The Locals (Dee) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
This novel is a big machine, and Dee drives it calmly … perhaps too calmly. He has the intelligence to pull off a novel of this size but lacks, somehow, the killer instinct — the ability to move in for intensities of feeling and  thought and action.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


As the tension builds, protests are planned. Yet for all that the book gestures at a kind of political allegory, it shies away from the capital-S Scene it seems to promise and tapers away into anticlimax.… Still, The Locals is a quietly engrossing narrative that dishes out its food for thought in sly, quotable lines.… [M]y favorite: "Tough times brought out the bad side of people … and this internet was like some giant bathroom wall where you could just scrawl whatever hate you liked."
Lucinda Rosenfeld - New York Times Book Review


[Dee's] sensitivity has never been more unnerving than in his new novel, The Locals … [which] feels attuned to the broader currents of our culture, particularly the renewed tension between competing ideals of community and self-reliance.… With this little town, this idyllic-looking version of America, Dee has constructed a world — harrowing but instructive — where no one feels content.
Ron Charles - Washington Post 


(Starred review.) Engrossing.… His blue-collar characters … are vividly developed, and his insights into how they think about the government (ineffective and corrupt) and their rights as citizens (ignored, trampled) are timely.… [Dee] handles the plot with admirable skill … and strikes the perfect ending note
Publishers Weekly


Dee taps into the zeitgeist with a novel about a rural, working-class New England town that elects a New York hedge fund billionaire as its mayor.… [C]ulture and class clash are inevitable.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Good old social novels are hard to come by these days, great ones harder still. Leave it to [Jonathan] Dee to fill the void with a book that’s not only great but so frighteningly timely that the reader will be forced to wonder how he managed to compose it before the last election cycle
Booklist


(Starred review.) The residents of a small town in the Berkshires have their world overturned by a billionaire in their midst.… [The Locals] plays both as political allegory and kaleidoscopic character study. An absorbing panorama of small-town life and a study of democracy in miniature.
Kirkus Reviews