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Recent Reviews
Rivers Solomon
Pan The New York Times Book Review Solomon is too narrowly focused on reiterating the depth and \'inevitability\' of pain to make good on this propulsive setup ... The reader can allow only so much ornamentation before the actual suffering loses resonance ... Solomon, like Ezri, has let fatalism get the better of them, the gravity of their subject matter luring them to write an overwrought cautionary parable. The character at the center gets lost in the ambition.
Heinz Insu Fenkl
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Specific and melancholic ... Fenkl depicts Insu’s mixed-race experience with...nuance ... Despite his meticulous attention to detail on the scene level, however, Fenkl sometimes neglects the more macroscopic continuities of plot and character ... Skull Water therefore feels realistic to a fault, Insu’s preoccupations coming and going, abandoned or cut short by the cruelty of circumstance ... The reader appreciates how any kind of loss is ultimately made up of everyday, nameable parts.
Elif Shafak
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... with its complex structure — the setting jumps from contemporary London to Cyprus in 1974 and the early 2000s, and many chapters are told from the perspective of a fig tree — Shafak’s novel conveys how our ancestors’ stories can reach us obliquely, unconsciously ... If Shafak’s prose is occasionally cloying, leaning heavily into nature metaphors, The Island of Missing Trees is not overly sentimental. Shafak is cleareyed about how difficult it is to reach across the gulfs within our families: At the end of the novel, Ada is only beginning to learn about her history, and her grief.
Priyanka Champaneri
Rave The New York Times Book Review Throughout this epic, Champaneri remains attuned to such atmospheric details, both physical and emotional ... If this initial setup is operatic, the haunting is surprisingly ordinary. Champaneri subtly renders how grief lurks in mundane objects and gestures ... Champaneri shifts among the perspectives of his wife, his assistant and other characters inside and outside of Kashi, who also harbor anxieties about the ghost and their own private histories. The novel remains an intimate portrait of Pramesh, and yet the other characters allow Champaneri to articulate how grief and healing are social processes ... Just as grief descends, sudden and sweeping, so too can wonder and joy.
T. Fleischmann
Rave The Paris Review Fleischmann is not wringing their hands but instead leaning into the world, constantly pressing at the corners of language ... I am astonished by how Fleischmann folds written language, as constrictive and limiting as it can be, into an open form ... Watchful of its context and position, this book is able to pose increasingly interesting, urgent, and difficult questions. It holds us accountable to the world. What are we doing about our global climate crisis? How can we pay reparations? How and when are we complicit in state violence? How do we move forward?
Marwa Helal
Rave The Paris Review Helal disorients space in a way that is both welcome and necessary ... The absurdity of the U.S. immigration system becomes especially clear when she describes, in detail, her path to citizenship ... The markings brought to the pages throughout this collection are framed such that readers must look and think about how they, too, are complicit, to varying degrees, with the racism and tyranny of U.S. CIS, ICE, and the TSA ... I would rather live in a world in which Cairo can emerge on the other side of a tunnel in California. In Helal’s imaginative future, movement is no less complex, but it is far more free.