About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jacqueline Woodson
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... profoundly moving ... urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex in America ... part of the miracle of Red at the Bone is its evident, steady respect for Iris’s wants, the narrative primacy given to hungers that might not, to many, seem acceptable ... Again and again, in rich detail, Woodson gives life to Iris’s growing desires ... to depict a mother eager to leave her baby is a far less told story, and it’s astonishing, it’s a feat, to see how lovingly, even joyfully, Woodson sees Iris’s desires through ... With its abiding interest in the miracle of everyday love, Red at the Bone is a proclamation.
Andrés Barba, trans. by Lisa Dillman
Positive San Francisco Chronicle ...part of the power of Such Small Hands comes from the girls’ faith in play-acting, a belief suitable to young characters so isolated that longing exceeds knowledge ... In Such Small Hands, adroitly translated by Lisa Dillman, Barba is intensely alive to the shifting, even Janus-faced nature of strong feeling.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle ...a moving debut ... The inequities go on and on, a point powerfully emphasized by the novel’s structure, which splits A Kind of Freedom into short sections centered on Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. Ingeniously, Sexton tells Evelyn’s story, then Jackie’s, then T.C.’s, then cycles back to Evelyn, and so on, zigzagging from the past to the future, and back again, until the different eras almost feel like one relentless present day. In turn, Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. become parents; in turn, their own dreams thwarted, they each look forward to a better life for their children, aspirations that the book, with its hopscotch timeline, has already diminished, even revoked.
Mohsin Hamid
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle ...a short, urgent missive in which each detail gleams with authorial intent ... The prose in Exit West is restrained, its surface calm both belying and heightening the pathos of Saeed and Nadia’s situation ... Still, Exit West is lit with hope. Hamid has said that 'part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures,' and that 'fiction can imagine differently.' Exit West does so, and beautifully.