“A stunning first novel.”
—Mindi Dickstein, St. Petersburg Times
“Subtly, cunningly, with a perfect instinct for the implicating detail, Mary-Beth Hughes has graphed the contours of the self-sabotaging human heart. Wavemaker II flashes forward relentlessly, every page peeling back further the mask of public power to expose the private corruptions of love. More a detonation than a debut.”
—Sven Birkerts
“[Wavemaker II] is so ridiculously good that I’m sure to exhaust my supply of adjectives before I come close to expressing my admiration for it.… There is much to praise about Wavemaker II: its lovely spare prose, perfect pacing, details sharp and lethal as ice picks, and a handful of terrifying scenes into which Hughes writes so fearlessly that readers will be left wrung and stricken. Finally, though, what sets the novel apart is a raw power, an unselfconscious intensity and elegance, a rare breadth and depth of vision … sounds like genius to me.”
—Darcy Cosper, Bookforum
“With insight and compassion, Hughes lays bare the Clemenses’ intricate dramas.… [An] artful first novel.”
—Lisa Shea, O Magazine
“In her admirable debut novel, Wavemaker II, Mary-Beth Hughes stitches together a complex story of an unraveling family.… While the story line is full of daring shifts in point of view and authentic historical details, what holds the work together is the essential authority and music of the narrative voice.… It’s a grim and yet lyrically vivid period in this young family’s life, when nothing is going right, when the world is in league against them, and Hughes captures this with a wondrous array of sensual detail and a keen eye for the telling gestures and the crystallized perception.”
—Fred Leebron, Ploughshares
“Highly original … [A] lyrical, poignant debut … in succinct, clipped sentences, Hughes relays intricate, heart-wrenching details … moving and vital.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This first novel offers rich, nuanced characterizations ripe for book club discussion. Dozens of memorable scenes showcase Hughes’ eye for penetrating detail.… Highly recommended for all fiction collections.”
—Christine Perkins, Library Journal (starred review)
“In this glorious book about a glamorous, doomed family, Mary-Beth Hughes has taken a small, intricately knotted story from American history and unraveled it into a compelling narrative about the healing power of illness and the transcendence of the human spirit.… Hughes creates vivid scenes right from the heart.”
—Susan Cheever
“It takes a deft and sensitive writer to fill out the reality of such a story without being hobbled by the trueness of the characters and circumstances.… This novel evokes what a factual account of a life cannot bring us—the true beauty of human conflict, its tensions and releases, sensory assaults and pleasures, and the unconscious awkwardness and grace of it. For Mary-Beth Hughes, this is a truly impressive debut.”
—Sarah Goodrum, Bookpage
“I found it impossible to turn a page without being moved by this gorgeously written and deeply felt story of one father’s public act and its devastating personal ramifications. Wavemaker II’s complex message and its depiction of Roy Cohn are especially important now, when America is once again forced to make gordian decisions about her civil liberties.”
—Sheri Holman
“Wavemaker II comes out of a time when America was in one of its troubled childhoods, the years following Korea and preceding the hippies, when so many of us alive today were born, years which in retrospect appear almost to have been made up of the stuff of this novel: cocktails, big spending, surprising sex, weird politics. This is a book full of that special brand of American hopefulness and optimism that ran people ragged. Mary-Beth Hughes has given us a novel that is mysterious, intelligent, elegant.”
—Donald Antrim