About Book Marks
Tyler Austin Harper
Recent Reviews
Pan The Atlantic Unusually dispiriting ... Men enter their lives like meteors entering the atmosphere, leaving a trail of heat and light but always burning out. Whose fault this is—the women’s, the men’s—is for the most part unclear. Adichie’s protagonists are independent and deeply ambivalent, not so much aloof as detached, both from their love interests and from their own desires and aspirations. In a novel stuffed with reminiscences of past relationships, regret is startlingly absent ... Their dreams don’t pan out. Her characters experience no cathartic epiphany that they are better off without men after all. Nor do they truly second-guess their life choices: We get no sense that they would be better off with men either.
Richard Price
Rave The Atlantic The novel has all the trappings of fiction as gritty urban social portraiture ... Yet it isn\'t ... What Price has given us is a retrograde novel. It is animated by unreconstructed, unembarrassed humanism ... A trauma novel without a trauma plot ... The genius of Price’s novel is that it rejects all mechanistic accounts of human existence—tragic or utopian, religious or otherwise—without downplaying the social forces that shape lives of labor.
Danzy Senna
Rave The Atlantic Well-oiled, precisely choreographed ... Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of thick minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person ... Here to tell us that deciding on some tidy new biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise.
Percival Everett
Rave The Atlantic To call James a retelling would be an injustice ... What emerges is no longer a children’s book, but a blood-soaked historical novel stripped of all ornament. James conjures a vision of the antebellum South as a scene of pervasive terror ... The novel never loses its sense of humor, but the laughs become manic ... Imaginative.
Molly Roden Winter
Pan The Atlantic An unsparing account of a polyamorous life ... The result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity and individual self-fulfillment ... Despite the book’s slick marketing—which takes great care to cast the author as a \'happily married mother\'—Molly’s polyamorous journey toward self-actualization does not seem to bring her much happiness ... A near-perfect time capsule of the banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s, and a neat encapsulation of its flaws ... Though Molly may tell herself and her readers that she is on a journey of learning and growth, the ugly truth is that More feels like a 290-page cry for help.