RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewScorching ... I begged my family’s pardon multiple times while reading, gasps escaping from my mouth. The horror in Enriquez’s work is never gratuitous ... Maintains an intimate, sisterly relationship with horror. It is close and familiar; we touch its skin casually, nearly lovingly ... Enriquez illuminates both the night and the ghosts, and she rejects her characters’ paralysis. She refuses silence and crafts stories so searing they cannot be buried or ignored.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBergman’s characters have upheld noxious traditions for so long that poison tastes like love; and the only character left standing hopes, sympathetically, that a terrible storm or raging fire will someday burn it all down.
Joanna Cannon
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewCannon’s intense specificity captures a world in amber, permitting intimate access to the pantries, gardens and garages of Britain’s past ... The story is set in two decades, in 1967 and 1976. While each timeline features a disappearance — a baby and a middle-aged woman both go missing — these not-quite-palindromic years are less mirror images, more cause and effect ... Cannon is a mapmaker; her stories create an atlas. Through Tilly and Grace’s investigations, points are plotted ... Fear is contagious in small spaces. Common –– denominator fictions rule. Cannon’s book is so timely.
Josephine Rowe
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Rowe’s use of siblings brings to mind experiments based on twins. What happens if one brother goes to war and one stays home? Or when one sister accepts the privilege of wealth, comforts the other sister has rejected? Rowe has constructed a glorious either/or equation that allows a reader to calculate outcomes ... This is a highly interior book, in which gorgeous, precise language encourages inner storms as the surface remains calm, and Rowe — introducing notions of airline flights, runaways, fast cars and motorcycles — asks whether we ever move fast enough to escape this deep damage. Like the best of Breece D’J Pancake or W. G. Sebald, Rowe plants small moments from history as a soldier might bury land mines. What lies dormant beneath us? A massacre, a dead pet, a crime unchallenged. Rowe then waits for her characters to stumble home drunk or tired one night, tripping that memory wire, while we as readers watch the world explode.\
