Next of Kin: A Memoir
Spends a fair amount of time...in Hamilton’s childhood, with a welter of new details ... Winning as well as horrifying ... Demands an awed respect. It’s a naked, deboning sort of family accounting ... Hers isn’t a fun book, exactly, but it’s a feast.
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I’ve admired and even adored most everything she’s produced until now ,.. But despite a deep well of material, Next of Kin lacks the force and vision of her previous book, and its parts fail to cohere ... Hamilton is well positioned, at least in theory, to examine its mythology. Instead, she traffics in it ... The elisions in this memoir — they are noticeable and significant — could almost be explained away by practical constraints ... The strongest portions of Next of Kin are Hamilton’s reflections about her mother.
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Deeply engaging ... This virtuoso writer has assembled the ingredients of an American experience and turned them into a reminiscence sharply spiced with wit and candor.
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