PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... meticulously researched study of burnout among millennials ... Petersen is at her best when drawing a line through history, showing how previous generations thrived within a framework of protections in the workplace and wider society, then dismantled them all while pushing the myth of the self-made man: hard work means success ... The sections on leisure and social media, and why millennials can feel exhausted by rest, are astutely observed ... For many, myself included, Petersen’s book will lead to excoriating self-reflection ... Can’t Even is extremely enlightening – I can only hope that millennials, and Americans, won’t be the only ones to read it.
E. L. James
PanThe GuardianAt least among all this wrongness, James gets one thing right: her randy English earl has a believably stupid name ... The Mister is James’s goodbye to BDSM, and hello to what looks like a long career of writing retrograde romances between powerful men and uncomfortably vulnerable women ... The Mister is a romance for Brexit Britain, a coked-up toff reaching out across the class divide to help a poverty-stricken migrant find a home ... It also has more red flags than a communist parade. There is a complete dearth of emotional maturity that is genuinely unsettling ... Just as James writes sex like a 14-year-old who thinks they know how it is done...she also writes about wealth like she’s not the author of a trilogy that has sold millions ... Just how underserved are the women who enjoy culture like this, if this is the best we can do? Is this real life? Is it just fantasy? I’m unsure which bothers me more.
Sean Penn
PanThe GuardianSo Penn’s novel is repellent on one level, but stupid on so many others. It follows Bob as he Just Do Stuff, often without much reason ... Penn doesn’t just swing and miss with his ambitious vocabulary; he swings and cracks a hole in reality as we know it, leaving us all unsure of the concept of a good sentence, how a novel should be structured and generally what makes sense any more. Words are not just misused, they are misplaced, to the point that Penn’s prose is more reminiscent of bot than man ... Penn’s novel is bad in the same way James Franco’s and Morrissey’s were bad: loudly and precociously, with a tendency to fling about big, empty words, not because it makes the writing better but because it just looks smarter, with an unashamed, almost masturbatory glee.
