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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
As compulsively readable as it is eviscerating in its dramatization of cultural divides, political mayhem, psychotic violence, and profound alienation. [Aug 2004, p.1870]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Banks never makes it easy, but this is worth reading as a warning to anyone not chary of the children of privilege. [15 Jul 2004, p.643]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
A rich and complex look at the searing connections between the personal and the political, this is one of Banks's most powerful novels yet. [2 Aug 2004, p.49]
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Wil Haygood
His are big novels, with daring, sweep and depth. In The Darling, he is working at full strength, and readers are in his debt.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Mike Phillips
The Darling is an urgent, passionate, compelling panorama.
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Favorable
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The Independent James Urquhart
Banks has cleverly grafted a bruising, fast-paced plot on to some gruesome events in Liberia's recent history, but the vitality of his narrative has its edges flattened by Hannah's emotional numbness.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Michael Winter
The Darling is a novel that refuses, curiously, to be intimate. [16 Oct 2004, p.D24]
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Mary Gordon
"The Darling" is not a perfect book -- its very expansiveness of vision and range make that almost impossible -- but it is admirable, compelling, always surprising and never cliched.
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Much like Banks' Cloudsplitter... The Darling inserts a fictional hero into the crossroads of history, which he illuminates with fresh insight.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Andy Solomon
Hannah's story shows why Banks ranks among our boldest artists. He creates a narrator we believe despite finding her neither likable nor credibly self-aware.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Banks has taken one imagined life and crammed into it every question he could about personal politics as they relate to political action, and vice versa.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
As always, Banks is a relentlessly compelling storyteller.
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Mixed
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The Economist
This story never quite sheds a nagging sense of being invented. Even so, The Darling is well crafted and courageously conceived.
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Mixed
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Village Voice Joy Press
This inability or unwillingness to bring Hannah's African family to life feels like a major failure on Banks's part, in a book otherwise reverberating with ideas and startling prose.
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Mixed
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The Nation Deborah Scroggins
Banks is such a master storyteller, and has thought so deeply about the issues of race and power at hand, that there is much to savor here.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In the end, Mr. Bank's failure to turn Hannah into a credible individual, combined with his tendency to sanctimoniously italicize the larger meanings of her story, results in a novel that is fundamentally flawed, despite its thrumming narrative drive.
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Mixed
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PopMatters Stephen M. Deusner
Most of the novel's flaws can be traced back to the rushed first section, which leaves Hannah's later motivations frustratingly underexplained and unclear.
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Unfavorable
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Library Journal Edward B. St. John
Hannah herself is utterly unconvincing, both as a revolutionary and as a woman, and it is impossible to feel much sympathy for her. [1 Sep 2004, p.136]
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
Severely disappoints.
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Unfavorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Gathman
With this story and a writer of Banks' stature, one expects great things. Unfortunately the novel doesn't live up to those expectations.
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