Category: Reviews

  • Come to The Colored Museum

    The Oakland Center for the Arts is presenting the timeless play The Colored Museum, written by George C. Wolfe, director of the Broadway smash, Angels in America. The Colored Museum takes a satirical look at what “color” is in America today. Coupling irreverent wit with deep compassion, Wolfe’s play tackles and topples the myths and…

  • Locus Review of One for Sorrow

    Gary Wolfe reviewed One for Sorrow in Locus this month.  It was a feature review, and I loved reading what he made of the book.  Okay, so I love reading and hearing what anyone thinks about the book, but this was yet another one of those detailed, thoughtful reviews that I enjoy so much, that…

  • SF Site Review

    Paul Kincaid on One for Sorrow: Whether you read the ghost story as a metaphor for Adam’s psychological travails, or the upheavals in Adam’s family as a grim mirror for the haunting, this is a superbly structured, beautifully written coming of age story. It is, in its way, as powerful and affecting a debut as…

  • Washington Post Review

    A really pleasant surprise this morning. Though I don’t think it will appear in print until tomorrow, One for Sorrow has been reviewed in The Washington Post. And reviewed well! An excerpt: Traveling through this story with Adam is like a nightmare, but the kind that fascinates you so deeply that when you wake up,…

  • October Country

    At Bookslut Colleen Mondor reviews books for the very Bradburyesque time of year we’re entering:  October Country.  Included in that roundup are books by Neil Gaiman, Margo Lanagan, and my own One for Sorrow. Here’s an excerpt: What really impressed me about this book was how it was a familiar story on one level and…

  • Datlow’s issue of Subterranean

    I’m reading the Ellen Datlow edited issue of Subterranean lately, and am having a really good time. The magazine could easily be the core of an awesome horror anthology, which is of course one of Ellen Datlow’s specialities, so it’s no surprise to find exciting, well-written and disturbing stories in this issue. Here’s the lowdown…

  • Vindicator Review

    A very nice review of One for Sorrow in one of the local papers: Chris Barzak’s first novel, “One for Sorrow,” is like a window into the metaphysical world. Told through the voice of a troubled but honest teen, it’s depiction of what it’s like to be unhappily dead is so believable, it’s like a…

  • Scifi.com Review

    So I said “um” a lot in my first ever radio interview. Oh well. Paul Di Filippo had great things to say about One for Sorrow in his review over at Scifi.com: Surely the current era is a renaissance of ghostly tales. The work of Peter Beagle and Tim Powers and James Blaylock and Charles…

  • Village Voice Review

    Elizabeth Hand (Elizabeth Hand!) reviewed One for Sorrow in the Village Voice: One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak’s lovely, melancholy, offbeat first novel, affectingly captures the emotional centrifuge that is adolescence, with sex and longing the fixed axes around which everything else spins. Fifteen-year-old Adam McCormick’s classmate Jamie is too weird and too much of a…

  • Long and narrow like a coffin

    Midori Snyder over at the Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts has written a review of One for Sorrow: While reading One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak’s remarkable debut novel, I was reminded of a quote from Danish author, Tove Ditlivson: “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and we do not get out of it…