About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Elizabeth Strout
Positive The Post and Courier The story of the novel is slow and simple ... No topic is too small for Lucy Barton, and no outcome beyond the novel’s imaginative reach. Strout insists on the openness of stories ... Some stories are irresistible to Strout, and she replays them in most of her books. First, families are weird, unfathomable, and sometimes lost ... For all the occasional extravagance of Strout’s plots, the magic of the everyday outweighs melodrama.
Hilary Mantel
Positive The Post and Courier The stories of Learning to Talk are told in the voice of a feisty child who believes in what’s good and true — fidelity, grace, kindness — in spite of everything she’s seen. She also believes that God walks beside her, and an angel sits on her shoulder. But her God is not a magician, and shouldn’t be asked to fix things, she says, \'like some plumber or carpenter.\' The life Mantel narrates is part waiting game, part deliverance story, and all wonderful.
Sally Rooney
Positive The Post and Courier Chunks of the novel come in the form of emails. This is a very lifelike arrangement: action followed by reflection on the action, living and reliving in memory what’s just happened or what’s long past. Life happens quickly, but it lingers and accrues meaning with each retelling ... The emails are some of the best parts of the novel ... In Rooney’s work, meaning evolves through repetition. Everything turns into words eventually and glistens.
Colson Whitehead
Positive The Post and Courier The handmade quality to Carney (\'still spackling himself into something presentable\') makes him an ideal protagonist. He is our point of entry into the striving American national soul, occupying a netherworld between crooked and straight ... Whitehead makes Carney so lovable and believably good that all my sympathies swayed his way. How could this person with the steady humor and outsized heart bring so much trouble on himself?
Alison Bechdel
Rave Post and Courier A book that seems brand-new and slightly unfamiliar. The Secret of Superhuman Strength is a highly crafted literary work ... Superhuman Strength gets its mojo from Bechdel’s blend of low-cult form and high-cult subject matter ... This very bookish book is never less than entertaining, but Bechdel grounds its merriment in philosophical mystery ... The idea that certain experiences are reproducible and connect us to the ages isn’t new, but Bechdel takes comfort in knowing that where she’s been, others have been before. Her guiding lights, old-style and neo-Romantics, are just the brilliant, strange, and questing forerunners she needs.
Jenny Diski
Rave The Post and Courier If you don’t know her yet, now is the time to stage a meeting. On nearly every page, Diski asks implicitly: what are the contours and limits of our pursuit of happiness? She is often fizzy with good feelings, in spite of seeing the world clearly ... The bravura piece of the collection is \'A Feeling for Ice,\' Ditski’s first stab at the material that became her memoir and best book, \'Skating to Antarctica\' ... The marvel of \'A Feeling for Ice” is its arrangement. Diski shuffles the pieces of her life to scramble the causes and effects on her personal timeline. One minute she’s a 4-year-old, taken by her mother to skate at a local rink and \'floating free and frictionless.\' The next she’s 14, overdosed on her mother’s Nembutol, and turned over to the state. Blink again, and she’s rescued by a friend’s mother, Doris Lessing.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Rave The Post and Courier ... asks profound questions about what it means to be human, about what our boundaries and limitations are, as well as what our peak achievements might be ... Ishiguro’s wonderful novel deals in shadow and light, but it’s Klara who triumphs and the light that wins.
Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
Rave Post and Courier To tell his story, Bras Cubas patents a voice that is hilarious, irreverent and fractured. Machado imagined him in 1881, but he might have stepped out of today’s pages. Because he has no stake anymore in protecting his own reputation or in salvaging dead dreams, Bras Cubas is a free man ... Memoirs is an intricate, mirror-like work, with no faith in resolution. It’s fun to watch him second-guess himself ... Translator Margaret Jull Costa’s introduction to this newly rendered edition labels Bras’ narrative \'a catalogue of failures.\' He likes to show himself in a bad (though human and understandable) light. Midway through the novel, he writes \'already, I’m beginning to regret this book. Not that I’m tired of it; I have nothing else to do\' ... Machado is both playful and philosophical. From an imagined timelessness, he frees his hero to see his portion of the cosmos without the filter of a term limit. It’s a bracing perspective.
Helen MacDonald
Rave The Post and Courier Readers of Macdonald’s wonderful memoir H is for Hawk will have high expectations for Vesper Flights. Not to worry: While the essays don’t have the memoir’s concentration on a single grief-fueled story, they do showcase the same feel for the interplay of wild and human worlds ... Each of Macdonald’s essays is in some way an encounter with the unknown. She is a famed naturalist and a sublime writer, but her expertise is only an entry point for joyful discovery. The world never had a better advocate. What strikes me most about Macdonald is her patience and delicacy. She doesn’t expect to capture nature in a glance or to sum it up in a phrase. She looks long and hard, and then she looks again.
Ali Smith
Positive The Post and Courier No voice here carries the day. Smith is ever aware of the wide streak between what seems to be and what is. She lets us listen in, play emotional detective and unscramble what we can of what is and what was (always crucial in a story that hopscotches across time and geography) ... Never has she been more dedicated to the long view. And never has the long, settled view seemed more inconclusive ... over and over, her novels show us beauty at the junction where innocence and knowledge meet. Smith has hitched herself to history on the fly, but she reminds us that in all times, love and beauty persist.
Hilary Mantel
Rave The Post and Courier Cromwell lives in a full-blown, bloody, action-packed age. He is gutsy and brave; he rises to every occasion; he accepts risk. Mantel’s Cromwell belongs at the center of power ... The Mirror and the Light is majestic in its scope and sympathy, especially in its last 60 heartbreaking pages ... Mantel arranges heart-thudding, you-are-there details.
Louise Erdrich
Positive The Post and Courier A character in Love Medicine,” Erdrich’s first novel, says \'Love is a stony road.\' The sprawling plots and crowded stages of all her novels since are really just continuations of this thought. Each of the characters in The Night Watchman has a toehold on the rocky terrain of love. Erdrich doesn’t speak in grand terms about the persistence that keeps her Turtle Mountain band on their native ground. She shows us instead, one by one, what love of a homeland means to her characters and why they choose fidelity over dispersal. These are new characters for Erdrich. If we’re lucky, she’ll let us meet them again in a sequel.
Jenny Offill
Rave The Post and Courier ... a pliable, resistant novel ... Many readers (I am one) fall hard for Offill’s spare, fractured method ... Offill writes as if from the long historical perspective. Her end-times narrative is both desperate and funny ... Lizzie is such a charming empath, her sensibility so offbeat, and her dread of climate catastrophe so real ... Jenny Offill’s wonderful book ends with its own plea to close distances: \'The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.\'
Garth Greenwell
Rave The Post and Courier In lean, uncluttered language, Greenwell tells messy, lush stories ... It could be argued that every story is really about the narrator. He is our filter for all the other perspectives, and his narrative shapes theirs. Memory and art are making something durable out of experiences most notable for comings, goings and chaos.
Zadie Smith
Rave The Post and Courier ... a catch-all volume, zippy and various ... a fun party ... Smith, as always, nails the pitch and tone of everyday life. Just as we readers are floating along frictionless in Smith’s prose, she brings us back to the real world ... Smith herself brims with zest and attitude. Her sense of inhabiting a time and place — fully being there — is a marvel ... Whether she’s recording a mass cry of distress at the closing of Cage Loup in the Village or taking us on a walk with her Jamaican aunts, whose visit coincides exactly with the four days of the Kavanaugh hearings, Smith tunes in to big, colorful worlds. She will always be a native of Willesden, another big, colorful world, but she’s made herself at home also here in the States ... In all the outposts of Zadie Smith’s imagination, one thing is certain: No one fails to be.
Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Rave The Post and Courier These are great mysteries, and Janina Duszejko is a great and fallible soul. Her idiosyncratic, exclamatory style is a pleasure to read, along with her expressive attention to human and non-human suffering ... The climactic scene defamiliarizes the familiar. At a church service celebrating the hunt, the narrator is suddenly sick of the world’s hypocrisy and bursts the bounds of silence. It is a thrilling moment, worthy of the author’s radical and demanding vision.
Amy Hempel
Rave The Post and Courier The good news is that [Hempel] is still funny, still sneaking in the oblique details that move an ordinary story ... Hempel’s empathy with the secret lives of her characters is epic ... The title story is Hempel’s sort of masterpiece ... The story and the collection insist that each one is irreplaceable ... Many of the stories here don’t have a traditional narrative arc. The have loss; they have laughter in spite of everything ... Hempel’s narrators shuffle through the moods of their lives, remembering but not regulated by the past. They laugh it all off and choose pliable, singing futures.
Janet Malcolm
Rave The Post and Courier Her specialty is the discrepancy between self-image and reality, but she doesn’t watch only to pounce. Malcolm also can be a sincere praise-singer and is happy to admire ... Malcolm does not scorn surfaces. She assumes that we all live in a world of appearances and that the look of things—a room, an outfit—is of interest ... Malcolm is fair, and excellent company. Nobody’s Looking at You is a thrilling book, studded with sharp perceptions and images.
Sally Rooney
Rave Post and Courier ...riveting ... Gone is the love foursome of Conversations, gone too the ironic knowingness. Rooney’s new book is more concentrated, more desperate, more willing to go for broke ... Page by page, Normal People works out with fascinating exactitude what the privilege of touch and influence entails. In the way of 19th-century novels, Rooney makes us care in old-fashioned ways about the outcome of her story ... While Rooney grounds her plot in a world of social fixities, she understands personal truths to be elastic. Over the course of a life, almost anything might happen to anyone. And anyone might at one time or another become somebody else ... In the realm of love, either everything is normal or nothing is, Rooney seems to say. Love for her \'normal people\' is the ultimate conversion experience ... Goodness is a gift Connell gives Marianne; now it belongs to her. It’s tempting to imagine each without the other. Marianne might year by year come to value herself less, be more open to abasement. Connell might become one of those Henry James men with his hands in his pockets, a ghost in his own life. The idea of the unlived life hovers over these pages. Yet Rooney goes full-throttle toward the big finish: Love is real, and love matters.