... a really very wild and superbly intelligent reimagining ... [the book is] written with a crafty poetic gleam ... The descriptions of animal life are meticulous and terrific ... There’s no shortage of images to engage us, but this book has the task of providing narrative suspense when we already know the outcome of events ... adopts a stance of wonder, even toward the innocently lethal wolves and tigers, and the writing is most sublimely clever when depicting the dilemmas of dealing with all creation in one locale ... If Naamah, this 21st-century riff on climate disaster, is too exasperated with [God] to be a monitory tale, it also left me with an abiding admiration for the writer’s charged powers of imagination.
...[a] vivid first novel ... what does it mean to be a woman? How exactly is God’s presence distributed throughout creation?—these sojourns in other realms might have become unbearably high-flown. Instead, thanks to Blake’s attentive world-building, they read as natural side missions from the story’s un-science-fiction narrative ... Naamah houses an improbable bounty of life. Blake has packed a remarkable amount of earthly experience that is wondrous, funny, queasy, erotic into an ancient vehicle. Then, she made it sail.
The narrative’s thread is sometimes lost when Naamah delivers quippy dialogue while moving between reality and dreams—and with it, the urgency to Naamah’s story. The rambling effect this can have is one of the book’s most significant shortcomings, yet these passages are worth sticking through. Blake ultimately succeeds in making this woman of antiquity feel of our times, offering no easy answers to the many questions Naamah poses. By highlighting Naamah and her struggles, the story of the ark becomes more convoluted. No longer is it a story about a righteous man chosen by God to do a job, which he does well.
Instead, it’s a story about the many who died to make a new world, about the messiness that goes into taking care of animals, about faith in a future one can build. Blake turns this biblical tale on its head, making it more challenging and moving in the process.
Revelatory, ethereal and transfixing, Naamah cracks open the ancient tale of Noah to reveal a danger that exists in supposedly safe places, the force of a woman charged with maintaining the world’s tremulous balance and the depth of our mind’s eye ... [Blake's] language and storytelling style are as playful as they are sensual, as fluid and surreal as they are crisp and hyper-realistic ... Naamah plucks a female character from myth and imbues her with sexuality, personality and intimacy, making her an altogether more modern hero—the kind of woman capable of giving a stern talking-to to a vengeful god.
... [a] fresh telling of the flood story as seen by Noah’s wife, now rescued from submergence ... Blake is a poet. In her lyric debut novel, Naamah escapes the hold of the ark to feel God’s wrath on its deck ... Naamah dares us to center the experience and wisdom of women as we devise answers to [several] questions, reminding us that the final covenant — our future — belongs to our children, the latest of a long lineage that emerged, crawling, from the same bitter water to which we will return.
Blake writes with strong, sensual, modern language, and utilizes time travel and dream sequences to create a multilayered story. With this book, Blake has taken one of the best-known biblical tales and opened it up in ways both inventive and provocative ... Blake brings this world alive in many ways, from detailed descriptions of the construction of the Ark and preparations for the journey, to the day-to-day practicalities of living with a literal boatload of creatures ... With Naamah, Blake provides insights both unique and moving, and makes an ancient tale feel vibrant and relevant to today.
... a shimmering and visionary feminist debut novel ... Blake’s interest in the unruliness and sexuality of a woman’s body (and thoughts) outside society’s boundaries follows a more avant-garde aesthetic than a classic one, calling to mind the work of contemporary American novelists like Lidia Yuknavitch or Kate Zambreno. In its wholly immersive approach, it incorporates digressive, cerebral, near-absurdist dialogues that bear shades of Madeleine L’Engle. If its poetic vision doesn’t quite build scene to scene, surely this is at least partly because of its profound imagining of how surreal it would feel to watch the world you love drown all around you, while you remain alive, until some arbitrary date when a greater power decides otherwise ... a singular and timeless portrait, a deep and gorgeous contemporary evocation of an ancient woman asking unanswerable questions about the end of an existing world.
Blake transports readers to biblical times ... Blake’s tale is a powerful exploration of the trauma of change and the reckoning required to move on from unimaginable loss.
This Naamah is not a product of her time. Her life is not shaped by the patriarchal structures of prehistoric Israel ... She cares for the animals, but she can no longer see them. Even as she cares for them, she knows them only through smell and touch. Their visual absence is striking: Others can see the animals, only Naamah cannot. Her failure is both disturbing and miraculous ... Blake’s novel is a strong revision of a classic story.
Blake’s writing is deeply feminist. Whether she's focused on giving birth or having sex, Blake sketches the female body and experience in all its gore and glory ... Comprised of mesmerizing prose poem–esque sections, the novel explores themes of sexuality, purpose, loss, love, and faith. A poetic debut of biblical proportions.
...inventive but erratic ... The author creates a for-adults-only multidimensional portrait of Noah’s wife by combining biblical narrative with modern prose, fantasy with realism, spirituality with erotica. Despite its mysticism and metaphorical aspects that may perplex some readers, this is a remarkable feat of imagination.
