No One Is Here Except All of Us (Ausubel) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Fantastical and ambitious.... Infused with faith in the power of storytelling.... Light and tenderness persevere—in a shining moon, in a candle still aglow, in a mother’s embrace of her child.
New York Times Book Review


Ramona Ausubel's first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, is a poetic fable about a part of history after which some people say poetry is an obscenity.... Ausubel's fable-like tone is effective in creating a sensation of tale and dream. For conveying the full horror of the events surrounding the Holocaust, it is less so, but this isn't what she's trying to do. Instead, she is comfortable reshaping, in a safe time and place, stories that were handed to her, using her rhetorical and narrative skill to create something that can be carried without cutting the one who carries it.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


No One Is Here Except All of Us contains so many achingly beautiful passages, it's as if language itself is continually striving to be a refuge.... If a book can be said to have a consciousness, the consciousness here is infinitely tender and soulful, magical and true. It's the kind of God we wish for.
San Francisco Chronicle


Debut novelist Ausubel casts a vibrant, dreamlike spell in this tale of a remote Romanian Village whose citizens try to save themselves from the Holocaust by reinventing their own history.
Marie Claire


Romanian Jews in 1939 reinvent their own reality in this inspiring novel about the power of community and imagination.
O, the Oprah Magazine


Ramona Ausubel’s debut, No One Is Here Except All of Us captures the magical group-think of a Romanian village that retreats into an imaginary reality at the outbreak of war.
Vogue


When danger threatens, would that we could simply change reality's rules. That's what one little Romanian village tries to do in 1939, as war thunders on the horizon.... A wonderfully fresh and inventive premise replicating exactly what literature can do.... Ausubel repeatedly writes with warmth and flare.
Library Journal


A bittersweet fable of war and survival set in a Romanian shtetl.... Ausubel's sustained, idiosyncratic take on the Holocaust is double-edged, alternating affecting heartache with sentimental poetic overkill. Opinion may be divided, but there's an undeniable element of talent here.
Kirkus Reviews