About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Araminta Hall
Positive Booklist A sleek takedown plot with a #NotAllMen foundation ... Compelling, unsettling, and nuanced, this will be a fast favorite for fans of dark domestic thrillers.
Ramona Ausubel
Positive Booklist Transfixing ... The narration, from Vera’s young adolescent perspective—though not in her voice—is lush and full of wonder as a family is broken and reshaped, and the women come of age, evolve, and grapple with the limits and conflicts of biology and ambition.
Kashana Cauley
Positive Booklist This debut by former Daily Show writer Cauley is compulsively readable as it tracks Aretha’s dizzying downward spiral with incisive observation, logic, and dark humor and delves into the perils of the thrill of the fringe and the limits of anyone’s power to control their environment.
Ibram X. Kendi
Rave Booklist Kendi talks at length about his own parenting journey, noting his own errors, false assumptions, lessons learned, and intentions for the future. His humility in modeling continual self-improvement helps make this a readable and approachable guide. Because of its scope, nearly all readers will come away from Kendi’s message more aware and having found a point of resonance in their own lives.
Tabitha Carvan
Rave Booklist Quoting Brené Brown, Mary Oliver, and Gail Sheehy and referencing her own lifelong, complicated relationship with fandom, Carvan’s loving but unapologetic manifesto is one to carry proudly on your next sojourn into the melee of backstage autograph seekers.
Hanna Bervoets, tr, Emma Rault
Rave Booklist Bervoets’ writing is vivid, eerie, and beguilingly conversational, especially considering its content. As Kayleigh’s narrative careens toward its conclusion, and the reason for the letter becomes clear, readers are forced to confront the way perspective shapes understanding, and they will likely want to avoid the internet for a beat. Powerful, discussable, and a harbinger of a voice-in-translation to watch.
Jamie Foxx
Positive Booklist Oscar-winning actor Foxx takes readers on a rollicking ride through his childhood, rise to stardom, and parenting adventures that are still in progress ... Foxx displays his comedic timing and pacing and is always entertaining, blending the folksy yet hard-edged wisdom of his adoptive grandmother with hard-won, more worldly \'New Dad\' sensibilities he acquires while raising his children in Hollywood under very different circumstances from those of his own childhood ... Fans will appreciate the many mentions of Foxx’s famous friends and the deep-dive into his healing from his sometimes painful early life. Foxx’s parenting-advice book is the equivalent of a vitamin-packed smoothie: sweet, fun, and easy to enjoy, full of slyly concealed nourishment and goodness.
Tabitha Lasley
Positive Booklist Laskey’s prose is dizzying in its descriptions of obsession, brutal work, and loneliness. The oil workers lives are hard and unforgiving, and Lasky taps into their exhaustion as she becomes their mirror image: while her lover is at sea her life is suspended, and she craves the intensity of each of his return.
Ellen Airgood
Positive Booklist Airgood’s characters feel true and rich, outwardly simple—the hardworking, salt-of-the-earth types found in every community—but internally complex as they strive for happiness, connection, fulfillment, and comfort in each other, their surroundings, and themselves. A leisurely read with a strong sense of place that is ideal for pairing with the stony beaches of Lake Superior or the sharp crackle of a campfire, or for experiencing the shift in atmosphere reading fiction provides.
Chloe Shaw
Positive Booklist Shaw’s language is lyrical and contemplative, whether relating small moments of intimacy or big feelings. This is a quiet, heartfelt, and memorable work that cuts right to the quick of the unique bond between dogs and their people. As she tries to cling to the fleeing present, a feeling of sadness pervades; we all know how dog books end.
Casey Wilson
Positive Booklist Wilson’s first memoir is, at first blush, as big and kooky as one of the characters she has crafted or portrayed ... Her humorous writing flows in a rapid-fire, conversational tone, but underneath the laughs, the constant, human, and very relatable undercurrent becomes more apparent: this is also a woman seeking her footing through the grief of losing her mother and finding her place in the world.
Lina Meruane, tr. Megan McDowell
Positive Booklist ...all relayed in fragmented, visceral prose that illuminates their experience of illness: isolation, confusion, speculation, fear, and detachment ... cerebral, raw, and disorienting, effectively creating an unsettling and tense reading experience. McDowell’s translation maintains a cadence that evokes the original Spanish. Best for larger collections with a call for literary South American works.
Uzma Jalaluddin
Rave Booklist Jalaluddin’s second novel isn’t a spin on an Austen novel like her first, Ayesha at Last (2018), but the clever and independent protagonist, large cast of vivid characters, strong family ties, and satisfying enemies-to-lovers trope all have the feel of a classic remake and will thoroughly delight readers looking for modern Indian Muslim representation in a love story that hits real-life issues on the way to a very satisfying conclusion.
Avni Doshi
Positive Booklist Doshi’s language is expansive and fluid, even dreamlike at times, unspooling through serpentine paths and leaving the reader wondering, as Antara does, about the boundaries between reality and an imagined past. Doshi is a talent to watch, and this debut will readily find an audience in readers seeking well-crafted examinations of messy relationships, both internal and external.
Arlene Heyman
Positive Booklist ... a first novel with prose shaped by a keen ear for language, and she confronts female sexuality, aspiration, motherhood, and sexism with eyes wide open. Lottie’s life experience will feel familiar to her contemporaries and find a ready audience in readers of Sue Miller and Margaret Drabble.
Rosalie Knecht
Positive Booklist Knecht’s writing is evocative and spare, stylish and brooding, making this mystery series compulsively readable and offering a refreshing spin on atmospheric noir with a compelling queer historical frame.
Mark Bowden
Positive Booklist For all of the podcasts and Netflix docu-series that brought true crime into the modern zeitgeist, this genre solidly thrives where it began: in print journalism. Here, best-selling Bowden...collects six of his long-form articles, most from Vanity Fair, each delving the intricacies, patience, and persistence of detective work ... [a] slim and satisfying volume. While humanizing the victims...these are, at their core, detective stories. Bowden writes with journalistic efficiency and a matter-of-fact admiration of the investigative work—from the ingenious to the tedious—of his detectives, whose mystery solving \'creates order from disorder, salves our ache for moral balance.\'