"I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad..."

The Countess and Excelsior take Pip in after he's been beaten senseless, a state Youmans describes in ways that force contagion. Pip's is a harrowing delirium, much like his migraine auras, both of which we're made to feel and reel from. I have not read another writer who so perfectly captures in words the scary wiles of brain activity suddenly gone awry. Youmans speaks into experience that unspeakable disequilibrium.  --from Linda McCullough Moore's review 

Last North Carolina reading from A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage: Saturday, May 26th at 11:00 a.m., McIntyre's (Fearrington Village / Pittsboro.)

Lovely Books and Culture review

A long and magnificent review of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage by writer Linda McCullough Moore at Books and Culture, edited by that great bookman, John Wilson.

A taste: Which brings us—not before time—to Marly Youmans, whose new novel A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is literary fiction at its finest. (Tell me you didn't see that coming.) Here is fiction which required the writer to reinvent language, engage magic and mystery with every commonplace of living, explore the whys and wherefores of human understanding, and enlarge the boundaries of what it's good to think about and know. Here is fiction which requires the reader to take it slow, to savor, bask and meditate, to revel, and to laugh aloud and cry. Another:  But what Pip does with all his might-have-beens and what he does with what-just-is is lovely to behold. What Youmans does with only words is beautiful to see.