Gold Fame Citrus (Watkins) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Watkins has never been afraid to take structural risks in her work. Her...novel is interspersed with sections that break abruptly away from the story of Luz and Ray’s flight into sand, expanding the scope of the novel well beyond their lives. These leaps usually pay off—a chapter set in a psychiatric ward saves the latter half of the book from nihilism, for instance, and the section involving the businessman on the plane is spectacular. But not all of the stand-alone chapters connect.... But if this book is sometimes frustrating, it’s also fascinating. A great pleasure of the book is Watkins’s fearlessness, particularly in giving her characters free rein to be themselves.
Emily St. John Mandel - New York Times Book Review


A gripping, provocative debut novel.
Boston Globe


A beautiful debut novel.... Watkins' vision is profoundly terrifying. It's a novel that's effective precisely because it's so realistic—while Watkins' image of the future is undeniably dire, there's nothing about it that sounds implausible.... She also writes with a keen understanding of human nature, both good and bad. She has a genuine compassion for the Angelenos who have chosen to remain in their dying, desiccated city as well as for the ones who have evacuated.... The prose in Gold Fame Citrus is stunningly beautiful, even when—especially when—Watkins is describing the badlands that Southern California has become…. One might think there are only a few ways to portray a landscape that has become, essentially, nothing, but Watkins writes with a brutal kind of beauty, and even in the book's darkest moments, it's impossible to turn away. It's an urgent, frequently merciless book, as unrelenting as it is brilliant. Watkins forces us to confront things we'd probably rather ignore, but because we're human, we can't.
Los Angeles Times


Watkin’s narrative is mythic and speculative, its sediment forming and re-forming in lists, treatises, and reports. The writing, with its tough sentimentality, is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s, but Watkins has a style of mordant observation all her own.
Harper's


[Gold Fame Citrus] burns with a dizzying, scorching genius.
Vanity Fair


At once beautiful and profoundly unsettling, [Gold Fame Citrus] sears its way into the brain, burning hot through the devastating journey and lingering long after the last page is turned.
Elle


Unsettingly resonant.... Watkins, whose brilliant short-story collection, Battleborn, revealed a deep understanding of the darker American mythologies, finds it’s not simply water we’re thirsty for.
Vogue


Watkins is at her best here, characterizing the easy slide from isolation to the open arms of an accepting, if ultimately wayward, community.... Gold Fame Citrus is a different kind of dystopia; one that illuminates the spiritual coping mechanisms of those living in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Huffington Post


(Starred review.) It's the near future: water is running out and a vast sand dune that covers whole towns is growing.... [Watkin's] book is packed with persuasive detail, luminous writing, and a grasp of the history (popular, political, natural, and imagined) needed to tell a story that is original yet familiar, strange yet all too believable.
Publishers Weekly



(Starred review.) Plagued by severe water shortages, the residents of California (already dwindling in number) are subjected to a forced evacuation.... [W]ith its damaged and complicated heroine and multiple voices, shifting perspectives, and unconventional narrative devices, [Gold Fame Citrus] is a wholly original work. —Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
Library Journal



(Starred review.) Spectacular… In Margaret Atwood mode, Watkins spikes this fast-moving, high-tension, sexyecocrisis saga with caustic parodies and resounding allusions that cohere into a knowing and elegiac tale of scrappy adaptation and epic loss.
Booklist


(Starred review.) A tour-de-force first novel.... Watkins writes an unforgettable scene with a carousel; another in a dank tunnel where the couple seeks contraband blueberries. The author freckles her fiction with incantations, odd detours, hallucinations, and jokes.... [M]agnificently original.
Kirkus Reviews