“Raw and gritty and real… Part of Wolf Bells’ allure lies in that it is implicitly political and socially aware without being polemical and trite. Wolf Bells is as radical as the society-shifting housing practices it explores—completely unflinching in its boldness and bravery.”
— Everybody’s Reviewing

“From the first sentence, you know you’re in the hands of a novelist with the ear of a very good poet… A delight to read. It stands out as a book that features the interior voices of children, middle-aged women, and an elderly woman with equal verve… A tender and well-told story about the meaning of family.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Wolf Bells is an urgent novel about protecting the vulnerable... It’s about people we’re already so adept at ignoring. But that’s just another reason to lean in... Zumas’s compassion shines through... Carefully crafted [white spaces] convey great expanses of missed opportunity, unhealed grief, open longing... All the more poignant for being so wholly at odds with our current ruling politics... This novel strikes just the right notes... [An] urgent outrcy.”
— Ron Charles in the Washington Post

 
 

“Wolf Bells is a response to the era of un-caring, with its crises of healthcare, housing, loneliness, and addiction… Funny as hell… Zumas charmed me [with] vividly realistic scenes of cohabitation gone awry––alongside moments of radical patience, poignant self-awareness, and goofy authenticity. Like The Emperor of Gladness, The Hearing Trumpet, and Never Let Me Go, Wolf Bells wants us to look more carefully, and see more lovingly, those that a eugenicist state casts off as disposable… [Zumas] reminded me that in this political age, we might be each other’s only refuge from the circling wolves.”
— Staff Picks (Emma Staffaroni Blog)

“A spirited, hilarious, and tender study of intergenerational living. A nonverbal poet glows at the center of Portlander Leni Zumas’s big-hearted novel Wolf Bells. James is 8, and he is the most gorgeously rendered character I can remember reading... With poetic efficiency and beguiling shifts in tone, Zumas… animates [Wolf Bells’s] many protagonists in a quick and hilarious 211 pages.”
— Matty Trueherz in Portland Monthly

“A tense, devastating novel about ‘semi-radical hospitality’ and people trying to do the best they can for each other.”
— W Magazine

“Leni Zumas’s third novel explores America’s crisis of care in a sharp story about belonging, responsibility, and the limits of a haven in a world that often refuses it. Wolf Bells asks important questions about what the world could look like if everyone had a place to belong.”
— Geek Girl Authority

”Unflinching, hilarious, and radical. In Wolf Bells, Leni Zumas has written the most humane of books; an essential and audacious novel that we need, urgently, in these fearful, fearsome times. Wolf Bells challenges us to imagine a new way of living; in true community, mutually caring and compassionate and free to speak our dissent. I would love to live in The House, the fictional residence Zumas has created, with all its aches and pains and complications and tender, precarious solidarity.”
— Miriam Toews, WOMEN TALKING

“At once a fable, a cautionary tale, a sitcom, an elegy, and a no-frills utopian roadmap, Wolf Bells howls with the thrill of life and death intertwined. This is a brave book about trauma and persistence, aging and intergenerational kinship, and the frustration, conflict, and connection in caring for one another. Reshaping the world out of a broken history, Leni Zumas shows us how to dream.”
— Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, TOUCHING THE ART

“With the precision of a cartographer of the human heart, Wolf Bells navigates the ways the oldest and the youngest, the queer and the marginalized are forced to live along the fault lines of precarity. And with the tenderness of an attentive and honest lover, she guides us towards a world that is not only better but possible.”
— Mona Eltahawy, THE SEVEN NECESSARY SINS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

“Wolf Bells will make you weep, I promise. Weep for radical possibilities of community. Weep for the cruelty of systems. Weep for the deep, fully human characters present in these pages. I am always blown away by Leni Zumas, who is, hands down, one of the finest novelists writing today. This is a novel that will be read for generations.”
— Emme Lund, THE BOY WITH A BIRD IN HIS CHEST