PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"These introductory chapters are incredible — it truly is a lot of fun to see Phoebe fall so quickly and so hard for Heist. Making Heist the honest and unapologetic object of Phoebe’s post-Obama rebound fantasy is a delicious complication of the femme-fatale tradition, and it’s great to see her unapologetic voraciousness respectfully, even somewhat meekly, received by the terse but game Heist. Lethem wrings plenty of comedy out of the improbable culture-clash romance that rapidly develops between the two, there is something troubling that develops, too. For a writer who is normally so good with voice and so adept at playing off types while still imbuing his characters with enough specificity and depth to keep them from becoming cartoons, Phoebe begins, as the novel progresses, to feel at times much too broad — a weird gestalt of awkward comedienne, working girl, and other tropes whose presence isn’t entirely exorcised by cheeky self-consciousness ... The plot, depending on how well the conceit works for you, congeals, or thickens ... By the novel’s end, most of my doubts were, if not totally expunged, at least leavened by the complex affection I’d begun to feel for Phoebe.\
Iain Reid
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Booksa deviously smart, suspenseful, intense, and truly haunting book with a fuse long and masterfully laid. Though slim, clocking in at just over 200 large-print pages, the atmosphere is so laden with strangeness and dread that the burn at whatever pace feels torturous ... What’s remarkable in I’m Thinking of Ending Things isn’t that Reid has forged ahead, inventing new, unknowable, unclassifiable scares — it’s that he’s found a way to make us feel old fears fresh again ... The problem with the ending of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is that it tries at the last moment, to give us an explanation, a way out. There are some hints throughout about the truth underneath all the uncanny menace, some subtle, others less so. But while I read, it didn’t matter. All I felt was fear and I never wanted it to let up.
