Last of Her Kind

The best novel I've read in 2007. Style, story, depth, character development, texture, humor and voice, all just great. I recommend this book for anyone who has lived those times or wants to get a personal feel what the 60's/70's were all about. Ms. Nunez has the gift of making the reader feel like it's just you and her in the room, and nothing else matters. I finished it in two days and immediately loaned it out to my circle.

I think this must be one of the best novels of 2006--I simply can't believe I haven't read any of Nunez's earlier ones, I'm completely blown away by this subtle & wonderfully compelling novel. It has a sharp interest in morality and ideas that I miss in a lot of contemporary literary fiction; the characters are remarkably well drawn, and the prose exceptional. It brought to mind some of my favorite novelists--Joyce Carol Oates, Rebecca West--while being also very much distinctively like no other novel I've read. Highly recommended.

Stylistically written very much in the vein of Philip Roth's great American novels of the 1990s, but importantly diverging from them in content because this is America from a woman's point of view, Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind connects the large events of our lives with the small and renders the decade of the 1960s with unprecedented wisdom and truth. If you are looking for a TV-type docudrama, this isn't the book for you. If, however, you wish to understand a time that has been sensationalized and often misrepresented-and is here depicted in a way that is closer to how one's own individual consciousness processes and remembers experience--you are in for a powerful ride. Nunez, one of our most innovative and humane writers, has tackled the world in this book: Watch out Franzen, Lethem, et al., there's a girl on the block.

I've read two of Nunez's other novels: MITZ, a biography of a marmoset, written in childlike gleaming prose, and FOR ROUENNA, mixing the genres of autobiography and fiction, and telling the story of two women, a novelist and an ex-Vietnam nurse, both raised in the Staten Island projects, as Nunez was. I praise the imagination that could create two such different narratives. And now we have THE LAST OF HER KIND, which continues to draw on the 60's with quiet sorrow. I think Nunez mourns the past and desires to preserve and understand its visceral energy. We need more women to write about wartime.