RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBrief quotes give the text the veneer of nonfiction, and keep the narrative at arm’s length, rather than pull you close as fiction often attempts to ... We leave the pool in the novel’s second half, and are firmly anchored aboveground with Alice, diagnosed with dementia, and her unnamed daughter ... Otsuka’s prose is powerfully subdued: She builds lists and litanies that appear unassuming, even quotidian, until the paragraph comes to an end, and you find yourself stunned by what she has managed ... It’s in [the] dissonance that the novel’s halves begin to meaningfully cohere ... The puzzling narrative structure makes a kind of poetic sense as myth ... The Swimmers makes an archetypal story wholly personal ... In a time of monotony and chaos, when death is as concrete as it is unimaginable, and when cracks can and do appear in the pool for no discernible reason, The Swimmers is an exquisite companion. Though it doesn’t answer the unanswerable, the novel’s quiet insistence resonates: that it is our perfectly ordinary proclivities that make us who we are.
Maria Kuznetsova
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe honest truth is that I found Natasha grating, and frequently frustrating, especially her repeated insistence on her pre-childbirth hotness and her incredulity about motherhood. (She’s an actor, and dramatic, I had to keep reminding myself.) It was easier to love Larissa’s voice. Even in the grimmest circumstances, Larissa is a droll and hilarious narrator, able to blend the funny and the heartbreaking beautifully together. Yet, in the end, each narrative complements the other. Though Larissa’s and Natasha’s stories are wildly different, they share an irreverence and a longing for something more, and they echo each other in their explorations of obligation and desire, of envy and disappointment, of art and contentment, and the possible incompatibility of the two ... With Something Unbelievable, Kuznetsova movingly makes a case for the significance of the everyday. The book, Kuznetsova’s second, is particularly poignant, especially during our present pandemic. It calls attention to the fact that human beings living through extraordinary circumstances are still, well, human beings: They hold grudges, they’re petty and they fall in love with the wrong people, whether they’re fleeing a war or staying at home with a baby. The book argues that the mundane moments are what make a life ... seems to say that the everyday matters — how unspectacular moments can transcend their confines, how miraculous the ordinary can be.
Sarah Elaine Smith
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... strange and powerful ... Smith’s eye doesn’t accost; it considers. That Smith is also a poet comes as no surprise. Her prose — densely though never overly descriptive, rich and bursting, verdantly Appalachian — puts you vividly in this world, where the banal is rendered strangely and tenderly. This is a book interested in people not just unglamorous, but overlooked. It’s a book brimming with longing, with heartbreak. It’s a coming-of-age by coming into somebody else ... the novel is about more than just adolescent angst, a young girl’s longing to be somewhere else, someone else. Its universality lies in its generosity — its empathy for every character within it, regardless of his or her decisions, no matter how flawed. There is compassion for questionable actions rooted in longing. Reduced to those longings, are any of us so dissimilar?
Tessa Fontaine
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"This is an assured debut that doesn’t shy away from the task of holding the ordinary and otherworldly in its hand, at once. It’s herein that the book’s power lies ... Fontaine is unafraid to write the ugliness — the imperfect care and love — that takes place between people, and the memoir is most \'electric\' when it doesn’t shy from that imperfection ... There is, at times, an Orange Is the New Black feeling to The Electric Woman, with Fontaine as the Piper Kerman to the rest of the sideshow: Everyone else’s story is far more interesting, including an amazing anecdote involving a Chihuahua that I won’t spoil. The book is longer than it needs to be, and that is its main drawback. There’s the sense that Fontaine manages to distill other people’s stories more succinctly than her own ... The quiet beauty of this book lies in its ordinary, enigmatic human feats of interpersonal connection.\
