Book Reviews
Wiggins seems to be writing her own psycho-history here. (The book is dedicated to her daughter, Lara Porzak, a photographer.) But if the novel fails to integrate all the cosmic elements she summons up — her digressions on maps, aerial perspective, Western land rights and Los Angeles traffic are strained — Wiggins ably challenges the smug idea that we can easily distinguish truth and falsehood in telling anyone’s story, especially our own. Fictive memoir? Fact-based novel? I don’t care what she calls this book. I’ll gladly read it again.
Richard B. Woodward - New York Times
There are passages in Marianne Wiggins's eighth novel so piercingly beautiful that I put the book down, shook my head and simply said, "Wow." She's reproduced a number of photographs in her text — appropriately, since her subject is a photographer — but these physical images pale in comparison to the pictures she creates with words.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
The author can make you weep in a single sentence...The events and relationships are rendered on the page with an immediacy that catches you up short.
Boston Globe
(Starred review.) Wiggins is a writer who paints elegant pictures with words.... The pages are liberally sprinkled with photographs, insights, realistic pathos, and human situations. This creative novel will not disappoint. —Elizabeth Dickie
Booklist
Wiggins takes on real-life American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. The author braids the stories of Curtis, whose photos of Native Americans and the western landscape shaped the region's mythology; his long-suffering wife, Clara; and a present-day writer, "Marianne Wiggins," who's summoned to a Las Vegas hospital to see the dying "father" whom she knows to be an imposter because her dad hanged himself decades earlier. Incorporated into the text are photographic images taken by the mysterious, obsessive Curtis, famed for his pictures of grave, brooding Indians posed in ceremonial dress-funeral portraits of a dying race, he called them. Especially poignant is the plight of Clara, who manages the household and raises their children virtually alone (the youngest goes 18 years without seeing her father). Yet when she finally sues for divorce, the children side with Curtis, choosing the mythical god over the disciplinarian. Wiggins intercuts the story of the writer/narrator's own absent father. The novel can seem diffuse—neither storyline is explored as fully as it might be—but the stratagem pays off in bravura passages like the one in which Wiggins riffs her way from ethnic roadside restaurants to gods of Greek myth to the American cult of celebrity...and in the process forges an emotional link between narrative lines. An ambitious, lively work, though its fragments don't coalesce perfectly.
Publishers Weekly