More Critical Praise for Brucie Jacobs & Secret Girl

 

The author writes effortless prose. She is confident of the worlds—whether it is a suburban backyard at night or the confusion of Hong Kong—being created; and that confidence and a clarity of vision pull the reader in and make all the stories believable and poignant. One of the things that amazed me was the beauty of many of the images. And those images come with a precise dissection of the characters’ lives…This is wonderful work. --Praise by Edward P. Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Known World, for Jacobs’ collection of short stories, Small Burials.

 

...That Jacobs is able to depict her parents' neglect without utterly demonizing them is a testament to her skill as a writer. The book is filled with lovely images: The Victorian house of her childhood "sat like a dowager atop a hill"; her grandmother was as domineering as a mother superior and as calculating

as a first-class Parisian madam...--Kirkus

 

Only once in a yellow moon does a great memoir come around and break the rules and break your heart. Quite simply, Brucie Jacobs’Secret Girl is an unwaveringly courageous, wisely seen, and gorgeously written book about family secrets, indelible loss, and the healing power of reconciliation that stands equal to groundbreaking memoirs like Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss," and Lucy Grealey's "Autobiography of a Face." It's one thing to air your family laundry on a talk show; it's another to be able to write about familial love, hatred, and personal pain in a way that is both literary and lovely, frank and fruitful, self-reflective and generous. Secret Girl bears out what the psychologist Otto Rank said about pain and its relationship to art: suffering, objectified, can be truth and beauty both. Books like Jacobs' Secret Girl remind us that we have in each of us, always within reach, the possibility of saving our own selves. --Julie Checkoway, director of the forthcoming documentary Waiting for Hockney,and author of the memoir, Little Sister.

 

[Secret Girl] is wonderful, insightful, and emotionally runs the gamut from joy to tears.--Steven Ritter, M.D. New York

                                                            

                                                      Click HERE for page 3 of Critical Praise

 

 

 

 

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