“This is a powerful, funny and sometimes immensely beautiful novel, with a female lead whose life is a low-key renunciation of the violence that shook her city for a generation.” - Star Tribune (Minneapolis) You just have to turn your face toward it, and give it your full attention.” - Slate For all the darkness of the world it illuminates, Milkman is as strange and variegated and brilliant as a northern sunset. There is a pulsating menace at the heart of the book, of which the title character is an uncannily indeterminate avatar, but also a deep sadness at the human cost of conflict.

Among Burns’ singular strengths as a writer is her ability to address the topics of trauma and tyranny with a playfulness that somehow never diminishes the sense of her absolute seriousness. “ Milkman is a richly complex portrayal of a besieged community and its traumatized citizens, of lives lived within many concentric circles of oppression. On that, too, perhaps especially so, Milkman is a triumph of resistance.” -Th e Boston Globe To plunge headlong into this voice now feels like a necessary reminder that one of the most complex and difficult emotions to put in a novel of darkness is joy. This book is also bursting with energy, with tiny apertures of kindness, and a youthful kind of joy. “Few works of fiction see as clearly as this one how violence deforms social networks, enhancing, people’s worst instincts. She is a modern heroine.” - Los Angeles Times It is a deeply feminist work, a compelling and significant look at how the regular life of a young woman is intimately used for personal and political gain.

“ Milkman is a deft and triumphant work of considerable intelligence and importance. Milkman makes a passionate claim for freethinking in a place where monochromatic, us-versus-them ideology prevails.” - USA Today “ style powerfully evokes the narrator’s sense of emotional entrapment. “ Milkman is a strange animal it asks a lot, but gives something back, too: the electric jolt of a voice that feels utterly, sensationally new.” - Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A–) It’s as though the intense pressure of this place has compressed the elements of comedy and horror to produce some new alloy.” - The Washington Post “ Milkman vibrates with the anxieties of our own era, from terrorism to sexual harassment to the blinding divisions that make reconciliation feel impossible. At its core, Milkman is wildly good and true novel of how living in fear limits people.” -NPR.org For a novel about life under multifarious forms of totalitarian control-political, gendered, sectarian, communal- Milkman can be charmingly wry.” -The New Yorker “ seeth with black humor and adolescent anger at the adult world and its brutal absurdities.

The milkman book review