Reviews
Reviews for The God of War
“Marisa Silver is the author for whom we've all been waiting. With unabashed voice she steadily, bravely, unerringly tells a heartbreakingly beautiful story for our time. The God of War is the truest novel I've read in ages.”
- Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
“The God of War is such a stunning dive into a desert landscape few have understood and loved as deeply as Marisa Silver. It is no man's land, and every man's land — there, her people wage epic battles for their lives, for their loyalties, and for their very fierce versions of love.”
- Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales and Highwire Moon
“Marisa Silver's The God of War is as gripping as it is beautifully written. By the end I ached for these brothers, Ares and Malcolm, as if they were my own family, and I will not forget them.”
- Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
Reviews for No Direction Home
“A beautiful novel of father hunger, tenderly written and carefully plotted…A remarkable, memorable first novel.”
- Boston Sunday Globe
“Silver is masterful at orchestrating her complicated cast of characters and settings…But perhaps the most impressive quality of this novel is her ability to create distinct and idiosyncratic characters struggling with physical, psychological and economic limitations…Silver is refreshingly unafraid of emotion as she holds the strands of her narrative taut and brings each of the intersecting dramas in this knowing first novel to a moving and resonant conclusion.”
- The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Silver, with her attention to everyday detail and her determination to take seriously the myriad individual lives that create California, has crafted a beautiful honest, and poignant novel of this siren state.”
- San Francisco Chronicle
“Marisa Silver’s first novel, No Direction Home, presents a promising sampler of miseries…juggling so many plot lines without confusing the reader is a considerable feat, and Silver manages it well.”
- The New York Times Book Review
“Silver deftly tells the stories of three families whose struggles to survive are made tougher by depression, dementia, and traumatic separation…A perceptive look at the rippling effects of adversity on family dynamics.”
- Booklist
“Silver proves herself a deft juggler of plot lines and an effective realist; she conjures an aching world of half-truths, physical need and emotional frustration…This is a moving novel, each of its well-wrought characters finding some comfort in the ‘solace of in-between spaces.”
- Publisher’s Weekly
“Marisa Silver is an explosive writer, capable of igniting prose with m moments of startling insight…Silver delivers her most subtle thoughts and mature wisdom…in lines that possess the compact power of poetry.”
- Nashville Scene
“A luminous piece of fiction. I love the way it takes the form of the family novel and raises the stakes its people face out into the jagged perils of the real world. And all this is narrative with great intimacy and tenderness - a rare, striking, unsentimental book.”
- Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven
“In No Direction Home, the sense of longing is s alive and so pervasive, yet, at the same time, it is so individual t each of Marisa Silver’s haunting characters. This is a rich, textured novel about the depth and resilience of imperfect love. It is ambitious, accomplished, and tremendously moving.”
- Cathleen Schine, author of The Love Letter and She Is Me
“This is an excellent book. Reading it, I was reminded of the kind of fierce lump-in-the-throat emotions a book can stir. Marisa Silver has a preternatural insight into the hearts and minds of children, and her writing is passionate, wise, fearless, and often utterly gorgeous.”
- Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me
Reviews for Babe in Paradise
“Silver’s vision cumulatively amounts to a dark, desperate down-and-out world, a Los Angeles of her own making, where the elusive instances of human connection are all too rare, and therefore all the more luminous.”
- The Los Angeles Times
“…a writer with a keen eye for alienation, and an ability to pinpoint the surprising ways that even the most disaffected among us are brought together.”
- The New York Times Book Review
“Magnificent…(Silver’s) writing stings, but the pain is good.”
- Village Voice
“When it comes to the small moments – the frustrations and regrets of daily living – Silver’s work is powerful and heartfelt, and nowhere more than in the relationships she depicts between parents and children, which she traces with savage grace.”
- Atlantic Monthly
“Energetic, inventive, and intensely dramatic, these fine stories illuminate unexpectedly dark corners of the American dream.”
- Andrea Barrett, National Book Award Winner and author of Ship Fever
“A very impressive debut from a writer of striking talent.”
- Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
“How well Marisa Silver writes about her n’er-do-well characters, and how cunningly she invents their lives in these glittering stories. Babe in Paradise is a passionate and memorable debut.”
- Margot Livesey, author of The Missing World
“I loved reading Babe in Paradise. Marisa Silver’s talents are wide-ranging, and her authority considerable. L.A. needed someone to reveal its complex, beautiful underpinnings. Here she is.”
- Antonya Nelson, author of Nobody's Girl