Ducks Newburyport (Ellman) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
This book… mimics the way our minds move now, toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.… [It] demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times


Brilliantly ambitious…. At times there’s such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique… but it is also, fundamentally, a very long and meaningful list… as accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.
Martin Riker - New York Times Book Review


A book about a mother’s love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings..… It is also a catalogue of life’s many injuries and mishaps… and of the simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. [A] triumph.
Guardian (UK)


Resplendent in ambition, humour and humanity.… [A] lifetime of memories hoarded and pored over, like the family heirlooms the narrator and her husband have inherited along with all the joy and desolation contained within them.… In Ducks, Newburyport Ellmann has created a wisecracking, melancholy Mrs Dalloway for the internet age.
Financial Times (UK)


Perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever witnessed... what Ducks amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire country.… It’s a colossal feat.
Spectator (UK)


Ellmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain.… [The book] also flickers with tenderness… that every individual is owed an unending devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change the fate of the world.
New Yorker


Brilliant—and addictive.… There have been comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.
Associated Press


The free-associative stream accumulates into a work of great formal beauty, whose distinctive linguistic rhythms and patterns envelop the reader like music or poetry.… If art is measured by how skillfully it holds a mirror up to society, then Ellmann has surely written the most important novel of this era.
Paris Review


Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann’s daring is exhilarating—as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.
Joanna MacGregor - 2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation


(Starred review) [A] stream-of-consciousness monologue… [in which] plot is secondary…. This jumble of cascading thoughts provides a remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and society’s storm clouds… challenging but… brilliant.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [A] long, free-association, run-on sentence from the overactive brain of a mother of four…. Is it worth the considerable time and effort required… to journey into the mind of this funny and insanely loveable worrywart? Yes! It's a jaw-dropping miracle. —Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Mesmerizing, witty, maximalist…. [A] bravura and caring inquiry into Earth’s glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.
Booklist


[A] Ulysses-sized saga…. Literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space.
Kirkus Reviews