RaveThe Observer (UK)A cool breath of air in an overheated room ... Contains some very sharp thinking about what we need to do now ... The personality that comes through is charming, clever, self-effacing, interesting and thoughtful about his creation ... His recommendations for the 21st-century world wide web are also extremely clear and sensible.
Sandra Newman
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewSome early readers have called The Men transphobic, because transgender women disappear along with the cisgender men. I see what they mean. The novel states that an unexplained force \'had removed every human with a Y chromosome, everyone who’d ever been potentially capable of producing sperm.\' Given that this is an imaginary landscape that Newman could have organized any way she chose, she’s effectively made a strong statement about where transgender people \'belong\': Transgender men remain on Earth with the cisgender women. Some readers will — very reasonably — want to avoid this book because of it ... But for those who do read it, there are other elements worthy of discussion. Evangelyne’s political philosophy of commensalism — a biological term for a relationship between species in which one benefits and the other is not harmed — is fascinating. The sections in the demonic landscape are tremendously unsettling, and perfectly conveyed ... These sections are eerie, propulsive and horrifying ... a book whose disturbing imagination reaches through the page into our world.
Kelly Barnhill
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAlex, a physics prodigy whose own mother dies six years later, is a plucky, tenacious heroine, selflessly devoted to Beatrice and undaunted by her dismissive father or pervasive 1950s sexism. Is she too perfect to be real? Probably. But a book in which women spontaneously morph into dragons (amid social pressure to forget it ever happened) isn’t aiming for realism, just delightful fun ... This is a lovely motif in the novel: knots of string and twine and wire forming and unraveling, as women try to stop themselves from dragoning. It’s a pleasing metaphor for the ways the ties that bind us to our lives can also hold us down ... Barnhill intersperses a variety of fictional \'found texts\' throughout her narrative, and they make for enjoyable and very funny sketches.
Leni Zumas
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Zumas has a perfectly tuned ear for the way measures to restrict women’s lives and enforce social conformity are couched in the moralizing sentimentalism of children’s imagined needs ... [a] lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women’s lives ... If there is a criticism to be made of this highly absorbing novel, it is that it feels perhaps a shade too contemporary, and never quite reveals the horrors that would surely follow if the pre-Roe v. Wade days were to repeat themselves ... Zumas is a skillful writer, expertly keeping each of her characters in balanced motion, never allowing one to dominate the rest.\
