Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Zapata) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Instead of using a story-within-a-story framework (think Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love), or an entangled symmetry (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), Zapata layers his worlds flat atop one another. The reader has to hunt for traces of communication between story lines…. When Zapata… favors people over events, their stories come alive…. Through the allegory of the multiverse, Zapata reinterprets… the gulf between universes of human experience.
Will Chancellor - New York Times Book Review


[S]edate and ruminative… imbued with a fairy-tale vibe…. Overlaying the deftly conjured 20th- and 21st-century settings and events is a sense of eternality, of archetypes and mythic patterning… [and] Zapata’s own evident love… of science fiction…. Zapata’s carefully crafted prose oscillates between matter-of-fact and lyrically poetic, a tonal range that provides a very pleasant reading experience. Also stuffed, not inelegantly, between the microcosmic doings are several larger incidents that limn the bloody and brutal history of the two centuries, including South American totalitarianism, European pogroms and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
Paul Di Filippo - Washington Post


[B]ig-hearted…. Full of stories within stories, Zapata builds his layers with a light touch…. Politically engaged, the book is deeply critical of betrayals and injustices of all kinds and in all parts of the globe, reckoning unsparingly with humanity’s hard-wired propensity both to destroy and to self-destruct…. Remarkably, Zapata’s tone is frequently gently or even absurdly comic and his sensibility is one of great love for human beings and for life itself. This seeming contradiction operates as the central tension that animates the entire novel…. [A] jubilant and generous story-teller.
Kathleen Rooney - Chicago Tribune


Smart and heart-piercing, Lost Book is a story of displacement, erasure, identity, mythology, and the ability of literature to simultaneously express and transcend our lives—not to mention reality…. Zapata tackles huge feelings and ideas… [but] makes it look effortless…. [His] multilayered concepts—most prominently, the theory of multiple worlds—underscore his more immediate themes of family, diaspora, and the sway that patterns hold over our lives…. Zapata illuminates the reality-inventing power of storytelling itself.
Jason Hellor - NPR


[A] stirring debut…. Zapata expertly blends the drama of the lost manuscript with the on-the-ground chaos and tumult caused by the storm.… [His] marriage of speculative and realist styles makes for a harrowing, immersive tale.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [R]eaders will be mesmerized by the unraveling of how the protagonists’ lives interconnect.... The story-within-a-story structure might lose some…. However, patient readers will be rewarded with an illuminating work.... A heady literary and genre-bending novel.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Zapata spins an iridescent web of grief, loss, and memory… an enchanting blend of history, science, and fairy tale.… [U]nforgettable characters… preserve "lost worlds" in the stories they tell and by "reading" the night sky…. A lush, spellbinding tale.
Booklist


Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.… Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy.… A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Kirkus Reviews