Gorgeous reviews for BODY LANGUAGE in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times!

“One of the great pleasures of reading contemporary writers is watching them evolve in real time. Howrey’s 2022 novel “They’re Going to Love You” is a feat of emotional development and plotting, and contains some of the most exquisite writing about ballet and devoting a life to art that I’ve encountered. Here, Howrey is in a different mode. Like Nanette, who is drawn to God, she’s practicing a brand of “discernment” — the act of listening closely to a higher power and understanding her calling.

I can’t pretend to know about Howrey’s relationship to menopause, sisterhood or assisted suicide. But however she arrived at these topics, she has tapped a vein of life’s messy, heartbreaking and hilarious moments. “Body Language” is full of verve, even when capturing the final bookend of a life. What other novel could put a nun on her hands and knees, helping her mother search for something she’s lost? “I think it’s a gun,” Barbara tells Nanette. I doubt even Chekhov could engineer a scene as satisfying or as poignant.”

—Joumana Khatib, New York Times Book Review

“There are novels about the ties that bind wildly disparate sisters (“Little Women” comes to mind) and novels about women contemplating suicide (Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”) and novels about grown daughters making pilgrimages to their aged mothers (“Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett). There’s the novel adapted into a movie, “Still Alice,” about a female Alzheimer’s sufferer contemplating suicide, and there are novels that use humor to satirize dead-serious social issues (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Catch-22,” “James” by Percival Everett).

What Howrey delivers with “Body Language” is a novel that covers all that ground while keeping the reader on the edge of their seat, alternately howling with laughter, holding their breath awaiting resolution, and weeping. We can only hope that the way she did this book, with her finger on the pulse of all that moves us, is the way she’ll do the next one.”

—Meredith Maran, Los Angeles Times