“Prescient and provocative….The characters…jump from the pages and dare you to care about them….The prose is crisp and precise….The pieces fit together at the end with a satisfying click.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
Reviews
“Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me…takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand….Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth.”
— Salon.com
“Look at Me makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process.”
— Chicago Tribune
“Egan’s rich new novel…is about bigger things: double lives; secret selves; the difficulty of really seeing anything in a world so flooded with images.”
— The Nation
“Egan’s take…is surreal and profoundly ironic and exaggerated, but it still rings true….Beneath it all, she finds characters worth saving.”
— Hartford Courant
“Breathtaking….combines the tautness of a good mystery with the measured, exquisitely articulated detail and emotional landscape of the most literary of narratives….. Sure to leave readers thinking about these very real characters for some time to come.”
–BookPage
“An imaginative, well-paced read with serious questions about the elusiveness of meaning inside the gilded cage. Egan has intelligence to burn but plenty of feeling too.”
— People
“Part mystery, part cultural critique, [Look at Me] masterfully entwines the novel’s secondary characters, building to a conclusion that is unexpected and disturbing, and making an incisive statement about our society’s obsession with fame and glamour.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“Riveting….As the book gains momentum, Egan’s writing is both fluid and driven, with wonderful slashes of satire….A remarkable study of our culture (where we all seem to be wearing masks) and of our palpable need to be known.”
— O: The Oprah Magazine
“Egan has created a compelling world….With [her] graceful prose and vivid characterizations, she navigates her plot lines’ churning waters with admirable skill.”
— Seattle Weekly
“[A] scintillating inquiry into the complex and profound dynamics of perception. Egan…animates a superb cast of intriguing and unpredictable characters, and tells an elegantly structured, emotionally arresting and slyly suspenseful story.”
— Newsday
“Dark, hugely ambitious….As riveting as a roadside wreck — and noxiously, scathingly funny.”
— Elle
“Intelligent and refreshingly dark, Egan’s eerie tale has the same mesmerizing pull as the culture it skewers.”
— Us Weekly
“Fresh, accurate, clear and inventive….The vocabulary, the crisp, graceful sentences, the intelligence of tone, all suggest that behind the narrative is a consciousness, and behind the consciousness a writer who knows what she’s doing.”
— Francine Prose, The New York Observer
“This masterfully plotted work bears the stamp of a perceptive — if not clairvoyant — writer whose disturbing vision…rings all too true.”
— SF Weekly
“If there were justice in the world, no one would be allowed to write a first novel of such beauty and accomplishment.”
— Pat Conroy
“Wonderful….words glide through her fingers and enter the pores like cool San Francisco fog”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Mesmerizing….told with great assurance and power….Ms. Egan portrays the sisters with a quiet, heartbreaking clarity.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant in its authenticity and overwhelming passion.”
— Boston Globe Book Review
“A trip that takes the reader through stunning emotional terrain.”
— The New Yorker
“Evocative….an auspicious first novel for a very promising writer.”
— The Washington Post Book World
“A lustrous, intelligent novel that ultimately is less about an era than about timeless human yearnings.”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Wonderful….a triumph….told beautifully and energetically….by a writer who dances right along the scary edges of the material without ever losing control of it.”
— The Boston Sunday Globe
“Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus is a real page-turner. Dramatic, suspenseful and beautifully written, it is also a thoughtful evocation of the world fo 1960’s European radicals, featuring some memorable characters of the past and present.”
— Robert Stone
“Elegant and brilliant….spellbinding, heartbreaking, and told by a master.”
— Cosmopolitan