Searching and deeply reported ... Macy relies on experts from a variety of fields to aid in her understanding of the bigger picture ... Poignant, essential.
Macy’s personal history provides an appealing prism, even as Paper Girl covers some familiar terrain ... She writes movingly ... The book’s mood gets extremely dark.
Ever since Donald Trump was first elected President, in 2016, a slew of books have attempted to reckon with the growing divide between urban and rural populations in the United States. Few do so as deftly as Beth Macy’s new book, Paper Girl ... Rather than dismiss her religious sister or her conspiratorial ex-boyfriend, Macy digs deeper, excavating a topsy-turvy world where many people still believe that Trump won the 2020 election ... Macy’s interactions with Silas, and his role in the book, feel organic; she does not reduce him to his gender ... A surprisingly moving account of how politics can rupture the personal ... Macy demonstrates the genre’s elastic power, collating large amounts of information into a cogent and thrilling story ... Macy is a surprisingly empathetic narrator...without ever minimizing her own beliefs ... Her conversations are heated, but never stilted; she refuses to foreclose the possibility of redemption, always searching for some element of compatibility ... The conversations Macy has in this book...are fascinating, but never entirely fruitful.
Both wide-ranging and strikingly intimate, Paper Girl is an affirmation of faith in humanity, and Macy lights the way ahead, even as the darkness stretched before us threatens to swallow our conviction.
