“Strange and delightful . . . The past half-decade has seen a spike in oddball novels about brainy women in various states of crisis; think of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, or Halle Butler's The New Me, or Danzy Senna's New People. These three novels succeed, in part, because their prose and protagonists are leached of joy. Dinerstein Knight inverts that strategy. She shoves joy at Nell, and makes Nell greedy for it . . . How could a reader — or a botany professor — not be charmed?”
—NPR
“Swift-moving, sardonic . . . Dinerstein Knight paints a withering portrait of this web of toxic romances, and of the excesses of academia, while illustrating how both the heart and the mind can be broken and reshaped by changing circumstances.”
—The New Yorker
“As precise as any scientific observation and far more tantalizing.”
—Vogue
“Delightful…a macabre premise executed with absurdist panache.”
—Vanity Fair (a Best Book of 2020)
“A sophisticated, surprising take on the campus novel (with a welcome dose of witchery). Knight's writing feels a little wild and charged, as if you're constantly on the edge of discovering something new.”
—Goop
“The novel is a delightfully odd pastiche of courtly love . . . There’s a rhythmic mannerism to the novel that hypnotises even as it bewilders . . . Hex is confessional and confounding; sometimes, plain weird. But, with its dark humour and loopy lyricism, it bewitches.”
—Francesca Carington, The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
“Contained and bewitching, HEX is a love letter, a diary, a scientific study of relationships and desire. . . . There’s a lush darkness here, and [Knight's] tight, poetic language bolsters the novel’s intellectual New York hipster cool to become something more verdant, more unexpected. . . . Tender and enchanting.”
—Russell Janzen, Jewish Book Council
“The working minds of Knight’s characters are simultaneously so precise that they feel scientific and so familiar to one’s own life experience that they feel magical…astoundingly and delightfully perceptive . . . she reveals the complex truths of this story deftly and easily.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“[An] arresting novel of obsession. . . . Nell’s intensity and the hypnotic, second-person prose convincingly render the protagonist’s bewitched, self-destructive state. Readers who liked I Love Dick and want something more lurid will appreciate this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Knight writes in a distinctive, addictive, and poetic style in which every sentence provokes and nothing is predictable.”
—Booklist
“Propulsive . . . This is a bold and highly charged book that makes entertainment seem like not such a bad word.”
—John Freeman, Lit Hub
“Dark, off-kilter and entirely beguiling.”
—Elizabeth Taylor, The National Book Review
"Nell, our heroine, is equipped with a unique skill set: an incredibly biting and satirical sense of humor, a profound psychological acuity, and enough self-loathing to make her utterly fascinating. The scrutiny within the laser-sharp focus of her gaze makes alive all the other life forms in this story—plants, animals, people, dirt. The overlap in all the varieties of love and pain—felt, given, shared, afflicted, scorned—mingle within this group of six making this novel a most brilliant conjuring."
—Lucy Kogler, Lit Hub
“Luminous, manic, clever . . . The real witchcraft of this book is in its prose.”
—Carson Beker, Lambda Literary
“In her brilliant second novel, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight cannily explores both the poisons and the antidotes of love, ambition, mentorship, and yearning, and she does it all in prose so lively that I often found myself laughing with pleasure. HEX is some dark and joyous witchery.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“The language of this novel is so finely tailored, so elegant yet organic, so absorbing that it takes the reader a moment to realize that this is not just a deliciously engaging tale of what it is like to be social and sexual, but that this writing is an actual incantation in itself. It is a beautiful, spooky spell that divides and processes our innate potential for poison or pleasure.”
—Jenny Slate, actress and author of Little Weirds
“HEX reads like a botanist’s cross-breeding of The Secret History and Department of Speculation, full of brilliant and bodily obsession. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is both a scientist and a magician, and she conjures this beautiful spell of a novel with total control.”
—Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers
“HEX is sexy, unhinged, revelatory, so smart it gives the reader whiplash. It works on you like the poisonous plants that wind through the story line, until you’re as obsessed and intoxicated as the vivid characters that make up this love hexagon gone fascinatingly and beautifully wrong. I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book or was so impressed by the wizardry of the language.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“HEX is a gem of a book: sharp and exquisite. Dinerstein Knight writes about women’s obsession with devastating wisdom, insight, and humor. It is pure pleasure to be under her spell.”
—Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things
“HEX offers pleasures on every page. It is wise, funny, suspenseful, and quite moving. Dinerstein Knight takes great care with every word.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Here I Am
“HEX is neon-bright and guided by a fierce, scintillating interest in the innermost chambers of the human heart, where melancholic and bright humors mingle together. In every line you hear the voice of a writer who knows how to lead you expertly into the place where the story is most alive: spooky, shifty, darkly funny, and delectable in every way.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“Offbeat yet entirely precise; original and universal. HEX is a nut with sweet meat and a poison shell, at once disarming and quietly devastating. This is a book for anyone who’s ever felt adrift, or felt alone, or loved someone out of reach, or all the above.”
—Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin