Dear friends,
My book has gotten some reviews, which is really wonderful and exciting. Here are links to all the ones I could find:
The New Yorker Briefly Noted // The New York Times // Paris Review Staff Picks // Minneapolis Star-Tribune // Associated Press // Chicago Review of Books // New York Journal of Books // Fredericksburg Free Lance Star // Book Reporter // Arts Fuse // Barrelhouse // Booklist // Kirkus // Publishers Weekly
Here are some quotations:
“[A] stunning début...Dektar has a gift for describing the wonders of the natural world, and sensitively inhabits a young cultist’s fragile state.” —The New Yorker
“In the recent surge of fiction written by millennial women for their peers, none have done quite what Molly Dektar does in her debut novel, The Ash Family…The ‘millennial novel,’ as it has developed into a subgenre thus far, is in large part about individuation and actualization, but here it is about trying to connect in some meaningful way with the physical world. The protagonist, Berie, is never fully involved in her new family’s increasingly violent acts, and this is likely because Dektar’s attention is as captivated by the natural world as Berie’s is; she would rather linger over landscapes than plot a protest. And thankfully so—Dektar crafts beautiful prose, lush and loamy in the vein of Thomas Hardy’s naturalism.” —The Paris Review
“This debut novel is nothing short of compelling . . . a captivating and haunting tale.” —New York Journal of Books
"If Wild Wild Country was your number one Netflix show of 2018, then you'll love the story of Berie—a 19-year-old who finds belonging in an off-the-grid (and dangerous) collective instead of her freshman dorm.” —Glamour
“Although it’s tempting to rush through this near-thriller, The Ash Family is the kind of novel that should be read slowly. Yes, it’s propulsive and ridden with moments of tension, but savoring on the layered secrets found inside the unraveling Ash Family’s farm is the real treat here.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Molly Dektar's creepy, brilliant debut novel, The Ash Family has not a whiff of the supernatural about it. Yet it is a top-notch horror story, made even more unsettling by the fact that nothing about what it unravels is particularly far-fetched.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance Star
“This debut novel is nothing short of compelling . . . a captivating and haunting tale.” —New York Journal of Books
"If Wild Wild Country was your number one Netflix show of 2018, then you'll love the story of Berie—a 19-year-old who finds belonging in an off-the-grid (and dangerous) collective instead of her freshman dorm.” —Glamour
“Although it’s tempting to rush through this near-thriller, The Ash Family is the kind of novel that should be read slowly. Yes, it’s propulsive and ridden with moments of tension, but savoring on the layered secrets found inside the unraveling Ash Family’s farm is the real treat here.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Molly Dektar's creepy, brilliant debut novel, The Ash Family has not a whiff of the supernatural about it. Yet it is a top-notch horror story, made even more unsettling by the fact that nothing about what it unravels is particularly far-fetched.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance Star
