About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Michael Parker
Rave The Denver Post Clever new novel ... An improbable premise...but in Parker’s telling, it feels plausible, and real ... Parker’s skillfully rendered story rolls like a restless, unpredictable west Texas river — calm depths here, turbulent shallows there ... But what makes All I Have in this World memorable is this: While any number of disasters can (and do) take place along the way, and while some are heartbreaking, the watershed moments happen not with sadness or blood or pain, but with cascades of laughter. It’s through moments of unabashed humor...that [Parker\'s] characters finally, and completely, connect.
Helen Oyeyemi
Positive The Denver Post Mary Foxe is Mr. Fox’s critic-cum-muse, here a real character, there a ghost. In some chapters she is flesh and blood, in others only a shadow. In every one she taunts him. Is she real? Don’t ask Mr. Fox (his grip on reality is tenuous at best) … The stories take imaginative, sometimes jarring tangents, and it’s easy to wonder whether every detour drives the main story forward, but this may be part of Oyeyemi’s conceit: No matter how fanciful the stories we create to explain the world may be, the reality of the world is infinitely more unpredictable and bizarre, and we like it that way.
Michael Ondaatje
Positive The Denver Post The details of the trip and the boat recall an appealing if anarchic 20th-century subgenre, the colonial and post-colonial travelogue (Harold Nicolson’s Journey to Java is one), offering a window into a long-gone mode of semi-civilized transport that was at once comfortable and discomforting … The Cat’s Table, a reference to the dining area for those low-profile passengers who never make it to the captain’s table, is a sensitive boy’s story told by a sensitive, confident storyteller.
Maria Semple
Rave The Denver Post Her second full-length book, the impossibly clever character study-cum-escape fantasy Where’d You Go Bernadette is a gas ... Semple gleefully and skillfully skewers tony private-school PTAs, Seattle’s self-righteous eco-culture, helicopter parenting, software gurus and architecture fetishism — all ripe for skillful skewering — while maintaining a refreshing snarklessness that’s been woefully missing from so much contemporary comic writing today ...Supporting characters steal scenes with aplomb ... the story of Bernadette’s apparent descent (ascent?) into eccentricity and subsequent disappearance is narrated by Bee ...outrageously funny and deceptively deep, is a rewarding read.