The Wonder Spot

Praise

“What Austen did for marriage, Melissa Bank does for serial monogamy . . . She has a light touch that is both deft and devastating – her characters come to life in a brush stroke and yet are not easily dismissed from memory.  This book is a lovely, funny, melancholy stroll through twenty years of a woman’s life – and when I finished it, I wished I was getting twenty more.”
—Zadie Smith

“The tone [of The Wonder Spot] is perfect, the stories are perfect, the characters are perfect and every word, seemingly so casually chosen, is perfect . . . Bank is incredibly clever with structure . . . As a lesson in literary compression, how to condense a story without sacrificing emotion, it is breathtaking.”
—The Guardian

“Marvelous . . . Bank’s sharp wit and streamlined prose serve Sophie’s exquisitely honed female sensibility, placing the author squarely in the tradition of Clare Booth Luce and Nora Ephron.  Like them, Bank possesses a prodigious talent for snappy one liners, and her self-deprecating anecdotes belie intelligence and sophistication.”
—The Washington Post

“Prodigiously talented, mordantly wry and wise, Bank offers […] irresistible reading.” 
—San Francisco Chronicle

“There’s a warmth and a winning lack of pretension in Bank’s writing.”
—The New Yorker

“A five course meal:  loaded with pleasure, but offering enough protein and complex carbohydrates to satisfy both body and soul . . . Bank mixes sadness with humor while leavening difficulty with laughter to create a rich narrative that gratifies on many levels.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Bank’s  bittersweet, tremendously winning return [is] . . . enthralling and engaging.”
—Jennifer Weiner, Entertainment Weekly

“Compelling . . . [Bank’s] prose is always bright and funny, and it’s filled with perfectly concise descriptions.”
—The AV Club