A Separate Peace Book Reviews Novels & Stories

The castle was eerily quiet, the sounds of my footsteps and the pounding of my heart heavy in my ears. The heavy wooden door creaked when I pushed it open. I inhaled the smell of books, a smile tugging at my face. Climbing the ladder resting against the top bookshelf, I placed the book he ordered into a space on the top, and scanned the row. I could have spent hours in that library, but I knew Zander would be up soon. Snagging an old copy of A Separate Peace, I hurried down each rung, and turned toward the door.

The reviews began arriving on Thursday. Patricia Osei had told me to read them but not to organize my understanding of the book around them because the book had been written for the women in the long middle and the women in the long middle were not the reviewers. The reviewers were the first room the book passed through on its way to the people it was for. The first review I read was from a literary publication that described the book as unflinching and specific and written with the particular authority of someone who had lived inside the thing she was describing rather than observing it from outside.

They did not change Don. Most were positive. Three were very positive—the reviewers who had understood the argument and engaged with it seriously, who had written about the book as a book rather than as an occasion for their own tangential thinking. One of these was in a major literary publication, the review that would matter most to the publisher, the review that would be quoted in the advertisements and printed on the paperback edition. The reviewer had written: "The Inside Account achieves what the best books of its kind achieve: it changes the way you see the thing it describes. After reading Don's argument about the reciprocal account between person and place, you will never again thin