Reviews

 

“Rosner beautifully bridges past and present in the dynamism of her historical depictions, capturing the dangers and excitement of invention, the complex play between generations of America’s immigrant populations and its native peoples, the wonder of young love, and the insatiable spark of curiosity that is a calling card of scientific inquiry, and a hallmark of the human heart.” —Elle Magazine

“Through layers of time ‘sticky like amber,’ Rosner etches images of family, community and the electric power of love.” —BBC.com

“Rosner’s most ambitious and successful work yet…. The rise and fall of Schenectady is the ticking clock that keeps time in “Electric City.” In alternating chapters, the novel moves forward and backward over 50 years, the interplay of “Electric City’s” past and present, forebears and descendants, mirroring the dance of invention and tradition, industry and decline, progress and history.” —Chicago Tribune

“The confluences here … are not only of the rivers but of tragedies and personal histories, of cultures and of what we leave behind and what we face.  The novel beautifully explores the ways we attach ourselves to a place, the ways we might escape it, and how these things, like the Hudson River, often flow both ways.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Rosner… skillfully captures the city’s conflicts between science and nature, history and progress.  From immigrant experience to coming-of-age story, “Electric City” is a luminous tale.” —San Jose Mercury News

“A deeply evocative paean to the wonders of science, the perils of technology, and the sacrifices of people in thrall to its power.” —Booklist

“With deft descriptions, Rosner sketches the bustling city, on land long cherished by aboriginal culture, which grew and flourished as whites invaded and industrialized…offers a gentle meditation on love and loss.” —Kirkus

“This beautiful book joins the compression, vivid intensity, and imaginative connectivity of poetry to the deep character work of the novel. Rosner handles with effortless assurance both the small, intimate stories and the great impersonal worlds of science, nature, and history that combine to make us who we are.” — Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award

“A heady mix of world-changing history (Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz) coupled against a bewitching love triangle ignites Rosner’s gorgeously written exploration of the way inventions transform cities, hearts, and lives, sometimes with a terrible cost, and the way light nudges inroads in the darkness. Electrifyingly original.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You

“Reminiscent of In the Skin of a Lion and set in a 1960s New York manufacturing town once founded by Thomas Edison, Electric City is a love story made incandescent by Rosner’s prose. The triangle she creates between Sophie Levine and her two admirers is as tangled, tragic, and beautiful as the history of their fundamentally American city.” —Maria Hummel, author of Motherland

Electric City is the gripping narrative of an ever-changing America seen through the prism of one town caught between the past and the future, and the tangled tragic love triangle set within it. Compelling, beautiful, important, and timeless, Electric City is as much a thoughtful look at our changing past as it is a metaphor for the present. Elizabeth Rosner is a bright literary light.” —Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers

“At the heart of this gripping novel is the brilliant mathematician Charles Proteus Steinmetz, whose ability to capture lightning in a bottle electrifies a city and animates the lives of friends and strangers.  Rosner achieves something just as powerful and thrilling in this marvelous book.” –Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier