Reviews
“The wayward heroine of Hannah Tennant-Moore’s Wreck and Order…speaks to 20-something motivations—“lust, rage, lust, rage”—with outspoken feminism and rueful honesty.”
—Vogue
“[A] no-holds-barred account of a young female body and what it feels, what it likes to feel, and what it doesn’t. It is refreshing to be in the company of a woman who is comfortable with her own sexuality.”
–Los Angeles Review of Books
“Tennant-Moore is too savvy to give in to the empty platitudes of the spiritual journey genre. Instead, she presents a raw and honest exploration of a complicated woman whose suffering is uniquely of her own making—and challenges her readers to honestly confront their own preferred brand of suffering.”
–Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
“Dark, incisive.”
–The New York Times
“Badass.”
–Refinery 29
“The novel’s forthright candor about sexuality can’t be separated from its equally direct approach to contemporary politics. … Elsie’s sinuous, ever-surprising thoughts wind over and over again into paragraph-long arabesques, and the effect is near hypnotic.”
–Santa Barbara Independent
“Seeking a change in her life, Elsie backpacks around Sri Lanka, but Tennant-Moore is far too sophisticated and nuanced a writer to allow Elsie to be miraculously healed by the mysterious East. Instead, Tennant-Moore provides no easy answers, deftly illustrating Elsie’s inner monologue as she tries to face up to herself and the people around her…Many young women will keep [Wreck and Order] stacked on their bookshelf next to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick.”
–Publishers Weekly
“An often entertaining and thought-provoking debut…leaves the reader ready to hear more from Tennant-Moore and her distinctive voice.”
–USA Today
“Tennant-Moore—in this antidote to Fifty Shades of Grey, Hollywood’s beloved simultaneous orgasm, and those personal narratives that treat feminine sexuality like some exotic beast—has managed to do a difficult thing: write frankly about female desire, and unfussily capture the emotional and visceral confusion of pleasure being contingent upon another human.”
–Elle
“Sometimes you have to tear it all down to really start over—at least, that’s the case for the protagonist of Tennant-Moore’s boundary-pushing debut novel, which finds its somewhat self-destructive heroine on a journey that could be read as the darker side of Eat, Pray, Love. ”
–BookPage
“There’s a little bit of Elsie in all of us, and with all of Tennant-Moore’s acute observations, you’ll find every bit of this book intensely satisfying.”
–Bustle
“Tennant-Moore gives us an unnerving portrait of a woman embracing sex-positive culture only to be subjected to the inequalities and inherent sexism within it…There is an urgency to Tennant-Moore’s writing that kept me turning the pages. Her ability to write one quotable sentence after another astounded me.”
–Genevieve Hudson, The Rumpus
“Although Elsie makes rash decisions, her thoughts about intimacy and desire are searching and considered, and Tennant-Moore depicts even her most startling fantasies with analytical froideur.”
–The New Yorker
“Instead of attending college, [Elsie] journeys to Paris and Sri Lanka to create her own form of education, where she meets an assortment of characters who teach, mold and challenge her to examine her own choices and actions head on.”
–Harper’s Bazaar
“The prose is strong, with threads of melancholic wit and clarity. Tennant-Moore can craft a sentence that explores all the hatched ironies and contradictions within a moment in a life.”
–Fiction Advocate
“The novel stands out not only for its emotional precision, but for its incredible attention to the visceral realities of having a body…. A quietly intoxicating novel that resists easy answers.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Interviews
FROM SALON:
“Millenials, Money, and Monogamy”
FROM GRUBSTREET:
“Pretty Sentences Should Add Up To Something: An Interview with Hannah Tennant-Moore”
Read the Interview on GrubStreet.org
FROM THE LIT UP SHOW WITH ANGELA LEDGERWOOD
Episode 44: Hannah Tennant-Moore on Lust, Rage, and Finding Buddhism
CONVERSATION WITH JAMES WOOD AT HARVARD BOOKSTORE
Hannah Tennant-Moore reads her new book at the Harvard Bookstore. Discussion with James Wood