During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Reviews.”
Read Melinda Misener’s review of Townie by Andre Dubus III, here, and Sarah Malone’s review of NW by Zadie Smith, here.
BRITTA STROMEYER
Lambridis offers an incisive commentary on how communities construct collective realities as a defense mechanism against trauma and marginalization, suggesting that our afflictions, histories, and identities are not passive interpretations of the world, but the very scaffolding that shapes it.
JULIA LICHTBLAU
The story is told through several narrative devices, primarily Green’s notebook entries, interspersed with newspaper clippings, which feed the mystery at the center of the book. The notebook entries include bird measurements, rock formations, guano consistency, every ingredient of every meal, and conversation.
BRITTA STROMEYER
[She] braids personal ache into a collective anthem, forcing readers to confront the weight of unhealed personal and shared wounds. Her prose demands a new definition of beauty, worth, and what it means to belong. By exhuming voices long buried in silence, she drags the messy, vital contradictions of the human experience into the light.
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