... shaggy, conversational, and unabashedly poetic ... It's as real a depiction of falling in love as you can read ... Death and Other Holidays brilliantly balances humor and anger, sorrow and beauty. Vogel's subjects may be grief and death, but her writing reflects life as we live it, life with its many intricate, unnoticed balances.
There’s an aching sense, beneath the book’s surface, of the rigid corseting that just barely contains modern life ... Death and Other Holidays is the rare book that treats relentless, humdrum grief with humor and pathos—and without a shred of sentimentality. Before its publication, it won the Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize for the Novella, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a realist work in an unreal world. Vogel honors mortality and our awareness of it as the organizing facts of our humanity. With unparalleled tenderness, she recognizes our celebrations of life as heroic efforts to think about literally anything else. But over the course of one calendar year in April’s life she also reminds us: Death is never far away, try as we might to ignore it.
Short but mighty ... Maintains a remarkable confluence of palpable mood, a capricious and shifting tone, and wise character studies ... An original and affecting tour of family, the calendar, and the days that bind us to both.
Despite the centrality of death to the book, its tone is more poignant and affecting than mournful and depressing. It’s the sort of prose that may make you cry (at least it made me cry) but over its lyrical beauty and spot-on turns of phrase rather than the tragedy of what has taken place ... [Vogel's] style is spare and unaffected, often with a dash of wry; no superfluity here. Both narration and dialogue come off as conversational, casual, off-handed, so natural as to be effortless ... One of many finely crafted aspects of this novella is its hazy yet undeniable locatedness. While not emblematic of Los Angeles with the intensity or granular specificity of [other novels], Death and Other Holidays embeds itself deeply in Los Angeles throughout.
Beautiful ... captures with acute accuracy the drifting sadness that lingers in the months after the death of a loved one ... The prose is stunning: never overwrought for so intense a subject, flowing yet specific, quiet and lovely ... A moving and graceful novella of overcoming sorrow.
Uneven ... these vignettes are meant to accrue meaning and result in something weighty, and for some readers they will. But for others, Vogel’s bijou collection of moments fails to add up. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in creating a portrait—if not an indictment—of the anxious times in which it was written.
