Two blog posts on Filter House:
Tricia Sullivan reviews the collection at length here. She concludes:
Shawl is a poet, and not in a flashy, 'look at my language' sort of way. Always grounded in vivid sensory truth, her writing is damned good without ever making a big deal about itself.... The author's examination of the not-obvious angles to a concept imbues the mundane with a significance that becomes apparent in sneaky increments. Ideas creep in quietly and go to work. In the end, I suspect it is this ability to osmose their meaning across the border between external and internal that makes the stories in Filter House exceptional. I can't wait to see what Nisi Shawl does next; I'd follow her writing anywhere.
Rich Horton, briefly blogging at The Elephant Forgets, characterizes Filter House as "worth your time." He particularly likes "Deep End," which he describes as "about a prison ship heading to a new world, and a revelation about the nature of the bodies the prisoners occupy that seemed creepy and also powerfully a comment on colonialism."
And Sean Melican reviews Blood in the Fruit and Stretto, Books 4 and 5 of the Marq'sssan Cycle. He concludes:
It is this awareness of the varying reactions (and not just a simplistic dichotomy) to such radical change—from government to anarchy (keeping in mind this is not synonymous with chaos, but
merely the complete lack of government agency and agencies) that imbues the series with such power. Characters are not merely mouthpieces, but are fully fleshed out and more importantly, their arguments are fully fleshed out. Duchamp does not use straw men and women. She challenges her own thoughts and assumptions. Her novels are the strongest utopias written to date.
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