Zambreno’s writing is sharpest, most emotionally alive, when it drills into that interior landscape.

Zambreno offers a catalogue of these kernels, these moments of beauty and flashes of joy. There are things here, she suggests, worth grieving. There are things here worth saving..

As a book that dwells with children in a way that is almost always compassionate and never condescending, The Light Room returns readers to a kindergarten of the senses—to the basic contours of time, the colors of home and public space—and unravels the relationship between labor and the obscurely fascinating objects it produces, around which life, work, and family subsequently orbit.

The Light Room offers readers who are new to Zambreno a perfect entry point into the patterns of thinking and writing that her work is known for.

Zambreno’s book gathers a series of diary-esque recordings. Straddling two years, her baseline subject matter is domestic, replete with the quotidian sensations, colors, and textures of cramped pandemic life. Expansion occurs through Zambreno’s wide-ranging and deeply felt artistic preoccupations.

Zambreno... brings an erudite perspective to the challenges of motherhood during the pandemic.

Zambreno... lays bare her feelings of near-constant fatigue, effectively contrasting darkness and light, frustration and pure happiness.

Though Zambreno’s repeated complaints about nursing, sleep deprivation, and a problematic radiator may prove tedious even to empathetic readers, her frustration is relatable.

...a somber, intellectual gut punch.