RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPook’s writing is reliably vivid, alternating between dense lyricism and free indirect speech with an old-timey diction. The eventual explanation for Charles’s disappearance is somewhat thin — even Eliza thinks so. But Moonlight is a sensitive and compassionate book, admirable in its engaging synthesis of multiple strands of history. It is alive to the complexity of how things must have been, and its consideration of race, gender and sexuality invigorates the era with a freshness that feels organic ... The novel is shaped around a straightforward mystery plot, which demands attention to the concrete and material. But “Moonlight” feels more interesting when you allow the narrative to play out on the level of the symbolic, when its ideas borrow the hallucinatory quality of the landscape. At its heart, this is a story about family — whether it can survive in an inhospitable environment — and whether it is possible to be a good person in a corrupted world.
Douglas Stuart
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewStuart writes beautifully, with marvelous attunement to the poetry in the unlovely and the mundane ... The novel is precise, primarily in rendering what is visible to the eye rather than in fine-grained interiority. Characters articulate almost everything they think and feel, and what they say is what they actually mean. Irony occurs in the gap between speech and reality, rather than the interstices of speech and thought ... The two plots sit oddly astride each other, generating suspense, but never quite cohering, especially when events turn toward the violent. And despite abundant narrative complications, the book’s most surprising and affecting moments are quieter.
Megan Nolan
PositiveThe NationNolan squares her character’s predicament with contemporary feminist debates by emphasizing her protagonist’s sense of self-awareness and control—the power and deliberation she exercises in choosing to submit. It is a striking experiment with mixed results ... By the end of , with some distance, the narrator can see how damaging this kind of attitude has been—but, crucially, she still has admiration for that earlier self. This is a large part of what makes the novel so compelling. It retains, or perhaps conjures in hindsight, a reverence for its protagonist’s will to self-abasement as “steely and pure.”
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
RaveBookforumCornejo Villavicencio is able to inhabit her subject in a way few who get to publish can. (She even turns her limitations into strengths: writing powerfully about the places she can’t go, the situations where she’s out of place, the people who won’t talk to her.) ... The book is beautiful for Cornejo Villavicencio’s sensitivity to character, and for her ability to structure a narrative almost entirely through the people she meets ... Their stories are told with generosity, vigilance, and humor ... fantastical longing is, in fact, commonplace in The Undocumented Americans. It’s the grounds on which the book stakes an alternative claim of belonging for its subjects, one that has nothing to do with citizenship.
