Partita
The Appalachia-bred narrator of Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita, is wry, resilient and as forthcoming a companion as you could ask for ... Often relies on tropes...but the tropes work ... Partita has a few sluggish chapters, but they fall in the middle when the author may have been resting up for the heart-hammering final third of the novel ... The book has moments so Thomas-Hardy-sad that you feel like you’ve got rain in your veins.
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A hallmark of the decorated novelist’s work is her flair for pithy sentences that illuminate the human experience, giving voice to our private longings and secret vulnerabilities ... Kingsolver brings the full weight of her experience and her other work to the page in this entirely new story. It hits the same chords, but it is full of discovery and insight. She’s different, and we’re different too.
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Not all inwardness and insinuation. There is still plenty of Dickensian melodrama ... The novel’s ending...is wonderfully done. Ms. Kingsolver dramatizes it by way of a village recital, turning to music to evoke the feelings that straightforward exposition would heavy-handedly summarize.
