"Wonderfully powerful, disturbingly beautiful, and filled with night. " -Beverly Donofrio "In Melissa Ferrone’s memoir there is a great deal lost before there is any found. Her innocence, her girlhood, and for a terrifying while her very identity. Sometimes, you open to a knock and evil comes striding through the door. This happens. It happened to Melissa. That man left by the door he came in but he haunted Melissa’s consciousness as real as real, returning for months and years in terrifying flashbacks. Look Alive is not a recovery memoir, its about trying to swim in the wake of extreme trauma. Finally, it is about life-saving. What Look Alive insists on is that Melissa made it to shore and emerged heart-whole." -Kevin Oderman
"Ferrone’s nonfiction about gender violence is haunting. Bone shaking. Assuming a distanced voice, her nonfiction narrator interrogates what it means to survive and move on from a violent rape. And though her subject is so large, she uses compressed images as focus. A bitter melon in “An Unusual Thing.” Recipes in “Recipes.” A campfire in “Blue Ridge Talk.” In this last piece, she writes, “The campfire is darkening and our mouths have not opened to taste each other’s sound,” as a way of describing the changing landscape of her relationship with her mother after a violent rape." -Kelly Sundberg