Wonder Valley (Pochoda) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A dizzying, kaleidoscopic thriller that refuses to let readers look away from the dark side of Southern California.… Impossible to put down.… It’s the memorable characters and beautiful prose that make the novel so successful.… Unexpected and pitch-perfect.
Michael Schaub - Los Angeles Times


Enthralling.… A compassionate look at the displaced that treats each with respect and humanity.
Associated Press Staff


Incandescent.… Pochoda keeps you guessing while bringing these lost souls wonderfully, intensely alive.
People


Audacious.… Each character is realized with vivid empathy.… A richly Californian novel, drenched in enough sunlight to illuminate the harshest of truths.
Entertainment Weekly


[A]live with empathy for the dispossessed and detailed descriptions of the California landscape…. But as sympathetic as the characters are, their stories fail to come together as a dramatic whole.
Publishers Weekly


Despite the initial confusion… vivid and sympathetic. Each of the main characters does achieve some sort of peace or resolution by the dark and often violent book's end. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal


Ambitious, absorbing.… Pochoda paints southern California with a vibrant brush, rendering an evocative landscape on which her desperate characters seek out redemption and rejuvenation.
Booklist


(Starred review.) The gritty lives of Southern California drifters are entwined first by circumstance, then by love and revenge.… Absorbing, finely detailed, nasty California noir.
Kirkus Reviews