Summary and Reviews of Memorial by Bryan Washington

Media Reviews

NPR Readers who fell in love with Washington's perceptive writing haven't had to wait too long for his follow-up, Memorial, a novel that's also set in Houston. Here's some good news for the writer's admirers: Memorial isn't just every bit as brilliant as its predecessor. It's somehow even better...Just like Lot, Memorial is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.

Washington Post Memorial is a profoundly sensitive story about the rough boundaries of love in a multicultural society. In fact, no other novel I’ve read this year captures so gracefully the full palette of America. The range of cultures, races, generations and sexual identities contending with one another in these pages is not a woke argument; it’s the nature of modern family life fully realized.

New York Times In plain, confident prose, Washington deftly records the way the forces of loyalty pull the heartstrings in different directions. The tone and dialogue are cool, almost jaded, gesturing obliquely at the emotions roiling beneath the surface...At times I wished for an expository voice that would elevate all this muddle into something more polished, and therefore transcendent. But that is not what life is like, of course. There is only the muddle and what we make of it.

Booklist (starred review) This is a love story, writ large, that sings...Washington writes about race, class, family, love, and the idea of home with evocative nuance and phenomenal dialogue.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) There is passion in this novel—fight scenes, sex scenes, screaming matches, and tears—but it reaches a deep poetic realism when Washington explores the space between characters. When so much is left unsaid, that's when this novel speaks the loudest. A subtle and moving exploration of love, family, race, and the long, frustrating search for home.

Library Journal (starred review) Briskly and brightly told, this deeply affecting work is an astonishingly rendered novel of love in crisis. Highly recommended.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) Washington shows readers more of the unforgettable Houston he introduced in his stories, and comfortably expands his range into the setting of Osaka, applying nuance in equal measure to his characters and the places they're tied to.

 Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn Memorial is a true page-turner. I was entranced, picking this book up every chance I got. Bryan Washington is a great writer and I love the story he tells here. Intriguing. Each character stays with me.

 Jasmine Guillory, author of The Wedding Date and The Proposal I was entranced by this deeply original and wholly absorbing novel. Bryan Washington creates characters who are complex, interesting, and three dimensional, and made me care about every single one of them. This book made me think about the nature of love, and family, and anger, and grief, and love again.

 Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Memorial dares to insist on the mundane, thoroughly lived life as a site of perennial hope, joy, and abundance. It casts a fresh take on the American family that becomes truer because of its disparate origins, the queerness of its genesis, and the buoyed wonder it finds in surviving grief and loss towards the rare and forgiving ground of difficult, hard-won love. All of this done in sentences clean and clear as cut glass. This book, in what feels like a new vision for the 21st century novel, made me happy.

 Tommy Orange, author of There, There Bryan Washington's Memorial is stunning. Everything happening in this book is so intimate, sensual, and wise. It is a funny book with much sadness and love. It is a story about relationships, and family, and what it means to have and not have home, in Houston, Texas, and in Osaka, Japan. It is also a surprising page-turner. The scenes and characters here couldn't be more alive and vivid. I love this book.

Reader Reviews

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