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Books Lost Memory of Skin

Banks is slow to reveal exactly what the Kid did or why he did it. Lost Memory of Skin unfolds suspensefully, deriving an eerie moral tension from the question of just which laws the Kid actually broke.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times Janet Maslin New York Times 2011
Things start to feel clunky in the novel’s final chapters, when the journalist (referred to, annoyingly, as “the Writer”) engages the Kid in a question-and-answer session that is more or less a means of delivering the novel’s resolution.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Observer Hannah Gersen New York Observer 2011

… Banks solves the problem of the Kid’s lack of education and experience by allowing his interior monologues sometimes to imperceptibly slide into the author’s, or by description so skillfully done that we never object that the Kid identifies a sophisticated list of Everglade birds without having ever read the bird guides of Roger Tory Peterson.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Diane Johnson New York Review of Books 2012