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Recent Reviews
Sophie Mackintosh
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"... sumptuous yet sparsely written ... It’s [the family\'s] cultishness that muddies the thematic waters of this novel. At first glance The Water Cure seems to be in conversation with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale... Yet the unspoken interstices of the story, to which Mackintosh delicately draws the reader’s attention with haunting, oblique prose, emphasize just how much hogwash the parents are feeding their daughters.\
Ana Simo
Pan The New York Times Book Review A speculative fiction reader can be forgiven for mistaking Ana Simo’s madcap mélange of a novel, Heartland, for genre. It sits somewhere at the intersection of Naked Lunch, absurdist experimental theater, telenovelas and magical realism. The publisher bills it as dystopian satire and lesbian pulp noir — all of which is to say that this story is unclassifiable. That isn’t a problem; the fact that it’s a chaotic mess is ... The setting is dystopian, and irrelevant. It’s an alternative modern-day America in which millions have starved in the 'Great Hunger'... The protagonist is hilariously absurd and profane, but after the fifth racial slur or transphobic remark or fat joke, it all starts to feel like performative edginess meant to shock the novel’s presumed white Middle American audience ... Her disjointed thought processes make it difficult to tell what’s actually happening versus what is absurdism — a difficulty sometimes muddled further by Simo’s stream-of-consciousness style. It’s a quick read, but not an easy or pleasant one.
Charlie Jane Anders
Rave The New York Times There’s a lot going on in this book. On the surface, it’s a chronicle of attempts to save the world from various slow-burn apocalypses: climate change, overpopulation, disease — basically the same nightmarish end-times scenarios that loom large in the public consciousness now, complicated by magic prophecies and theoretical physics. Beneath the surface, it’s the coming-of-age tale of Laurence, the aforementioned A.I. creator and scientific genius, and Patricia, a budding witch … The result is as hopeful as it is hilarious, and highly recommended.