SEPTEMBER 2015 - AudioFile
This harrowing audiobook is simultaneously engaging and disturbing. Narrator Amanda Dolan delivers diverse voices without losing momentum, and the power of her performance is intense. The heart of the story is compelling: A wartime photographer’s image of a girl, snapped at a moment of irreparable trauma, takes on a life of its own, changing the lives of those within its sphere. As one might expect, images of violence, cruelty, and pain abound, and, as is often the case with audiobooks, the closeness of these images can be unsettling. While this story may be too much for some listeners, or at least too raw to experience without frequent breaks, it is an affecting exploration of humanity. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Boats International
…this story packs a powerful punch. It may sound heavy but, trust us, everyone is going to be talking about this book.
Bustle
Lidia Yuknavitch’s writing is a sizzle wire. Her fierce prose will jumpstart your heart and electrify your brain…and her new novel, The Small Backs of Children is a provocative and thrilling jolt of a book.
The Nervous Breakdown
The Small Backs of Children is deeply complex and layered, yet also deceptively simple…exquisite in its lyricism and its ability to articulate and amplify the experiences of suffering and survival.
LitHub
Yuknavitch writes about art, violence, sex, ferocity, willpower and womanhood with explosive force, in a language that evokes modern mythology.
Portland Mercury
Yuknavitch’s writing style works in absolutes and blanket statements like large swaths of color on a canvas…if you ask me to follow Yuknavitch’s plume into a raw, experimental work, I gladly will.
Vol 1Brooklyn
In the latest book from Lidia Yuknavitch, she delves into the aftermath of conflict and tragedy, showing how one image can impact the lives of numerous characters...
Buffalo News
Yuknavitch has a point of view and a fragmented and fractured visionary elegance in her poetic, allusive punk-infused voice. She grabs readers by the throats and immerses them in an intense, wrenching fictive world, but lets them up for air through careful structuring and pacing.
Entertainment Weekly
[An example] of thrilling storytelling with universal appeal.
The Rumpus.com
The Small Backs of Children proves once again that Yuknavitch is witness to the kind of stories we ought to read.
Bustle Summer Reading Roundup
If you want a novel that is going to swallow you alive this summer, turn to Lidia Yuknavitch whose The Small Backs of Children is the kind of book that goes straight for your heart and your mind…This one is important.
The Oregonian
Lidia Yuknavitch’s first novel for a big publisher is a big winner.
Huffington Post
The Small Backs of Children beautifully examines the fractures of loss and the myriad ways we can recover from it.
Los Angeles Times
Lidia Yuknavitch’ s explosive new novel…is fierce in its vision, with captivating prose that carries its own momentum. Yuknavitch has created a reading experience that is uncomfortable and dazzling, with a vital intensity that grabs at the gutstrings.
Vanity Fair
Lidia Yuknavitch burns through sex, art, and war in The Small Backs of Children.
Boston Globe
An intensely corporal, potently feminist, tenaciously written work as alert to animal resilience as to the capacity for bruised and battered suffering, for desire, for ecstasy.
New York Journal of Books
This is a novel for the bold of heart.
Paris Review
I have never felt so wrung out by a novel and yet simultaneously invigorated…a terrifically good novel and powerfully written.
Library Journal - Audio
★ 03/15/2016
"This, reader, is a mother-daughter story," the American writer-who-is-also-the-mother insists in the latest from Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase). The mother-writer has battled debilitating bouts of depression but she's survived thus far, until her daughter's stillborn birth spirals her into silent withdrawal. In an effort to save her, the mother-writer's coterie of artists—including former and current husbands, an ex-lover, and friends—are charged with rescuing an Eastern European girl made world-famous by an iconic war photograph. The award-winning image captures the child midflight, leaping from an explosion that destroyed her family, her home, her identity. "Every novel is a lie that hides the self," the writer warns, and yet the truth proves even more difficult to comprehend. That the characters remain nameless—they're referred to only by their jobs/relationships—adds an oxymoronic layer of immediacy, as if the writer, photojournalist, playwright could be any mother, lover, brother we know. Narrator Amanda Dolan's measured, exacting voice heightens the recognition, making Yuknavitch's prose that much more chilling, alarming, and ultimately unforgettable. VERDICT A sparse, jarring, can't-turn-away experience. ["Gorgeous, scary, and a breathtaking rush to read, this book is less a meditation than a provocation on the power and dangers of art": LJ 5/15/15 starred review of the Harper hc.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
