Exit Party
Terrific ... Puzzling it out as it unfolds is one of its many pleasures ... The story deepens and expands in unexpected ways, across generations, into marriages, betrayals and rare acts of decency. In the world of Exit Party, through all of its tragic turns, we find Mandel at her best.
Read Full Review >>
Seamless ... Weakness for catchphrases is my least favorite thing about Exit Party and the Mandelverse in general. It speaks to an impulse to reduce the novels’ mysteries to accessible bromides. Still, the habit is in keeping with the book’s paradoxically optimistic tenor. Ari and her counterpart are smart, resilient, personable women who, for all their wrongdoing, have a gift for finding happiness in the midst of breakdown. The hope they represent is the stabilizing force that bridges Ms. Mandel’s enterprising fiction.
Unfortunately, this book is disappointing, both in its literary and science fiction aspects. The writing is prosaic ... Littered with banalities ... In the end, it’s hard to know what the point of it all is. Perhaps it is simply to follow Ari’s character arc as she tries to redress the wrongs of her life (or lives), but this feels poor compensation in a novel packed with so many big but hazy ideas.
