"The main character of this novel is an adult man who lives with his mother, and who fancies himself too intelligent to participate in mainstream society or to hold down a normal job. Don’t we all have relatives like this? Well, I do!"

"I first read this novel at 16 and felt centered in ways I’d never felt before as a reader. I’ve since returned to it whenever I feel lost and am given affirmation to journey for answers, like Hurston’s protagonist Janie in the muck."

"This book would probably be shunned today. Even though Humbert Humbert is clearly a villain, the very subject of pedophilia is now considered too transgressive. But Nabokov had to reach far in order to redeem the romantic novel, which had become trite."

"This debut from Sharina Harris shines, giving me warm feelings of Waiting to Exhale set in present day. Raina, Kara, Nikki, and Sienna—the lifelong best friends in this novel—quickly become yours too. You know these women and feel their emotions."

"Atwood keeps several plates spinning in this engrossing novel. What a gleeful storyteller she is. Her book is part family saga and part Gothic fantasy, with a plot twist near the end which casts the whole book in a dazzling new light."

"Of course, the black body exists within a wider black culture — one Hurston portrayed with grace and insight in this seminal novel. She defies racist Americans who would standardize the cultures of white people or sanitize, eroticize, erase or assimilate those of blacks."