Exquisite ... [The] 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.
Probing, ambitious ... The hallmarks of Bloom’s prose are present: graceful psychological insights...palpable love for her characters, and a story that lands squarely on the side of life and living ... Fraught intrigue saturates these pages like musk, looping in Coco Chanel and the Duchess of Windsor: piercing, powerful historical fiction ... Bloom meticulously traces the siblings’ steady rise in wealth, property and authority ... It’s a testament to Bloom’s delicate skills that she makes this relationship genuinely moving ... Although the many characters who come to populate the second half of the book are robustly drawn, I could not feel the same force from them as that which pulsed in their originators ... What’s always clear is that Bloom’s vision of human history and human effort...emanates a peculiar radiance.
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.
Bloom brings Colette rapidly and pithily on and off stage ... The author is at her steadiest, as in her opening, with vivid set pieces ... 'A good storyteller gives you a world', Gazala observes late in her life, and Amy Bloom does that—breathlessly. To read I’ll Be Right Here is to feel as if you’ve arrived at an overly ambitious dinner party where you know that all the guests are colourful and interesting because the hostess insists they are, not because you have a chance to engage with any of them for sufficient time.
Adventurous in both its manner of telling and its portrait of a family-by-choice ... The novel unfolds in short, dazzling chapters that move forward and backward in time ... Bloom’s suggestive prose awakens our senses. There are depictions of gardens and food and rock music and beautiful objects that hold old memories. There is talk of love and law and making a good life. I’ll Be Right Here is a brisk, short read, and yet, somehow it gives us a family and a world.
Stimulating ... Though the story loses some steam after the siblings first arrive in America, Bloom rights the ship with her thoughtful and complex character development. It’s a memorable portrait of a found family’s fulfillment.
