Inland (Obreht) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[S]entimental and meandering…. Let me pause to say: Obreht has real gifts as a storyteller… [but] all the drama feels fake, as if someone is backstage shaking a thunder sheet…. More common are observations and dialogue that are as softly didactic as refrigerator magnet slogans…. I realize I am being terribly hard on Obreht’s novel, but… [t]he many readers who will enjoy Inland and put it on best-seller lists can send an old curse in my direction.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


[T]he landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout…. Obreht's simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West's beauty and sudden menace.… Obreht also has a poetic touch for writing intricate and precise character descriptions…. In Obreht's hands, this is an era that overflows with what the dead want, and with wants that lead to death.
Chanelle Benz - New York Times Book Review


[Inland] unfolds like a dream… a smoky borderland between…reality and fantasy, the living and the dead, textbook history and fairy tales. Ms. Obreht has the extraordinary ability to… [create] a fully immersive imaginary world governed by its own logic…. The bedtime-story elements can become twee and caricatured….  And the novel feels sanitized… [yet] when you’re under its spell the objections seem beside the point…. Inland is a place of killers, camels, families and phantoms. Reading it, you may feel as Lurie does: "I had somehow wanted my way into a marvel that had never before befallen this world."
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


It’s a voyage of hilarious and harrowing adventures, told in the irresistible voice of a restless, superstitious man determined to live right but tormented by his past. At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory and found him riding a camel.… The unsettling haze between fact and fantasy in Inland is not just a literary effect of Obreht’s gorgeous prose: it’s an uncanny representation of the indeterminate nature of life in this place of brutal geography.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Inland is a classic story, told in a classic way—and yet it feels wholly and unmistakably new.… At once a new Western myth and a far realer story than many we have previously received—and that’s even with all the ghosts.
NPR


Tea Obreht’s M.O. is clear: She’s determined to unsettle our most familiar, cliche-soaked genres.… Inland can feel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian turned inside out: contemplative rather than rollicking, ghostly rather than blood-soaked.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


With Inland, Obreht makes a renewed case for the sustained, international appeal of the American West, based on a set of myths that have been continually shaped and refracted through outside lenses.
New Yorker


Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever change the way you think about a thing, just through her powers of description…. Inland is an ambitious and beautiful work about many things: immigration, the afterlife, responsibility, guilt, marriage, parenthood, revenge, all the roads and waterways that led to America. Miraculously, it’s also a page-turner and a mystery, as well as a love letter to a camel… splendid.
Oprah Magazine


What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry. It doesn’t feel written so much as extracted from the mind in its purest, clearest, truest form.
Entertainment Weekly


(Starred review) [A] mesmerizing historical novel spun from two primary narrative threads.… Obreht paints a colorful portrait of the Western landscape, populated by a rogue’s gallery of memorable characters… . [She] knocks it out of the park in her second novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) At 37, Nora Lark feels she's become a hard woman from the impossible challenges over the last 20 years…. [P]arallel to Nora's story is one of the Balkans-born outlaw Lurie Mattie…. How he ends up in Nora's yard roped to a camel is a most unusual, absorbing tale. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal


(Starred review) [E]xtraordinarily intricate worldview, psychological and social acuity, descriptive artistry, and shrewd, witty, and zestful storytelling…. As her protagonists’ lives converge, Obreht inventively and scathingly dramatizes the delirium of the West—its myths, hardships, greed, racism, sexism, and violence.
Booklist


(Starred review) A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet.… Meanwhile, there are head lice, marvelous, dueling newspaper editorials, and a mute granny with her part to play. The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.
Kirkus Reviews