PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAtmospheric ... Feeney effortlessly combines the overwhelming ebb and flow of life with her boat-building plot ... Feeney’s prose is both careful and relaxed — detailed in its description of place and character and of the effortful human urge to find order in the natural world; casual in its approach to storytelling, the point of view shifting throughout scenes ... In some places, the novel stumbles ... Yet the difficult winter carries the reader into a hopeful spring. Life is random; our connections are as essential and uncontrollable as the tides, the book seems to say. All we can do is learn how to float.
Haley Jakobson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe novel is told via a first-person confidential point of view, which imbues the story with an effortless authenticity that defies reservations about the scope of Savannah’s worldview ... Jakobson offers a guiding hand to her readers. If you’re going through this mess, you’re not alone, she seems to say, and if you’ve already survived, you’ll understand.
Cara Blue Adams
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewCara Blue Adams’s evocative first book is described as a collection of interlinked short stories, though it could easily be classified as a novel without the padding. We do not, after all, describe movies with time jumps as a collection of short films. Perhaps we should. We could dispense with the \'15 seconds earlier\' chyrons forever ... While each episode is somewhat discrete, this carefully curated collection forms a greater and more satisfying whole than the sum of its happy and sad parts ... Adams succeeds in capturing the microcosm of a young woman’s ordinary struggle in modern America, and it turns out to be pretty devastating ... There is a casual brutality in the manner with which Adams carves out Kate’s progression from student angst to adult crises ... This sense of things ending before they have begun suffuses the book with a sadness only slightly leavened by sensuous descriptions of an Arizona evening, or the scent of a New England sweater ... Through Kate’s particular losses, Cara Blue Adams does a fine job of showing the impossibility of innocence in a world that doesn’t recognize your worth.
