Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Tokarczuk) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A marvelously weird and fablelike mystery.… Tokarczuk masters… pacing and suspense. But even as Tokarczuk sticks landing after landing,… this book is not a mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy tale about life and death that’s been trying to spill its secrets. Secrets that, if you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you knew in your bones all along.
New York Times Book Review


While it adopts the straightforward structure of a murder mystery, [the book features] macabre humor and morbid philosophical interludes [that] are distinctive to its author… [and an] excellent payoff at the finale.… As for Ms. Tokarczuk, there’s no doubt: She’s a gifted, original writer, and the appearance of her novels in English is a welcome development.
Wall Street Journal


Sometimes the opening sentence of a first-person narrative can so vividly capture the personality of its speaker that you immediately want to spend all the time you can in their company. That’s the case with… Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead…,  [a] barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be.
Boston Globe


A brilliant literary murder mystery.
Chicago Tribune


Bewitching…. Serious crosscurrents… explore everything from animal rights to predetermination to the way society stigmatizes and marginalizes those it considers mad, strange or simply different.… Tokarczuk is capable of miracles and ensures that this extraordinary novel soars.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.
New Yorker


A winding, imaginative, genre-defying story. Part murder mystery, part fairy tale, Drive Your Plow is a thrilling philosophical examination of the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others.
Time


(Starred review) [A]n astounding mystical detective novel.… Tokarczuk’s novel succeeds as both a suspenseful murder mystery and a powerful and profound meditation on human existence and how a life fits into the world around it. Novels this thrilling don’t come along very often.
Publishers Weekly


More than an offbeat and dark detective work,…Tokarczuk combines ecological and social issues with disturbing images and great characterizations. Fans… will likely be caught off guard when the surprise identity of the murderer is ultimately exposed. —Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH
Library Journal


[C]aptivating…. Mythical and distinctive, Tokarczuk’s translated novel erupts off the page, artfully telling a linear tale while also weaving in the metaphysical, multilayered nuances of Janina’s life.
Booklist


(Starred review) Tokarczuk's novel is a riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable—and just right. Tokarczuk's mercurial prose seems capable of just about anything..
Kirkus Reviews