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Reviews

To accommodate my commitment to my local Friends of the Library Board, I will no longer be writing reviews. Thank you for understanding, and here's to encouraging readers of all ages to pick up books!

"Dueling Words in The Extinction of Irena Rey"

Chicago Review of Books

"'Books are books. They’re written by authors. Not readers, not critics, not us.' It’s easy to imagine Croft laughing while writing that line from the perspective of an author who is writing from the perspective of a translator who is translated by another translator. Of course, books are written by translators! The translator’s notes throughout the novel make this point extremely clear. For example, when the author writes, 'Then again, I was a translator. Wasn’t not being me what I spent every day trying to achieve?' the translator responds characteristically bluntly in a footnote, 'No (Trans.).'"

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"Leafing through Forests in The Language of Trees"

Chicago Review of Books

"Reading The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape feels like walking through an urban neighborhood during springtime. We stop at each island of nature buffeted by jagged concrete, and we lean in to catch a whisper of gossip passed between gingko leaves and Norway maple leaves. What are they saying to each other, we wonder as we hurry onto the next natural island."

Cover of Katie Holten's book, "The Language of Trees."

"The Ghosts of Our Mothers in Drawing Breath"

Chicago Review of Books

"Fittingly, Brandeis’ writing is joltingly alive. It rattles and swirls as she meditates on her 'own misdiagnosis of [her mother’s] life.' Like Brandeis in Drawing Breath, her writing dances, desires, births, nurses, creates. It weeps, screams, laughs. Yes, it breathes. And whereas The Art of Misdiagnosis is a confessional exhale, Drawing Breath is a restorative inhale."

Cover of Gayle Brandeis's book "Drawing Breath."

"Landscapes of Memory in Dorthe Nors' A Line in the World"

Chicago Review of Books

"She orients herself among dust and dirt, sea and sand, brilliantly capturing specks of memories which dance in the light, however briefly. Like W.G. Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants, who watches dust dance in the projector light, Nors documents how the past haunts the present."

Cover of Dorothea Nors' book "A Line in the World."

"To and From the Void: On Barbara Molinard's Panics

Cleveland Review of Books

"Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and, yes, Albert Camus, Molinard is far more concerned with how life itself is inescapably mad—how living means suffering, and suffering means falling into what she calls “the void,” an existential quality that infuses everything in modern life. Religion and reason will not save us; they are mere palliatives, distracting us from questions about mortality we cannot answer."

Cover of Barbara Molinard's book "Panics."

"Murders for Salvation in Carnality"

Chicago Review of Books

"Sharply translated by Frank Perry, Carnality is the crystallization of Wolff’s years of narrating carnality and its effects. This novel—centered on another pathetic middle-aged Spanish man, a 93-year-old Spanish nun missing a thumb, and a middle-aged Swedish female journalist—answers the central question posed in her previous works: What is the solution to the problems of the flesh?"

Cover of Lina Wolff's book "Carnality."

"The Red Zone: A Love Story Chloe Caldwell: Review"

Full Stop

"Snorting at how we’ve been taught to (not) talk about periods — or really, menstrual cycles — is exactly what Caldwell does throughout The Red Zone. By calling out American culture’s redirection of empowered female embodiment into ignorance and shame, Caldwell stages an intervention in what can be called 'American menstrual culture.'”

Cover of Chloe Caldwell's book, "The Red Zone."

"A Book is a Machine for Speaking with the Dead"

Rain Taxi Review of Books

"An experimental machine for speaking with her own dead, Samantha Hunt’s first work of nonfiction, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation, deftly takes up the questions at the heart of Edison’s proposed machine, an inspiration Hunt acknowledges: In what ways are life and death the same process, with the dead living in and around us? How do the stories we tell about dying shape our relations with the natural world, our acceptance of multiple truths? How are we haunted?"

Cover of Samantha Hunt's book "The Unwritten Book."

"The Ruptures of Maternal Creativity in Linea Nigra"

Chicago Review of Books

"We are beyond thinking of production and reproduction as natural opposites. Just as the Spanish term for childbirth—parto, from partir (to depart)—suggests that each moment of arrival is also a moment of departure, of partition, each moment of not writing is also a moment of writing: the lines birth each other."

Cover of Jazmina Barrera's book "Lines Nigra."

"Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Ghostly Poetics of Female Translation"

Hopscotch Translation

"Can translation—conceived of as a ghost haunting one body after another—breathe for the dead? Can translation reveal the dead still breathing, how our breath is made of theirs? For Ní Ghríofa, no breath is singular. Breath is embodied voice, a sign of life which the translator resuscitates for as long as she can, despite knowing she must suspend that breath for it to become text."

Cover of Doireann ni Ghriofa's book "A Ghost in the Throat."
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