‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Lorrie Moore

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Moore writes well on politics, as well as film and television, music and theater; her essay on a landmark 2007 production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd – sharply observed and gorgeously written – is the best among scores of reflections on this production. Including my own ... But Moore is at her best when she writes about other writers – with generosity but also candor, of a sort that’s often in short supply these days whenever fiction writers review each other ... Moore is the sort of feminist who refuses to be pigeonholed; she’s too expansive for that.

Paul Goldberg

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"...a scathing satire of Trump’s America ... Goldberg’s mordant satire – invoking and channeling a distinguished Russian literary tradition extending back to Gogol – hits home and bites hard ... Bill is a male version of Maxine Tarnow, the gumshoe heroine in Pynchon’s The Bleeding Edge. While Pynchon’s similarly dark satire of a fallen America has greater breadth and is much more lyrical, The Château shares its genre, structure and tone – as well as nostalgia for a younger self and more idealistic era, when so much more seemed possible.\

Tayari Jones

Rave The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel \"Tayari Jones’ fourth and best novel … A novel that creates three fully rounded and internally conflicted characters from this love triangle while nevertheless nimbly refusing to take sides. Easier said than done, when one considers the circumstances leading to Celestial’s dilemma … Jones writes about marriage with an equally sophisticated awareness that the substance is in the details, not all of them pretty. Marriage, one of Jones’ characters says, teaches you your limitations. As with the murders that haunt Jones’ Leaving Atlanta and the personal betrayal that sows a whirlwind in Silver Sparrow, Jones’ characters here try and fail to outrun the limitations of their own history – itself forever entangled in the fractured history of black America.\

Niall Ferguson

Pan The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel As has been true of Ferguson before — one thinks of his insistence that the West’s ‘edge’ can be explained by six ‘killer apps’ — his hobby horse du jour sometimes rides roughshod over the facts … Ferguson’s fascination with networks isn’t the only hobby horse he rides in this book; his conservative politics similarly tend to shape his view of the facts … There are some interesting nuggets in this book. Ferguson is particularly good when wrestling with the role of networks in shaping current political and economic disparities, and in asking whether we need hierarchies such as nation states to regulate network excesses. But there’s more and better where that came from, and it doesn’t require swallowing cant presented as history.

Ali Smith

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"...the stunningly original Smith again breaks every conceivable narrative rule; reflecting her longstanding affinity for Modernism, what she gives us instead is a stylistically innovative cultural bricolage that celebrates the ecstasy of artistic influence. It demands and richly rewards close attention ... Winter can stand on its own. But why forfeit the chance to read both of these magnificent novels? They each add to Smith’s growing collection of glittering literary paving stones, along a path that’s hopefully leading toward the Nobel she deserves. In the interim, we can (re)read Winter — and eagerly await the coming of Spring.\

Ali Smith

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"...the stunningly original Smith again breaks every conceivable narrative rule; reflecting her longstanding affinity for Modernism, what she gives us instead is a stylistically innovative cultural bricolage that celebrates the ecstasy of artistic influence. It demands and richly rewards close attention ... We also renew acquaintance with a wonderful character from Autumn, which raises the question of whether one can read Winter without having read the first installment in Smith’s series. The answer is \'yes\'; Winter can stand on its own. But why forfeit the chance to read both of these magnificent novels? They each add to Smith’s growing collection of glittering literary paving stones, along a path that’s hopefully leading toward the Nobel she deserves. In the interim, we can (re)read Winter — and eagerly await the coming of Spring.\

Nathan Englander

Positive The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Like ‘Anne Frank,’ ‘Sister Hills’ and ‘Camp Sundown’ resoundingly demonstrate why Englander consistently has drawn such raves. All three stories feature tight and suspenseful plots, sharply drawn and often thorny characters, the carefully reasoned presentation of difficult moral dilemmas and a refusal to take sides. Not every story in this collection manages to reach these lofty heights, although those falling short do so in different ways … Englander's best work here both acknowledges and bravely resists its deadly pull, obliquely angling toward shore - and the wider perspective that comes with higher ground.

Louise Erdrich

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...a novel that’s stuffed with intriguing ideas but uneven in advancing them and often unsure where to go next (or how to end) ... they all largely remain a mystery, in a novel where the plotting isn’t sure and where it’s never entirely clear why and how so much goes wrong so quickly. What’s both clear and inspiring is Cedar’s own abiding belief in a future; having long ago had an abortion and tempted early on to end the life she now carries, she chooses instead to carry on, convinced that 'we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful.'”

Daniel Alarcón

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"These stories — many set in an unnamed Latin American country resembling Alarcón’s native Peru, with a few unfolding in the United States where he’s lived most of his life — are filled with young men who’ve lost their innocence and their way. Many of them would be right at home in the 1930s world of John Steinbeck. Much like Nelson — the antihero whose decline and fall are chronicled in Alarcón’s spellbinding At Night We Walk in Circles — these lost souls often grow callous and cruel, in a country that one story’s narrator describes as \'stinking, violent, diseased.\' They witness random and pointless fights, involving men who can’t find work and have nothing to do, in cities and towns that are falling apart and that time itself seems to have forgotten. Many of these locales have the sort of surrealistic, menacing air of a hellish provincial town in a Robert Bolaño novel.\

Ron Chernow

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel In his latest doorstopper of a biography, Ron Chernow makes the case that we’ve similarly overlooked Grant, increasingly and rightly seen as one of the most underestimated presidents in American history ...devotes most of his book to dismantling two of the most damaging myths involving Grant: that he was a thoughtless butcher as a general and an incompetent leader amid the corruption marring his two terms as president ... This masterpiece, vividly recreated here, is symptomatic of what was true throughout the war: Grant usually lost a proportionally smaller percentage of his men than the South ... Reading this compelling book, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll continue to define Grant by these scandals rather than all he accomplished in winning the war and doing his best to make peace, on inclusive terms that would be fair to all.

Ron Chernow

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Reading this compelling book, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll continue to define Grant by these scandals rather than all he accomplished in winning the war and doing his best to make peace, on inclusive terms that would be fair to all. No president after Lincoln and before Lyndon Johnson did so much for civil rights. It was the bravest and hardest of many battles this great general fought.

Jennifer Egan

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Along the way, we occasionally lose sight of Anna; hiding from those around her, she also hides from us. We don’t always know what makes her tick or why she chooses — often spontaneously and desperately — as she does. These narrative holes our deliberate; Egan won’t let her heroine be pinned down and classified. That, after all, is what others have been doing to Anna all her life ... time bends are a modest variation on the dramatic temporal shifts in Goon Squad; they’re also true to Egan’s abiding sense — reflected in so much of her fiction — that ghosts from the past always linger, collapsing time while haunting us.

Nicole Krauss

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel In Forest Dark, Nicole – who shares numerous biographical details with Krauss and reminds one of those narrating doubles in Philip Roth – tells us that she can’t write because 'in my work and my life,' 'I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things' ... She gets there by channeling Kafka – himself forever frustrated by the sense that our lives are partial and incomplete, while forever hopeful that we might someday walk through the door separating us from the eternal ... That fantasy is necessarily implausible, just as the second and shorter part of Krauss’ novel is less successful than the first... But Krauss’ intrepid journey into this forest reveals great secrets, involving the tales we tell as we whistle in the dark.

Jesmyn Ward

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...as in everything she writes, Ward’s gorgeous evocation of the burden of history reminds me of Mississippi’s most famous writer, in a novel with more than a trace of As I Lay Dying. As with Faulkner, the past in Ward’s world is never dead. It isn’t even past. 'We all here at once,' Mam says to Jojo. 'The branches are full . . . with ghosts,' Jojo tells us. 'All the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves.' How might one live in a world so choked with death? That’s the urgent question Ward asks in everything she writes; the answer, time and again, involves the healing stories that can make us whole.

Alice Hoffman

Pan The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Hoffman tells all four stories in the first person – a risky choice in a historical novel, for reasons this one makes painfully clear. Because the characters surrounding this quartet rarely get to speak for themselves – The Dovekeepers doesn't have much dialogue – they are reduced to chess pieces, moved by Hoffman at will to satisfy the needs of a clumsily handled plot … Stripped of its overworked plot and overwrought prose, The Dovekeepers could have been a much better book.

Orhan Pamuk, Trans. by Ekin Oklap

Rave The Philadelphia Inquirer On its surface, Orhan Pamuk's latest - a fable masquerading as a novel titled The Red-Haired Woman - is an exploration of 'the enigma of fathers and sons,' that always-tangled love-hate relationship that Freud, in an essay referred to here, viewed as murderous ... Pamuk's men tend to fall like this for idealized women who never fully come alive ... She's more plot device than person, but what a plot device... In his spare time, he ruminates on two myths, both awkwardly sutured to the narrative and given considerable airtime: the Oedipus story (in which a son inadvertently kills his father) and the Persian story of Rostam and Sohrab (in which a father inadvertently kills his son) ...novel's periodic references to Turkish politics leave no doubt that Turkey's slide toward dictatorship... In Pamuk's world, one rarely gets to go home again to the father's house.

David Mitchell

Pan The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel The primary reason why Dejima is recognizably Mitchell territory is that it is border country – that shadowy land between peoples that inevitably exposes the fault lines within their competing historical narratives … With the exception of the fabulously drawn doctor who is Jacob's ally, I rarely believed in any of the major characters in Thousand Autumns, including Jacob himself. The primary problem is Mitchell's often clumsy third-person narration … Mitchell is a born storyteller, and no reader of Thousand Autumns will have trouble turning pages – or feel cheated by the three stories' climactic final scenes, all of which are really good. But one can say much the same of any decent thriller, quickly consumed and then readily forgotten. Thousand Autumns clearly aspires to more, and it is a tribute to Mitchell's unmistakable ambition, sheer intelligence and prior achievement that for all this novel does well, it is ultimately still a disappointment.

Hilary Mantel

Rave The Houston Chronicle Much of the dialogue in Bodies has the feel of masterfully crafted depositions or a first-rate police procedural, as Cromwell gently questions Anne's ladies-in-waiting – before cranking the heat while interrogating Anne's suspected lovers. But even as Bodies narrows its focus on the hunted Anne and hurtles toward its conclusion, part of Mantel – and her marvelous, many-sided Cromwell – refuses to be reduced to another episode of Law & Order … This Cromwell, keeping his own counsel even as he does Henry's bidding, gives us magnificent soliloquies. On his dead wife and vulnerable son. His colorful past and his decaying body. On the end of feudalism and the decline of honor. On the modern England he hopes to birth – and his growing fear that the capricious Henry will turn on him before it can be born.

Laurent Binet, Trans. by Sam Taylor

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Hearing this crowd natter won’t be everyone’s cup of tea; self-important intellectuals will strike some readers as more boring than brainy. It pays to remember that when the literary theory craze was at its height some 30 years ago, luminaries like these were celebrities; I’ll admit that encountering them again here made me nostalgic for a time when reading their seductive prose rocked my world ... as every good novelist knows, there’s more than one way to tell a tale. Once again, Binet’s telling is flat-out ingenious.

Eleanor Catton

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel There's a postmodern wink in all of this: for all the language and characters in the impeccably paced and executed opening section, there's ultimately more truth to be found in the novel's moving, closing coda … By bringing these men together — and using their distinct, astrologically coded personalities to illustrate the necessary limitations to their individualized points of view — Catton underscores all that divides her characters. Race, class and gender. Family, culture and education. Addiction, passion and greed. But having posed this problem, Catton sets out to solve it. Insistently drawing characters into relation, the very existence of this novel suggests the insight we gain and how we might be changed by interacting with those around us.

Allegra Goodman

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Goodman takes her time rendering this richly imagined alternative universe, so that we might better understand why, for Aidan, his 'ordinary body seemed a dim reflection of his gaming self' ... The weakest sections of this novel involve Collin’s romance with Nina, which is never quite believable and for which some of the dialogue is remarkably stilted, coming from such an experienced novelist. Conversely, Aidan and his twin sister nearly always ring true, whether the topic is their fractious entanglement as twins, their loneliness as teens or the corresponding yearning they share for love and connection.

Arundhati Roy

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Like Rushdie, Roy recognizes that there are atrocities on both sides – and that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism leaves ever less room for the idyllic, more tolerant world Kashmir once was ... [an] ambitious, all-encompassing novel, which dares to imagine that the pursuit of happiness might take many paths – and accommodate multiple versions of India.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Mixed The Milkwaukee Journal-Sentinel Ifemelu dissects American slang. The meaning of Obama. Slovenly American dress, reflective of an easy sense of superiority. American's overly indulgent, self-absorbed child-rearing. The petty infighting among academics. The herd mentality among the upwardly mobile. And, most of all, Americans' screwed-up language and politics of race … Adichie creates scores of characters, but they're flattened types; that's consistent with the often satiric tilt of the novel but does little for making us care about these characters as people … Despite this novel's identity crisis, Adichie's willingness to try something different — and her insistence on posing questions that matter — is bracing.

Kei Miller

Rave The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Miller’s novel exhales the breathy immediacy of the here and now, even as it ranges back toward Bedward – proving the claim staked in this story’s first pages, in which we’re told that 'it would be no exaggeration to say that every day contains all of history' ... Augustown pays attention to those lives, offering a compelling variation on the theme that black lives matter ... as with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, it demands they be heard.

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Moody and melancholic as this collection’s stories can be, some of them offer comparable hope that these men without women might emerge from their long and isolating loneliness, acknowledging the hurt, pain and even rage they feel rather than folding in on themselves and ceasing to fully live ... That recognition of time’s passage necessarily includes an acceptance of loss; 'from the instant you meet' a new woman, one narrator muses, 'you start thinking about losing her.' Every love ends in rupture or death. But as these wise stories suggest, that’s no reason to avoid living.

Grace Paley, Ed. by Kevin Bowen

Rave The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Lucky us that a generous selection of her stories, essays and poems has been collected in the just-published A Grace Paley Reader ... Best and most memorable of Paley’s characters is Faith Asbury, who is so colorful that Paley couldn’t bear to confine her to a single story. A single mother of two strong-willed boys, she’s messy and conflicted, about men and kids and the many women in her life ...[George] Saunders gets it right when he observes that she’s both 'particularly attentive to things as they are and extraordinarily accepting of them.' Her essays and poems continually champion the importance of listening, and she listens well.

Jessica Shattuck

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Shattuck manages to be both morally tough-minded and remarkably empathetic toward all of her characters ... Shattuck is best in the second half of her book, as she turns her gaze on those immediate postwar years when lying in Germany was both survival tactic and way of life ... Shattuck’s effective, cross-cutting temporal shifts — from Kristallnacht in 1938 to the end of the war in 1945, forward to 1950 and then back to the 1920s and 1930s — underscores the ongoing, nightmarish yesterday that Germany continued to live, long after the war ended. As one character ruefully learns, one ultimately cannot narrate 'away evil while staring it in the face.'”

Ron Powers

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [The] historical portions of the book don’t break new ground; good a writer as Powers is, they could be much shorter ... It doesn’t help that much of this material reflects Powers’ self-confessed tendency to be a 'sanctimonious bloviator,' There are too many snarky, sarcastic passages ... But through judicially interspersed chapters involving his beloved boys, one is brought back to why Powers is so passionate...The chapters on Kevin and Dean are heartbreaking.

Claude McKay

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel That doesn’t mean Amiable is a good novel; it’s not. Set in Harlem during the aftermath of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, it’s primarily interesting for sociological rather than aesthetic reasons ... a book with many clunky and protracted political discussions ... Even Maxim’s abstractions go down easier than the novel’s purple prose...McKay is at his best in capturing the appeal of his Popular Front ideology, for reasons having little to do with Maxim himself.

Elif Batuman

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...a funny, thoughtful and poignant portrait of an artist as a young woman ... Batuman takes her time with this journey of self-discovery; readers looking for propulsive narrative drive ought to look elsewhere. The Idiot meanders; it’s willing to risk coming off as slow (sometimes, it is) ... There is plenty that moves and is interesting, here; the truth with which it unfolds gives it a wonder and beauty all its own.

Ali Smith

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"...[a] zany, moving, beautiful and soul-affirming novel ... What this odd couple share is a gift for telling stories and an accompanying \'capacity to become someone else, if we so choose.\' What they become — and what Autumn itself becomes — is a leisurely, time-shifting collection of short snapshots featuring their friendship, from their first encounter as neighbors to Elisabeth’s long hours at Daniel’s bedside, in the assisted care facility where he straddles the boundary between life and death ... as is often true with Smith, fiction and history are entwined — true to her belief that the stories we tell not only empower us to create new worlds but also remind us that what we inherit as fact is itself an interpretation, inviting us to question the order of things ... It’s why I’ve long loved Smith. Like Boty — and like Dickens — she helps us see our best selves, even in the worst of times. We’ve never needed her more.\

Han Kang

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"Despite Deborah Smith’s poetically rendered translation, reading about human acts like these can be excruciating. But true to the urgency conveyed through its frequent use of second-person narration, Han’s book is also filled with human acts involving profiles in courage that inspire hope ... Human Acts is filled with talk of wandering and lost souls, struggling to connect; here, they’re allowed \'grazed contact\' with one another, painstakingly recreating a community that the government tried to destroy but which cannot be silenced.\

Aravind Adiga

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...[a] scathingly satiric novel of modern Indian life ... Adiga’s account of the brothers’ efforts to grow up and fly free of the nets holding them back is itself held back by Adiga’s broad and satiric focus, which stunts his characters’ growth and results in a disjointed narrative. While much more ambitious, Selection Day is ultimately less effective than Adiga’s tighter, Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger ... But Selection Day is also filled with smart, spot-on observations about the perils of growing up in a country where both sports and politics have become increasingly degraded forms of mass entertainment.

Michael Chabon

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The existence of this beautiful, brave book confirms that we must nevertheless continue constructing narratives, no matter how ephemeral they are. We cannot fully recover what’s been lost. But we can tell stories like this one, remembering where we came from so that we might somehow keep going.

Wesley Lowery

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Lowery can get lost in the minutiae of those separate stories. He occasionally repeats himself. And his transitions can be disjointed – a consequence, I suspect, of wanting to include too much, and too many names, in this relatively brief account. For all that, I highly recommend his book, and not just because the story he tells about why black lives should matter – and, in America, often don’t – can’t ever be heard often enough. What makes They Can’t Kill Us All more than a ripped-from-the-headlines chronicle is Lowery’s combination of solid reporting, emotional commitment to his story as a black man and a reflective turn of mind.

Zadie Smith

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Smith’s novel swings time between the narrator’s formative years in London and her current challenges in Africa; the bridge connecting them isn’t always apparent. It doesn’t help that the African chapters aren’t nearly as compelling as those spent in London; while Smith tries to avoid creating another morality tale involving the limits of feel-good philanthropy, her African characters aren’t sufficiently fleshed out ... to an even greater extent than with NW, history in this often dark book hurts too much.

Ha Jin

Pan The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Unfortunately, Ha Jin seems less interested in writing a novel than a screed taking aim at the various permutations of Chinese censorship ... Danlin’s quest — often less heroic than priggishly self-righteous — results in some of the most wooden, ideologically charged dialogue I’ve read in a long time ... Recollecting infinitely better Ha Jin novels, this poorly constructed and executed book induces such nostalgia in me.

Jonathan Lethem

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...plays out at a heightened pitch and can be very funny; A Gambler’s Anatomy marks one of Lethem’s periodic returns to those lighter (and shorter) novels reminding us that this prodigiously talented writer isn’t always trying to write the great American novel ... loaded with piquant aphorisms and spot-on descriptions ... Lethem fares best when taking apart our current stories of self and world. This novel is less compelling when imagining Bruno’s efforts to construct something new.

Ann Patchett

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...[a] moving, beautifully crafted novel ... Patchett’s dramatic forward and backward shifts in time and among her characters, coupled with her frequently elegiac tone, recall Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...[a] moving, maddening and messy novel ... Safran Foer is excellent in summarizing how an idealistic couple moves from A to Z ... Safran Foer is far less successful when applying the lessons learned through this domestic drama to the larger story he simultaneously tells, involving an earthquake that nearly destroys an embattled Israel ... it’s an imperfect novel...But I’m confident I’ll continue recommending its uneven sprawl because it rightly dares to insist that it nevertheless has something vital to say.

Hannah Pittard

Pan The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel At its best, Pittard's fast-moving story recalls a legion of American writers from Hawthorne to McCarthy, each chronicling existential encounters framed by the wilderness and exposing the heart of darkness ... But her tight plot proves too intent on making the next bend in the road to pay sufficient attention to the menacing terrain being traversed ... What could have been riveting drama about one of those frightening forks in life's road gets hijacked instead by melodrama — or, worse, confirmation of one's nagging suspicion that most of this couple's preceding problems are contrived and unreal.

Eowyn Ivey

Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Much of this material has a museum-like quality to it. True to her thematic focus on the partiality of our vision, Ivey approaches her material with so much respect and such attention to detail that it often fails to breathe. A reader’s trek through Ivey’s pages can therefore double what Forrester and his fatigued men frequently feel, as they slog forward. But both reader and Forrester’s crew also experience the imaginative phenomena I’ve described above (and others like it). Making good on what Ivey’s title promises, they take us to the edge of the world and the heart of Alaska, challenging us to see the mystery in everyday life.

Dave Eggers

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel True to form, [Eggers] is again as earnest, lyrical, passionate — and, yes, sometimes annoyingly preachy — as any contemporary American novelist ... Eggers is not giving us yet another treacle-filled account of how we should live for our kids, be defined by our kids, or describe our life's purpose through our kids. Eggers dares to offer still more: two extraordinarily textured and credible portraits of young children — rare, in American literature — coupled with a trenchant, spot-on account of how hard parenting can be.

Peter Geye

Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...a masterfully crafted, deftly connected collection of stories involving the history of the Eide clan and the fictional town of Gunflint since Gus' great-grandmother's arrival there from Norway ... So much for the philosophy. There's plenty of it in Wintering, but it's as taut and lean as Geye's muscular prose, which simultaneously shapes a thrilling and terrifying adventure story, pitting the Eides against darkness itself ... I was most impressed by how successfully Geye joins Harry and Berit's narratives, stitching together two frequently dissociated strands in American literature: its dramas of beset manhood and its domestic chronicles — often playing out in our fiction as a division between male and female writers.

Anne Tyler

Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel As with the best stage productions of Shrew, love creates a fundamental equality between the pair at the center of Tyler's novel; critics apt to castigate Shakespeare's play for its supposed sexism repeatedly miss this underlying truth. Tyler misses nothing. Yes: In her best novels about marriage the canvas on which such truths appear is bigger and more textured; in comparison, Vinegar Girl is a bit of a lark. So was Shrew. But this jeu d'esprit embodies all the reasons readers love Anne Tyler: it's fun, lighthearted, clever, compassionate and filled with Tyler's always extraordinary love for her characters, liberating them here to love each other.

Annie Proulx

Pan The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...[a] hugely disappointing and seemingly interminable novel, populated by hundreds of nearly indistinguishable characters. They come and go faster than the trees, whose death by a thousand cuts is continually decried ... embarrassingly overwritten prose, light years removed from Proulx's spellbinding The Shipping News ... 'The forest was a distant smudge,' one character reflects. He could have been describing Barkskins itself.

Edna O'Brien

Pan The Miami Herald ...halfway through Red Chairs, O’Brien makes an abrupt swerve, whisking Fidelma to London and turning her attention to the plight of refugees among whom Fidelma lives and associates ... Such Bosnian stories nominally tie this often lifeless and diffuse second section of the novel to the capture of Vlad, who will himself re-emerge in a final, even less successful third section, set at The Hague during his war crimes trial.

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