Exquisite ... These transitions, while initially dizzying, coalesce into a rhythm that feels fresh and exciting. Together they suggest that memory conflates the past, present and future, until at the end, our lives can be viewed as a richly textured tapestry of experience and recollection, threaded together by the people we’ve loved ... Her prose is so finely wrought it shimmers. Again and again she has returned to love as her primary subject, each time finding new depth and dimension, requiring us to put aside our expectations and go where the pages take us. As readers, we’re in the most adept of hands.
Short in length but contains multitudes. A multi-generational novel of family, war, immigration, love, and loss, the book is full to bursting with characters, settings, perspectives, time periods, insights, and aperçus. This multifarious abundance is both the novel’s strength and its weakness ... Irresistible voice ... While sections of the book enchant, moments and lines provoke laughter, knowing nods, or a delighted smile, the overall effect deflates our hopes. I’ll Be Right Here reads more like a collection of vivid sketches, haphazardly bundled, than a finely wrought and fully realized novel. The parts are greater than the whole, the ingredients tastier than the dish.
In such small, wryly observed indignities that one feels most sure in Bloom county ... Will not be for everyone. Then again, it won’t weigh down the terry tote.
