I'll Be Right Here
Exquisite ... These transitions, while initially dizzying, coalesce into a rhythm that feels fresh and exciting. Together they suggest that memory conflates the past, present and future, until at the end, our lives can be viewed as a richly textured tapestry of experience and recollection, threaded together by the people we’ve loved ... Her prose is so finely wrought it shimmers. Again and again she has returned to love as her primary subject, each time finding new depth and dimension, requiring us to put aside our expectations and go where the pages take us. As readers, we’re in the most adept of hands.
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Short in length but contains multitudes. A multi-generational novel of family, war, immigration, love, and loss, the book is full to bursting with characters, settings, perspectives, time periods, insights, and aperçus. This multifarious abundance is both the novel’s strength and its weakness ... Irresistible voice ... While sections of the book enchant, moments and lines provoke laughter, knowing nods, or a delighted smile, the overall effect deflates our hopes. I’ll Be Right Here reads more like a collection of vivid sketches, haphazardly bundled, than a finely wrought and fully realized novel. The parts are greater than the whole, the ingredients tastier than the dish.
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Probing, ambitious ... The hallmarks of Bloom’s prose are present: graceful psychological insights (she is a psychotherapist as well as an author), palpable love for her characters, and a story that lands squarely on the side of life and living—if also unflinching in its depictions of suffering ... Fraught intrigue saturates these pages like musk, looping in Coco Chanel and the Duchess of Windsor: piercing, powerful historical fiction ... Bloom meticulously traces the siblings’ steady rise in wealth, property and authority. Their relationship, secretly sexual, deeply comforts them—and, somehow, us. (Remember, Samir was adopted, but even still—it’s a testament to Bloom’s delicate skills that she makes this relationship genuinely moving) ... Although the many characters who come to populate the second half of the book are robustly drawn, I could not feel the same force from them as that which pulsed in their originators ... What’s always clear is that Bloom’s vision of human history and human effort—horrors included—emanates a peculiar radiance.
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