Praise for I Know You Love Me, Too

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Enhanced with inventive observations--success "arrived too late and she doesn't know how to care for it"; "Ingrid channels her obese aunt, her succulent swirls of fat"; "she's run out of things to say. She blames this on contentment"--Neswald effortlessly alchemizes the prosaic into something extraordinary. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon and Shelf Awareness (starred review)

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In her debut novel-in-stories, I Know You Love Me, Too, Amy Neswald threads the relationship between two sisters through fourteen linked stories to create a genre-bending experience. The half sisters, eight years apart in age, must figure out who and what they are to each other after the unexpected death of their father, the only person intent on linking them together. Haunting in both its language and images, the novel is quiet but intense. -- Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews

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In I Know You Love Me, Too Amy Neswald weaves a rich tapestry of places and people, old times and new, from the ramble of Central Park to the Rain Forests of Peru.  In these pages birds sing, and children grow, and marriages falter, and fat snakes lurk in trees.  Life’s an adventure, harrowing even in the daily, and so many ways to turn the gem: Ingrid lives, and Ingrid dies.  You have an aunt, and then you don’t.  There is poetry in these sentences, and joy in these voices.  I didn’t want to turn the last page, but the last page turned me: I Know You Love Me, Too is a trip both inward and out.   --Bill Roorbach, author of Lucky Turtle, Life Among Giants, and The Remedy For Love

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The fourteen stories in Amy Neswald’s I Know You Love Me, Too twist around one another beguilingly, equal parts trauma, heartache, and true love. In stories that range from 9/11 New York, to a spiritual healing trip in the Amazon, to a whale-watching trip in Iceland, images flicker like fireworks. At the heart of this novel-in-stories is the relationship between two sisters. Kate and Ingrid enact old battles for the love of their father, dead long ago. Characters are scarred and beautiful, loving too much or not enough; as one of them says, “Love is like that; it’s hard to get the measurements just right.” In this promising debut collection, Neswald gets the measurements just right. The stories are chain letters promising not fortune, but love. Pass them on. -- Patricia O’Donnell, author of Vigilance of Stars

 

Amy Neswald's stories are the creations of a storytelling Hippocrates: these are the very, very rare sort of super-artful fictions that reveal...and also heal. Vulnerability, pain, beauty that makes you cry- the author doesn't merely hypnotize, she shows us the way Home. A magnificent debut. -- Tom Paine, author of Scar Vegas and A Boy’s Book of Nervous Breakdowns

 

Amy Neswald writes with ferocious honesty about the bonds between us and the secrets we all keep. I love a book that delivers sentence by sentence, story by story, and I Know You Love Me, Too is that kind of collection. It transports with lushness and brilliance. -- Lewis Robinson, Water Dogs

 

"Amy Neswald’s story collection seem to be more than a novel. It is a full-fledged portrait, told in miniature and broad strokes, and somehow simultaneously.  She’s not only created indelible characters, it feels as though she’s created a new form. As a writer, especially when working through, in and around the bedlam of the past year, I drew real purpose from Amy’s characters as they “revive their paints,” as Tom Stoppard once wrote. The spiritual connection I feel with Amy’s characters has revived my paints.  And that's a feeling I heartily recommend.” -- Rick Elice, Tony Award winning playwright of Jersey Boys