Reviews of Mobility:

NPR Best Books of 2023
Time 100 Must-Read Books of 2023
Vulture Best Books of 2023
LitHub Best Books of 2023
Slate Best Books of 2023
Powell’s Best Books of 2023

The Atlantic
”Kiesling, however, has pulled off a rare feat: a deeply serious, deeply political novel that is, quite often, fun to read. It’s a coming-of-age story full of delicious detail, keen satire, and complex humanity. It’s informative without being didactic, thoughtfully confronting subjects such as climate change and American imperialism and gender inequality and white flight without taking itself too seriously. Kiesling is not in the business of preaching to the already converted—she’s here to hold up a mirror to her readers, and to make anyone who cracks this book open squirm a little.”

The Nation
”By embedding crucial context in naturalistic dialogue, Kiesling is able to establish the historical conjuncture in which her book is set without resorting to dull exposition. But this formal choice is more than just a canny bit of craft; it also hints at the novel’s true subject. Recognizing the epistemological impasse that Bunny runs up against in her quest to master the industry’s inner workings, Mobility is not really about oil qua oil, but the way it is narrativized—both for good and for ill.”

The Nation interview with Anna Kornbluh
”Mobility is pretty top of my list for the best books of 2023. What I like is that its way of engaging with the climate crisis is through historical fiction, not by conjuring a frightening future. It is also narrated in the third person, which helps not only to span historical time but as well to correlate interior to exterior, psyche to environment. And its themes concern not the cli-fi standards of human cruelty, but the powerful longing of a young girl to just be normal and how that scales up to the inertia and denialism of our oil oligarchs.”

The Washington Post
”Kiesling leaves readers with a troubling awareness of the role we play in our ecological future, and a bleak sense that the new normal is like the old one: simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming.”

The Millions
”As its polyvalent title suggests, Mobility is both a classically-proportioned novel of social climbing, as well as a harsh interrogation of the logic of our petroleum society. It’s a powerful work of “climate fiction” not because it liberates itself from the historical burdens of novel (per Ghosh), but because it burrows more fully into its own formal tradition and finds a way through. We are helped to do the same, even as we leave the book’s protagonist to endure the future she has made for herself.”

Chicago Tribune
”As with “The Golden State,” we are quickly invested in the fate of the central character, but what most moves me is Kiesling’s uncanny knack for freshly illuminating the aspects of living that most of us have deemed uninteresting. It is a marvel to find the sublime in the mundane, and Kiesling does this over and over again.”

Alta
”Which is not to say that Mobility throws up its hands in the face of moral quandary. Rather, it’s an urgent cri de coeur that asks us to consider what, if anything, we are willing to sacrifice to ensure the continued existence of a habitable world. Where does self-care end and stewardship of the future begin? Kiesling seems to ask. How much longer will we tolerate a plutocracy that we’ve thus far allowed to reign unimpeded? Mobility doesn’t have the answers; there might not be any answers. But it poses the questions in a haunting, and existentially terrifying, way.”

Grist
”The novel’s final feint raises a deep set of questions about how to depict climate change in fiction. After first posing as a novel of slow and delayed self-discovery, Mobility at the end almost seems to adopt the structure of classical tragedy, forcing Bunny to live in the world that her work for old Turnbridge’s oil company helped to create.”

Washington Independent Review of Books
”Kiesling and her editors clearly trust that the public still has an appetite for hefty, sometimes messy novels with large casts of diverse characters moving through the real world. In that regard, Mobility is for readers who yearn for E.M. Forster-esque literary fiction anchored in the here and now.”

The Window by Twilight Greenaway
”Do I think Kiesling is saying we’re all too preoccupied with shoes to start a climate revolution? Not exactly. But I do think with Mobility she offers readers a chance to reflect on how they perceive and judge one another and whether those patterns are preventing some of us from having a more radical, practical vision for change. It’s about what keeps us waiting around for hope to emerge while keeping our lives tidy and respectable, rather than summoning our courage. And it’s the opposite of freedom.”

BookPage
”Mobility is a forward-thinking book about old-fashioned themes of money, politics and family. And that’s no contradiction.”

Reviews of The Golden State:

The New Yorker:
"Kiesling repudiates the classic American literary idea of the West as untrammelled wilderness or open space available for the taking, and Daphne’s relative ease of movement in the present is set against her husband’s restricted mobility across international lines. The novel beautifully depicts the golden light of California, the smell of the fescue grasses, the thinness of the air, andthe way that Daphne and Honey often feel overwhelmed by the scale of the spaces they find themselves in. The result is less an untroubled analogy between the landscapes of motherhood and the American West than an invitation to think more deeply about how limited our canonical literary imaginings of each have been."  (Sarah Blackwood)

Bookforum:
"Situating motherhood prominently within a book that is as smart, as socially engaged, and as intellectually ambitious as this one is itself a consequential act, one that many of us are apt to applaud on its face, regardless of the book’s literary merits. But if we want to make a deep and long-lasting change to the status quo—expand the cultural consensus about what is important enough to merit serious literary treatment—it’s as important that Kiesling’s account of parenting a small child succeeds on purely aesthetic grounds. Which it does."  (Adelle Waldman)

The San Francisco Chronicle:
"Kiesling vividly renders the high desert town, its beauty and its starkness, its juniper-scented air and its neglect, the way it both centers and saps Daphne. Kiesling is also an astute cultural commentator, shedding light on our current political divide and university politics and Orientalism and the barbarism of America past and present while shedding light on parts of California often ignored by news and literature. She reminds us that the Golden State is more complexly storied than we often give it credit for; she also reminds us that for all its stretches of tedium and potential for heartbreak, the state of raising a young child can be pretty golden, too."  (Gayle Brandeis)

Slate:
"I do love commas. But commas divide meals into bites and hours into minutes, while baby care is a commaless stream of diapers jammies milk story teeth bed. While Daphne tends to Honey, she’s preoccupied by her bank account balance, Turkish grammar, the Islamophobia of the immigration system, the demographic and economic changes in the rural West that have fostered a secessionist movement, and when she can smoke her next cigarette. What Kiesling syntactically accomplishes is an exquisite look at the gulf between the narrow repetitive toil of motherhood and the sprawling intelligence of the mother that makes baby care so maddening."  (Heather Abel)

San Jose Mercury News:
"The overwhelming love and loathsome, crushing boredom of mothering a young child arrive in profound, convincing and equal measure . . . The Golden State not only puts fathomless familial love on display, but also unleashes the power of fiction to provoke empathy, shame, fear, imagination, memories, despair and joy."  (Lou Fancher)

The Wall Street Journal:
"The depictions are remarkably faithful, like a trompe l’oeil painting of a single parent’s mental state."  (Sam Sacks)

Publisher's Weekly (starred review):
"Kiesling’s intimate, culturally perceptive debut portrays a frazzled mother and a fractious America, both verging on meltdown."

Kirkus:
"Kiesling is a talented author...with a unique voice. She’s very smart, very funny, and wonderfully empathetic."

Booklist:
"Lydia Kiesling’s first novel encapsulates the intense and often conflicting feelings of early parenthood: frustration, tenderness, isolation. By playing with punctuation and sentence structure, Kiesling immerses the reader in the fragile headspace of the anxious new mother. With a style reminiscent of Claire Vaye Watkins and Sarah Stonich, The Golden State sparks the lovely, lonely feelings inside us all”

Library Journal (starred review):
"First novelist Kiesling nails the particular travails of new mothers, puts a human face on immigration issues, and adds some contemporary political commentary . . . There's so much to love about this novel . . . Strongly recommended for readers who enjoy contemporary literary fiction and can handle a few swear words."