A modern epic ... is Zusak at his best. To read a novel by this masterful author is to embark on an immersive journey that challenges readers to expand their understanding of what it is to be human.
... yet this book too is a stunner. Devastating, demanding and deeply moving, Bridge of Clay... unspools like a kind of magic act in reverse, with feats of narrative legerdemain concealed by misdirection that all make sense only when the elements of the trick are finally laid out ... Grief and sacrifice lie at the heart of things, and we can feel it through Mr. Zusak’s writing even before we understand the story’s real contours... His style is like free verse, at once spare and dense with feeling and meaning.
Surprisingly warm and heartfelt ... rowdy and joyous, with flashes of wit and insight, and ultimately moving. The brief chapters and bone-rattling pace make it interesting for anyone with a shortish attention span.
A collage of charming, bracing and scarring moments ... There’s much to love about this capacious novel, but there’s also so much. In addition to its obvious symbolic weight, the story feels freighted ... an extravagantly overengineered story ... overstuffed as it is, Bridge of Clay is one of those monumental books that can draw you across space and time into another family’s experience in the most profound way.
The chapters detailing the death of Penelope are among the most moving and successfully realised, not least because they allow Zusak’s uniquely laconic and insinuating concept of death to stalk the narrative ... You could argue that Zusak has a tendency to overplay the theatrical illumination, as even the act of opening the fridge becomes a physical assault... But if The Book Thief was a novel that allowed Death to steal the show, its slightly chaotic, overlong, though brilliantly illuminated follow-up is affirmatively full of life.
I won’t sugarcoat it: Bridge of Clay drove me nuts for the first 200 pages. I couldn’t follow the leaps in time or keep track of the characters. I started over four times, frustrated with my inability to understand everything that was going on ... Though I am not convinced that the story warrants the oftentimes muddled 500-plus pages it encompasses, it is clear in the blurred but palpable edges of a decade’s worth of innumerable rewrites that this was a labor of love, a story struggling to escape its writer. It is a tale fraught with trauma, sorrow, guilt and regret, but always interlaced with bold strips of love, joy and rambunctiousness, a story that is universal in feeling, if not in the specifics.
... Zusak has again proven his ability to present complicated and demonstrative ideas in an authentic and accessible manner ... Bridge of Clay is an epic novel thrusting readers into the middle of a rowdy and rambunctious family. Characters undergo sweeping arches exhibiting a human's culpability while extenuating flaws, grief, and regret ... Without question, Bridge of Clay features several points of entry for teaching and learning critical reading skills ... The entirety of the novel is character development and a study of interpersonal relationships. This results in long and tedious exposition ... Bridge of Clay stimulates the imagination while magnifying the readers' compassion.
It becomes apparent why Zusak has spent nine years on this latest manuscript. Matthew seems omniscient but is not: he has gleaned this extended family history from Clay himself in the wake of the present-day events described ... Imagery, often repeated and with good reason, showcases Zusak’s talent for capturing an idea or feeling... Originally disparate threads, interwoven and gradually revealed, weave a tapestry that emerges only more vividly by the page ... And yet Zusak unpacks deeply human truths within the posturing: there are myriad kindnesses speckled throughout as they deal with their grief and abandonment.
Exquisitely written ... The deftly woven threads build tension as Zusak’s skillful use of foreshadowing and symbolism brings long-held secrets to the surface. With heft and historical scope, Zusak creates a sensitively rendered tale of loss, grief, and guilt’s manifestations.
Thick with metaphor and heavy with allusions ... The story romanticizes Matthew and his brothers’ often violent and sometimes homophobic expressions of their cisgender, heterosexual masculinity with reflections unsettlingly reminiscent of a “boys will be boys” attitude. Much like building a bridge stone by stone, this read requires painstaking effort and patience.
