RaveThe New York Times Book Review... bigly entertaining ... \'Literary sunshine\' is a good way to think of Straub’s work. Her writing and tone are consistently bright and straightforward; her approach to character is warm and generous. Although essentially comic, Straub’s novels don’t avoid some of life’s harsh challenges. All Adults Here touches on fraught topics like coming out, gender identity, marital infidelity, abortion and predatory behavior, all while maintaining a feel-good mood that suggests most things will work out in the end ... Rather than constructing a tightly woven plot, Straub assembles a multigenerational cast of complex characters in an appealing setting, and stands back ... Part of the considerable pleasure of reading the novel comes from witnessing inner desires — or demons — gradually revealed, and then resolved ... The main pleasures of All Adults Here come from Straub’s wry comic instincts and her gimlet eye for cultural observation ... Her wit extends out from the individual characters into a larger commentary on the difficulties of becoming an adult, making this an especially rich addition to the author’s body of work ... If Straub resolves a few too many potential crises with cinematic ease, most readers will forgive her. Who among us isn’t in need of a happy ending right now? What could be more welcome than a novel that leaves you feeling optimistic about both the world and the muddle of your own life? Please, bring on the sunshine.
Helen Schulman
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"... strikingly original, compelling and beautifully written ... In Come With Me, Schulman’s central preoccupations continue to be the endless complexities of marriage, midlife and family and the ever-pressing need for people, even in Silicon Valley, to connect. Her writing in this new novel has the humor and wit, the careful eye for social detail and astute character development, that made her previous novel, 2011’s This Beautiful Life, a best seller ... Even [though the novel discusses multiverse theory], Schulman weaves all this material — along with multiple points of view — into a tight, urgent narrative that builds in tension until, about a hundred pages in, I found it difficult to put the book down ... One of the many triumphs of Come With Me is that Helen Schulman makes [the ending] enough.\
Lionel Shriver
RaveThe New York Times\"Shriver’s intellect and talent, her political convictions and her impressive confidence are all on display in Property: Stories Between Two Novellas, her assertive, frequently funny and altogether satisfying first collection of shorter fiction ... She is equally adept at inhabiting male and female characters, and equally convincing with natives of the United States and Britain ... Despite this variety, Property feels more unified than many story collections, and reading it has many of the satisfactions of reading a novel ... There are a few stories in this ample collection that seem inessential, and Shriver’s fondness for abundance leaves a couple feeling a bit overstuffed. But her confident grasp of the material and her natural gifts as a storyteller will keep you in her spell and leave you, at the end, slightly altered.\
