The
Girls:
"The Girls, the year’s best
book to come out of Canada, possibly the world. There’s
deep craft at work here. The Girls communicates
astute insights into the art of the memoir and tackles
plot development that would sink most other writers. Lansens
navigates them effortlessly. Awesome."
—NOW magazine
The Girls: "I promise: you will never forget this extraordinary
story. Love, connection, loyalty, raw humanity and much more are the ingredients
of this most unusual novel. Lori Lansens's blend of tragedy and comedy will touch
you deeply."
—Isabel Allende
The Girls: "“A stunner…immensely exciting…a
tribute to the extraordinariness of human consciousness…laced with delightful
comic moments…not just a sophisticated literary accomplishment but a
darned good read."
—Toronto Star
The Girls: "“Extraordinary…a masterful and
sophisticated duet…a multidimensional vision of the sisters’ lives."
—Time Magazine
Rush
Home Road: "To read Lansens's Rush Home Road is
to read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women coupled
with Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, but
as if both novels had been penned by Toni Morrison...
In Rush Home Road ... an Ontario almost
never imagined, a secret, rural black Ontario, a landscape of
tobacco, corn and strawberries and a history of struggle
and beauty, is given magnificent, complex reality....
Lansens is a brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted
comprehension of human flaws and humane possibilities."
—George
Elliot Clarke, The Globe
and Mail
Rush
Home Road: "Lansens
is a willing storyteller.... As a writer, she desires a particular
kind of reader, one who wants above all to be transported
-- who might sit at her knee… immensely readable."
—National Post
Rush
Home Road: "[A]
poignant debut….Addy’s life — her marriage, her children,
her journey to Detroit and back to Canada — is the
rich core of a novel also laden with history….This is artfully
done."
—Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002
Rush
Home Road: "While
wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience abound
in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written
about the country's long-settled black communities.
First-time novelist Lori Lansens ... does so passionately
with Rush Home Road
... a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we
know more about a time and place — and about humankind— than
when we opened the cover."
—Quill & Quire advance
review
