About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Niall Williams
Rave BookPage This reviewer has to wonder why an author as brilliant as Niall Williams, whose latest book is the resplendent, suspenseful Time of the Child, isn’t at the top of every reader’s mind. Few contemporary novelists create worlds and characters so amazingly alive and specific ... Anyone who cherishes great writing should want more and more from Williams.
Nayantara Roy
Rave BookPage Stunning ... Delicious ... Riveting from its first page to its last.
Danzy Senna
Positive BookPage Senna’s sense of the absurd is impeccable ... The perfect story for our time.
Liz Moore
Positive BookPage Spellbinding ... A beautifully written, devilishly clever work.
Morgan Talty
Positive BookPage It is beautifully written, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds ... This is a moving, humane book.
Kimberly King Parsons
Positive BookPage If you’re in the market for a sad yet funny yet hopeful book, We Were the Universe might be it.
Colin Barrett
Rave BookPage \"if you come for the nail-biting plot, you’ll stay for Barrett’s gorgeous language ... Wild Houses is a stunning work.\
Kirsten Bakis
Positive BookPage Bakis... creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the first chapter ... A scary good book.
Rebecca K Reilly
Positive BookPage Reilly writes with a dry, sly humor and great love for her characters. She brilliantly builds the world of the siblings bit by bit, like a jigsaw puzzle ... Ultimately joyous and life-affirming.
Karl Marlantes
Positive BookPage Utilizing short, punchy chapters full of period detail, Marlantes keeps you wondering how this potentially deadly breach of protocol is going to end ... Another enthralling work from a great writer.
Salar Abdoh
Positive BookPage In Abdoh’s sad, hilarious, big-hearted book, the nearby country called love is the very place where Issa stands.
Nicole Cuffy
Rave BookPage Have you ever read a book that you could dance along to, as if it were a song? Nicole Cuffy’s engaging novel, Dances, is one of those books.
Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
Positive BookPage Nothing much happens in Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons, but the author’s artistry is such that you keep on reading, whether for the beautiful writing or for the beautiful pain of the strange couple at the story’s core ... Beautifully translated ... Though the woman and her teacher are full of sorrow, their sadness doesn’t stop them from appreciating and even seeking small moments of beauty. This gives Kang’s slender book much of its power.
Abraham Verghese
Rave BookPage \"Sprawling, passionate, tragic and comedic at turns...the second novel from Abraham Verghese, author of the unforgettable Cutting for Stone, is a masterpiece. Put it on your bookcase next to A Passage to India by E.M. Forster or anything by the brave and brilliant Salman Rushdie. Indeed, put it next to any great novel of your choice...[Verghese is] probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov...Verghese surrounds the family with a world of unforgettable characters....All are interconnected, like the braiding waterways of Kerala. The Covenant of Water, as they say, is a lot. You won’t want it to end.\
Kate Morton
Positive BookPage Captivating ... One of the delights for readers of a mystery is picking up little crumbs of evidence along the way. As Homecoming gallops toward its close, you may think you know what’s coming, and the foreknowledge is both ghastly and thrilling. In a book like this one, there are a lot of ways the story can take a turn toward the preposterous or at least the improbable.
Rafael Frumkin
Positive BookPage Frumkin is superb at dissecting all manner of malfeasance and corruption ... In a world where well-heeled heels are arrested for cryptocurrency scams, squillionaires gleefully trash their own vanity projects and masters of the universe disgrace themselves over and over, Confidence’s arrival is beyond timely.
Ayobami Adebayo
Positive BookPage Adébáyọ̀... has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells. She captures the almost musical speech patterns of her characters and doesn’t trouble to translate snatches of Nigeria’s many languages. The novel’s cast is large, but each character is distinct; you won’t confuse Ẹniọlá’s mother with Wuraọlá’s, even though they’re quite alike. Both suffer, and so do their families. A Spell of Good Things is a wonderfully written, tragic book.
Wendell Berry
Rave BookPage The folks in How It Went, whom Wendell Berry writes about so beautifully, may remind readers of hobbits ... Berry’s book is divided into 13 lovingly written chapters ... Together, they create a tale that gently unwinds and doubles back on itself, not so much like a river but more like a flowering vine ... A book full of such gentleness, wisdom and humility seems preposterous in this day and age. It’s also something of a miracle. We are lucky, in such times, to still have a writer like Wendell Berry.
Jonathan Coe
Positive BookPage Coe’s book isn’t so concerned with capturing a side of Hollywood or the process of moviemaking as it is with summing up a life and a fading era ... Beautifully written and filled with compassion, humor and an abundance of knowledge about old Hollywood, Mr. Wilder and Me sheds light on lives that aren’t perfect but still well lived.
Tracey Lien
Positive BookPage ... suspenseful ... Lien’s novel, by turns gripping and heartbreaking, makes room for forgiveness and understanding. Ky knows all about her people, and to know all is to forgive all.
Belinda Huijuan Tang
Positive BookPage ... splendid ... At times, A Map for the Missing brings to mind George Orwell\'s 1984, though unlike that novel\'s dystopian England (called Airstrip One), the chilling and deeply sad China depicted here is real ... Along with Yitian, Hanwen and Yitian\'s parents, Tang brings additional secondary characters to life, such Yitian\'s beloved, broken grandfather and the unhappy girls who labor on the farm with Hanwen. The novel\'s many teachers, police officers, clerks, shopkeepers and other bureaucrats are individuals and never interchangeable ... It\'s astonishing that A Map for the Missing is Tang\'s debut novel. This 400-page book, whose protagonist navigates a purgatory of twists and turns, red herrings and dead ends, is gripping from its first page to its last.
Natalie Jenner
Positive BookPage ... captivating ... Jenner boldly mixes real history with her fictional creations, and readers who enjoy the \'nonfiction novel\' genre will find pleasure in parsing facts from embellishments ... Jenner draws readers into her tale with a genial, matter-of-fact style that’s exactly what’s expected for a novel about a humble London bookstore. Each chapter begins with one of Herbert’s many ridiculous rules, most of which are broken over the course of the book. But Bloomsbury Girls’ surface coziness puts the tumult of its characters in relief, giving the novel unexpected depth and complexity.
Chris Bohjalian
Positive BookPage Bohjalian traveled to the Serengeti to research this novel in 2020, but his fast-paced tale allows little time for contemplating sunsets through the branches of baobab trees. Instead, The Lioness succeeds in showing how otherwise pampered folks react when faced with the unthinkable.
John Elizabeth Stintzi
Positive BookPage Have you ever read a book that was so off-the-wall bizarre that you thought, I can’t read this anymore, it’s too ridiculous, but it was also so compelling that you had to keep reading just to see what happens? John Elizabeth Stintzi’s harrowing novel My Volcano is one of those books ... The novel’s narrative scope is tremendously broad.
Jennifer E. Smith
Positive BookPage Smith’s style is as smooth as an Alaskan cruise is supposed to be—though like Greta, the ship does rock and roll now and then. Smith’s characters are good and nice. She does allow for some eccentricity, as in Helen’s friend Todd, an obsessive bird watcher who longs to see some avian rarity on an ice floe. But Smith reserves nearly all the novel’s real complexity for Conrad, a man who can’t seem to overcome a certain midcentury rigidity. Greta is wary of him, and because she’s wary of him, so are we, and this is the real meat of the novel. Can these two stubborn people lay down their arms at long last and connect?
Nina De Gramont
Positive BookPage Few of the characters are particularly likable in The Christie Affair, but all are fascinating ... Despite...liberties and embellishments, de Gramont doesn’t let her story stray too far from the basic facts, so the ending’s a bit of a letdown for Nan. Still, The Christie Affair is an enjoyable entrant to the canon of \'Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance\' novels.
Nikki May
Positive BookPage For all its wittiness, fast-paced writing and recipes for Nigerian chicken stew and Aunty K’s moin moin, Wahala is a much darker read than you might expect. Many people get hurt—badly. It’s a story that reminds us of the ties that bind, and sometimes gag.
Hervé Le Tellier, Tr. Adriana Hunter
Positive BookPage ... pleasingly Gallic, with chapters weaving together comedy, melancholy, tragedy and a strand of noir ... No doubt you\'ll find yourself wondering how you would react if you were a passenger on Flight 006. Would you find your situation intolerable? Would you try to live with this new reality to the best of your ability? It is to Le Tellier\'s credit that these questions linger long after you turn the last page.
Uwem Akpan
Positive BookPage Akpan allows Ekong’s astonished anger, acerbic humor and, despite everything, love of New York and its people to anchor him. Of all the characters in New York, My Village, Ekong knows who he is. We are privileged to get to know him, too.
James Han Mattson
Positive BookPage You could say it’s a story adjacent to The Haunting of Hill House, but even more disturbing ... There are many ways to look at a book with so many flavors of madness. It could be a study of the effects of thwarted desire on people who are basically incapable of empathy ... As the book’s horrifying events unfold, Reprieve can be read as a commentary on, or even an allegory of, American racism. Are we fighting to succeed in a fun house whose rewards aren’t worth the pain? As a study of systems of power at their most perverse, Reprieve is a horror story, certainly, but it’s not as scary as it is deeply disturbing.
YZ Chin
Positive BookPage ... one of the first great novels to examine the grinding effect of U.S. anti-immigration policies during the Trump administration ... Chin is superb at describing the tumult of a woman being psychologically knocked about like a pachinko ball. Every chapter bears witness to Edwina’s pain, befuddlement and sheer exhaustion, while also revealing her snarky sense of humor, resourcefulness, tenaciousness and capacity for love. Edge Case shows what can happen to ordinary people when they’re caught up in systems beyond their control.
Violet Kupersmith
Positive BookPage Kupersmith’s grasp of her story’s secondary characters is as firm as her grasp of Winnie ... It would have been easy for a book with so much going on to collapse into incoherence, but it’s an engaging read the whole way through. Build Your House Around My Body is an unsettling and powerful work.
Colson Whitehead
Rave BookPage Like Dante leading us through the levels of hell, Whitehead presents the reader with the levels of rottenness in early to mid-1960s New York City ... yet another Colson Whitehead masterpiece.
Rivka Galchen
Positive BookPage Written with a surprising sense of humor for such a grim topic, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch shows what happens when a crowd is taken over by delusion, bigotry and grievance.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Positive Bookpage he feeling closest to what is evoked by this beautifully crafted novel is a stroll during the blue hour on the first warm evening of spring ... One of the many joys of this little book, besides Lahiri’s usual gorgeous writing, is that there’s almost no plot ... Another lovely thing about the book is that you don’t even have to read its chapters in order. The novel is like a contemporary orarium, a collection of private devotions to read for insight and comfort before going to bed. Whereabouts is even physically small, just the size for a purse or a roomy pocket, to pull out and enjoy when you have a moment. It is a jewel of a book.
Pamela Terry
Positive BookPage In moments like this, the book feels like a mashup of Fried Green Tomatoes and You Can’t Go Home Again with a sprinkling of William Faulkner ... One of the many pleasures of the book is Terry’s descriptions of details like the lushness of gardenias and crepe myrtles, and the way steam rises from a Georgia blacktop after a hard summer rain. When the story moves to Scotland, she’s just as skilled at describing fierce sea storms, the welcome coziness of a bed-and-breakfast and the colors and textures of tweeds and tartans ... But Terry’s real focus is forgiveness, radical acceptance or even what some might call grace. A reader might wonder if they could ever be as forgiving as the Bruce children are of their parents’ transgressions. The Sweet Taste of Muscadines encourages readers to believe that they could.
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Rave BookPage There’s plenty of Civil War fiction out there; it’s a seemingly bottomless category of novels exploring people both prominent and obscure whose lives are touched in some way by the war...With its revelatory history and fresh perspectives, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s splendid Libertie is a welcome addition to the canon ... The Haitian scenes allow Greenidge to explore the grinding universality of patriarchy, but this is balanced by Libertie’s determination to live her best life ... Passionate and brilliantly written, Libertie shines a light on a part of history still unknown by far too many but that is now getting the finest treatment.
Kj Dell'antonia
Positive Bookpage The tale itself upends any expectations of rural, Green Acres-esque silliness. Yet Dell’Antonia, the author of How to Be a Happier Parent , takes her characters seriously, albeit always with gentle humor ... In the end, \'Food Wars\' proves to be a catastrophe for Barbara and her daughters, as old wounds, resentments, postponed dreams and layers of grief are peeled back and allowed to heal... It all works to make The Chicken Sisters a delight.
Brandon Hobson
Rave BookPage Once in a while, you come across a book that seems to exist in its own bubble of space-time ... A word for such a story might be numinous, which ably describes Brandon Hobson’s splendid The Removed ... Hobson...weaves strands of the past and present so skillfully that events that would be improbable in the hands of another author are inevitable in The Removed. More than anything, in the case of the beleaguered Echota family, Hobson understands William Faulkner’s adage, \'The past is never dead. It’s not even past.\'
Greer Macallister
Rave BookPage The real Lady Jane Franklin sponsored a number of expeditions to find her explorer husband, Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin, after he and his men went missing in the Arctic. Though there’s no record of an all-female expedition, that hasn’t stopped Greer Macallister from writing a cracking good story about one in her fourth novel, The Arctic Fury ... Macallister’s book, written in prose as crisp as an Arctic summer, reminds us that women had all kinds of adventures during this period, from heading out into the frontier to holding conventions for women’s rights and writing antislavery books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Arctic Fury is a tribute to one young woman’s leadership and genius for survival.
T. Kingfisher
Rave BookPage After reading T. Kingfisher’s novel The Hollow Places, I have one thing to say to Stephen King: Steve-o, you’ve got some stiff competition ... one of the most terrifying books you’ll ever read ... Kingfisher’s superpower is her ability to describe things that cannot possibly be, things that can’t be there but are—things that the human mind can’t wrap itself around. In this, Kingfisher is much like H.P. Lovecraft. She differs from Lovecraft in that she has a rollicking sense of humor and believes in the power of love ... is one of those books that keeps you up at night, either because you can’t put it down or because you’re scared to turn off the lights and go to bed. You’ve been warned.
Héctor Tobar
Positive BookPage You might grit your teeth with resentment if Joe weren’t so openhearted—and if Tobar weren’t such a wizard of a writer ... Third-person narration weaves with Joe’s stream of consciousness, so we’re privy to not only his thoughts and observations, which flit from topic to topic like the butterflies he used to catch as a child, but also the thoughts of his mother, his fellow compas and even people he meets briefly. Quirky endnotes conclude each chapter. This structure lends propulsion and unexpected cohesion to a tale that would have been haphazard without it. A work of fiction and sort of true, The Last Great Road Bum is brilliant in its contemplation of a particularly American restlessness, innocence and foolishness.
Amy Poeppel
Positive BookPage Reading Amy Poeppel’s Musical Chairs is as fun as watching a Marx Brothers comedy, especially that scene in A Night at the Opera when everyone is squashed into the stateroom ... Poeppel’s people are a mess, but her writing is crisp and breezy. Where does everyone end up when the music stops? Read and find out.
Francesca Momplaisir
Positive BookPage Momplaisir shows how Lucien’s wickedness and perversity allow him to exploit other Haitian immigrants, especially women. In this way, Momplaisir illuminates the darker side of immigrant life, in particular Haitian immigrant life ... Still, Momplaisir makes you feel an ember of sympathy for Lucien, whose sole refrain since childhood has been \'I am nothing\' ... In Momplaisir’s novel, cracks of light are always there to penetrate the dark.
Ilana Masad
Positive BookPage Masad’s writing style is easy and straightforward, even if her characters aren’t ... A story of good but difficult characters and the openhearted people who love them, All My Mother’s Lovers is a compassionate and insightful work.
Lily King
Rave BookPage Once in a while you come across a novel whose protagonist is so engaging that you find yourself thinking, Oh no! or Don’t do that! interspersed with sighs of relief and some heartfelt rejoicing when things go right for a change. Lily King’s Writers & Lovers is one of those novels ... King is one of those rare writers who can entwine sadness, hilarity and burning fury in the briefest of moments. There’s a lot of this in her restaurant scenes, which are so finely observed that you may wonder if King ever worked in a sad little eatery once upon a time ... Casey’s story, like so many stories in real life, is messy. She’s messy. But King’s book isn’t. It’s a pleasure.
Chad Dundas
Rave BookPage Dundas patiently builds layer upon layer of clues, like pastry and butter in the best croissant ... Writing a thriller that’s engrossing from beginning to end is tough. Some readers might figure out the culprit early on, but figuring out the \'why\' will keep them hooked. Dundas knows how to keep things simmering, and his cracking good mystery kept this reviewer up at night. It just might keep you up at night, too.
Terry McMillan
Positive BookPage ... hilarious, poignant and bighearted ... McMillan has no trouble creating a crowd-​pleaser—even her \'unlikable\' women redeem themselves in the end—but she also promotes radical self-love for her characters, whether it’s through taking care of their bodies, minds and spirits, deciding who to love or deciding, indeed, whether to live at all. This is another winner from McMillan.
Colleen Oakley
Positive BookPage ... poignant ... a fascinating premise ... The inexplicable dreams, the tension between Mia and Harrison, the fortuneteller and Oakley’s breezy writing all encourage the reader to stick with the book, which tells a sad story to a bouncy beat. Full of misdirection and a few gentle red herrings, You Were There Too ends far more satisfyingly than you might expect ... the final meaning is huge, bittersweet and just the thing to happen in a place called Hope Springs.
Niall Williams
Rave BookPage The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams’ writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing. Readers will never forget the scene in which Christy and Noe get drunk in a pub and try to ride home on their bikes, nor Noe’s first kiss in the balcony of a movie house, an experience he endures from the fast-living sister of the girl he has a crush on. The book is hilarious among its many other virtues ... Buy, rent, get your hands on this book somehow and savor every word of it. Its title says it all: Plunging into This Is Happiness is happiness indeed.
Brian Allen Carr
Rave BookPage ... hilarious, heartbreaking ... Readers are privileged to be inside Riggle’s head, as this bright, fractious, hurting, lovable boy muses on everything from race and class to drugs and sex ... Carr’s style is delightfully straightforward, and he takes special pleasure in absurdity. The climax of the story is so strange, horrifying and darkly hilarious that you may have to put the book down because you’re laughing so hard ... The story offers no clear answers as to what’s going to happen to Riggle, Peggy and all the other characters. But the reader will wonder for quite some time—and there’s really no higher compliment to give a book.
André Aciman
Positive BookPage We see nothing of the dark side of Italy, with right-wing politics or trash rotting in the streets because everyone’s on strike. In other words, the characters are as overprivileged as ever, and Aciman populates his novel with a sensual, almost overripe type of a man who swears he can’t live without Balvenie Doublewood 17 Year Scotch. Better yet, Aciman’s people are as foolish as ever, and their foolishness is their point of connection with the reader. It’s tempting to describe Find Me as a pleasant, post-summer diversion, but it’s deeper than that. It will remind you of that one person you loved and lost and maybe found again. True, the book is lush, but it’s also bittersweet and nostalgic and a bit heartachey. Autumnal is probably the best word to describe it.
Steph Cha
Rave BookPage Steph Cha’s nerve-scraping novel—with its biblical, plangent title and painfully relevant plot—could be described as triggering, depending on the reader ... What Cha wants the reader to understand through her straightforward prose is that none of what happened between these two families had to happen, and everybody’s house pays.
Natalie Daniels
Positive BookPage Halfway through Natalie Daniels’ novel of grief, middle-age regret, betrayal and acid—specifically, acidic British wit—something happens that the reader can scarcely believe ... Connie isn’t the only troubled female in this novel ... Indeed, just about all the women and girls in Daniels’ tale have something at least a little wrong with them ... All the while, fathers, sons and husbands are either absent or just sort of stand around and go about their manly business. Is it the patriarchy that’s making these women sick and crazy and leaving their men so disconnected? ... Is this how it must be? Must women’s relationships with each other always end up toxic, tormented, even deadly? Maybe there is healing at the end, but clever, heart-shattering Too Close reminds you of the minefields you have to crawl through to get to it.
Karl Marlantes
Rave Bookpage ... seems a work born from Willa Cather by way of Upton Sinclair. But this new book is its own animal, and it’s something of a masterpiece ... Marlantes immerses the reader in the life of the Koski siblings, whose worldview is dominated by \'sisu\', a Finnish concept of honor, dignity and inner strength ... Page after page is dedicated to the dangerous and grueling job of harvesting gigantic trees from old-growth forests...The reader will be in awe of such hard labor done in the service of exploitive bosses who pay little. At the same time, Deep River bemoans the ruin of virgin forests, the pollution of pristine rivers, the fact that 100-pound wild salmon are now scarce. The book extols the love of family and friends and the beauty of the landscape even as that landscape is ravaged ... Best of all, Marlantes’ new novel has more than a few moments of fun and laughter. Even combative Aino can laugh at herself. In Deep River, she takes her place beside Ántonia Shimerda as one of the great heroines of literature.
Jean Kwok
Positive BookPage Kwok is unafraid to fully translate her characters’ flowery Chinese and contractionless Dutch, which gives the book an unexpected Pearl S. Buck-style flavor. There’s even a cache of valuable jewels passed from mother to daughter that everyone thinks everyone else wants to get their hands on ... a book that is busy, compelling and not a little wild. When you think of it, it is very much like Sylvie herself.
Julia Phillips
Rave BookPage ... powerful ... The book’s many characters are introduced in the preface, which calls to mind all those classic Russian novels with sprawling casts...at the same time, Disappearing Earth is utterly contemporary ... Besides the deep humanity of her characters, Phillips’ portrayal of Kamchatka itself is superb. Has there ever been a novel, even by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, set in such a strange, ancient, beautiful place, with its glaciers and volcanoes and endless cold? It’s a place where miracles might happen—where what is lost can once again be found—if you jump over a traditional New Year’s fire in just the right way. Phillips’ stunning novel dares to imagine the possibilities.
Sloane Tanen
Positive BookPage \"It’s easy for an author to get sucked into familiar tropes when writing about families; like venturing into a blind canyon, writers can stumble into cliches and have difficulty finding their way out. But with her latest novel, There’s a Word for That, Sloane Tanen is evidently undaunted by these common pitfalls, as she presents us with not one but two families with serious issues ... There’s a Word for That is often uproariously funny. Tanen’s skill is that you don’t laugh at the characters. Janine and Marty and Hailey and Henry and even Bunny know how messed up they are. All you, and they, can do is laugh at the straits they find themselves in and soldier on.\
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Positive BookPage His integrity and lack of cynicism keep the reader from resenting him the way his bandmates sometimes do. At the same time, Reid is adroit enough to make us understand why his white-knuckled virtue gets on people’s nerves ... [a] humane, delectable, rollicking novel.
Claire Adam
Positive Bookpage \"Adam was born in Trinidad and has a razor-sharp understanding of its society ... Adam allows us to share in Joy’s resignation when the water pressure in the tiny house goes out, to know what it feels like to slosh through a monsoon and to imagine food that ranges from traditional rotis, curries and melongene choka to packets of Chee Zees ... Golden Child is one of those uncommon debut novels that makes you eager to see what its author does next.\
Megan Collins
Positive BookPage \"With its focus on the grim-dark aspects of the female experience, The Winter Sister calls to mind works like Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects or the film The Tale. This twisty-turny story reminds the reader of the fickle nature of the truth, and that impossible things happen more often than you think.\
Jennifer Robson
Positive BookPage Robson, bestselling author of Somewhere in France, makes the reader eager to find out Ann’s secret. Ultimately, it’s one of those things you see coming, and yet you hope you’re mistaken ... an inspiring story about strength, resilience and creativity.
Melissa Lenhardt
Positive BookPage Another interesting take on the Wild West ... A rollicking, engrossing book that’ll keep you reading well past your bedtime.
Therese Anne Fowler
Positive BookPage \"Fowler skillfully depicts both the doomed, cruel, ridiculous society that Alva married into and how she tries, in her plodding yet ruthless way, to navigate it ... absorbing...\
C W Gortner
Positive BookPage Maria is fairly good-hearted, but forget about her checking her privilege. According to her, the czar and imperial family were ordained to rule by God. There is no scene in the book more heartbreaking or queasily funny than when Cossacks break into Maria’s bedroom in the middle of the night, and she reminds them that she’s the dowager empress—though by then, it hardly matters. The imperial downfall has already begun ... Gortner is wonderfully subtle, but given the times we live in, the problems are obvious: When a tiny percentage of people hold most of the wealth, it leads to demagoguery. The Romanov Empress relates an important piece of history. It’s also a warning about what comes when a nation is marred by rampant inequality.
Walter Mosley
Rave BookPage To start a Walter Mosley novel is like sitting down to a feast ... Lucia Napoli-Jones is such a vivid, vibrant presence in John Woman ... she is easily Mosley’s best secondary character since Mouse Alexander ... As usual, Mosley’s superpower lies in his slantwise take on the world and his characters, of whom there are dozens, and every one is memorable, even if they speak only a line or two ... this fantastic, surprising, humane and somewhat perverse book is one of Mosley’s best.
Raymond A. Villareal
Rave BookPage His tale is a little disturbing, and that’s a good thing. It functions somewhat as an allegory: The vampires are the 1 percent and everyone else is, well, everyone else ... Villareal brilliantly and stealthily examines how Gloamings have abandoned being human. Amoral in ways that normals can’t comprehend, the Gloamings only act to advance their situation.
Aja Gabel
Rave BookPage ...a magnificent, musical debut ... brilliant, groundbreaking ... No other novel is quite like The Ensemble.
Nafkota Tamirat
Rave BookPage Tamirat has created fascinating and tragic characters ... It’s often funny, with barbed, machine-gun dialogue worthy of Aaron Sorkin, but there’s a twist at the end. It happens so suddenly that you’ll miss it if you skip a few lines, but it plunges the tale into darkness. Everything has failed for the narrator: the love of her parents, their hopes for life in America, her friendship with Ayale, Ayale’s own screwy dreams and the island’s utopian vision. Everything has failed, that is, but the narrator. Because she’s the one who’s lived to tell the tale.
Christine Mangan
Positive BookPage \"A novel should stir the emotions, and Tangerine, the debut novel from Christine Mangan, does just that. It made this reviewer boiling mad. And that’s a good thing ... Readers will hope that Mangan, like Highsmith, writes a series of books about this villain, if for no other reason than to see whether the lowlife gets his or her comeuppance or slips away one more time.\
Rhiannon Navin
Positive BookPage \"Though Zach’s character could have benefited from being a little older, Navin succeeds in the tricky job of narrating her tale through the eyes of a young child. She views her characters with compassion, even as they are not on their best behavior. How could they be? Only Child shows the painful aftermath of a calamity that’s becoming all too common.\
Nathaniel Rich
Rave BookPage Has anyone written the Great Novel of New Orleans? If not, Nathaniel Rich’s sprawling, funny, tragic, generous new work, King Zeno, comes close. It reminded this reviewer of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, with its clever melding of real and fictional events, its snippets of newspaper articles and astonishingly memorable characters ... Like the U.S.A. novels, the action in King Zeno takes place around the time of World War I ... Rich not only knows these folks and their loved ones, but he also knows New Orleans. He loves the honky-tonks, cathouses and bayous, the names of its streets and even the fetid mud and miasmic summer heat. He is cognizant of the city’s racial hierarchies... Readers will genuinely worry for Isadore and his friends, ever threatened by this sledgehammer of racism. Because of this, the ending is a nail-biter — with a twist.
Jamie Quatro
Rave BookPage \"Critics claim that stories about adultery are going out of style. Contemporary adultery is so commonplace and banal that no one’s interested. Does any 21st-century woman stand to lose what poor, dumb Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina did back in the day? With Jamie Quatro’s stunning Fire Sermon, the answer may not be as simple as we suppose ... These questions aren’t the usual ones you see in a contemporary novel, and they make The Fire Sermon gripping.