RaveThe Boston GlobeNana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah sets his ferocious debut novel in one of the most inherently dystopian institutions ever conceived — the American penal system. With ruthless dexterity, he erases that comforting border between who we are and, if unchecked, what we might become. And the future is now ... Because Adjei-Brenyah skews so close to the atrocities we know, the implausible melts into the unnerving, yet possible ... With Chain Gang All-Stars he lets us think we’re reading a satire, but soon reveals a mirror of our dystopian days that lie not too far away.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
RaveThe Boston Globe[Coates] loses none of his mastery for conveying complex ideas and, blending a deep knowledge of American history with scintillating wordsmanship ... The Water Dancer exudes...gravity ... his craft shows on every page. He gives this story—and these men and women—the care and space they demand and deserve ... the novel gains a cinematic scope ... This could be a made-for-the-big-screen gimmick. Instead, it reflects the indefatigable strength and skill of those who claimed their freedom at any cost—through luck, guile, and perhaps even the divine ... A haunting adventure story told through the tough lens of history, The Water Dancer is a quintessentially American story of self-creation, doubt, and elevation, with every step threatened by peril and violence.
Edwidge Danticat
RaveThe Boston Globe... quietly devastating ... Through eight vivid stories, Danticat measures the fallibility of grace, and how, lovers, friends, parents, and even nations disappoint. She also reveals with stunning precision the myriad ways people disappoint, and the hard knowledge that shapes their path forward ... I don’t mean this in a cartoonishly plucky way — Danticat’s women, in particular, aren’t pollyannas blithely skipping between heartaches. They find the narrow spaces where they learn to live with difficult decisions ... With an unfaltering voice and evocative beauty, Danticat shows the uncelebrated resilience it takes to move toward something that, if it isn’t quite happiness, still burns brighter than sorrow.
Colson Whitehead
RaveThe Boston GlobeNot a moment is wasted, and for someone who writes as vividly as Whitehead, there’s also a graceful economy here. He uses words carefully, as if he doesn’t want them to get in the way of the truths he’s excavating ... Whitehead evokes the current-day madness of children kept in squalid conditions, of young ones lost in a system that cares nothing about them, and a government more concerned with incarceration than compassion. Whitehead captures how humanity is stripped away ... Whitehead, whose last novel, The Underground Railroad, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has again found dark inspiration in an overlooked corner of our nation’s history ... If God exists, he had long ago turned his back on such forsaken places. In The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s novel won’t allow us to do the same to the kids who survived, or those finally freed from an unmarked graveyard that could hold its silence no more.
Henry Louis Gates
RaveThe Boston Globe\"... luminous ... Gates writes brilliantly about the \'New Negro\' ... Few authors approach such difficult history with the unblinking clarity of Gates ... If anyone wants to understand how the groundbreaking election of Barack Obama as this nation’s first black president was answered with Donald Trump’s feral white nationalism, Gates has provided a road map. Black excellence incites white resentment. It is a ragged scar on the American psyche that Gates masterly traces from the ruins of Reconstruction to the hate crimes and white supremacy on the rise again today.\
Mitchell S. Jackson
RaveThe Boston Globe\"... vibrant ... Jackson recognizes there is too much for one conventional form, and his various storytelling methods imbue the book with an unpredictable dexterity. It is sharp and unshrinking in depictions of his life, his relatives (blood kin and otherwise), and his Pacific Northwest hometown, which serves as both inescapable character and villain ... One device Jackson uses to great effect are what he calls \'survivor files,\' interviews with men in his family detailing their experiences with gangs, infidelity, and incarceration ... [Jackson\'s] virtuosic wail of a book reminds us that for a black person in America, it can never be that easy.\
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
RaveThe Boston Globe\"Calling Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow a satire seems less an accurate description than an effort to cushion the blows this novel lands with lethal precision ... Given the frightful state of our nation, there isn’t enough satire in the world to outpace the madness heaped upon us daily. This is to Ruffin’s benefit. He can drive his story to the outer limits and beyond, and never lose the threads of bitter reality that make it so haunting. We Cast a Shadow soars on Ruffin’s unerring vision.\
Oyinkan Braithwaite
RaveThe Boston Globe\"Oyinkan Braithwaite’s rich, dark debut about Korede, a dutiful Nigerian nurse, and her sociopathic younger sister is more nuanced than its title might suggest ... Though this isn’t a whodunit, My Sister, The Serial Killer is a riveting story with a handful of well-timed twists, mixed with laugh-out loud observations about family, co-workers, and corrupt cops. Braithwaite doesn’t mock the murders as comic fodder, and that’s just one of the unexpected pleasures of her quirky novel. What could have been a series of grisly murders and dead-boyfriend punch lines is instead a clever, affecting examination of siblings bound by a secret with a body count.\
Esi Edugyan
RaveThe Boston Globe...[a] soaring new novel ... More than a tale of human bondage, it’s also an enthralling meditation on the weight of freedom, wrapped in a rousing adventure story stretching to the ends of the earth. It is also a bracing tribute to the indefatigable spirit of black people ... A beautiful and affecting writer, Edugyan manages to keep this rush of emotions and improbable scenarios both grounded and compelling ... Edugyan doesn’t hedge on the savagery of slavery, but neither does she revel in it. It’s not uncommon for works about the so-called peculiar institution to devolve into a kind of torture porn ... This is always a difficult line to toe, yet one Edugyan navigates without resorting to facile clichés ... I worried that we might plummet into \'white savior\' territory. Yet again, the author finds the right balance for the character.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele
RaveThe Boston GlobeIn When They Call You a Terrorist, Khan-Cullors recalls the shame she felt as a child for her silence in the face of racial injustice. Her deeply felt memoir is a blueprint of how that silence exploded into a scream heard around the world ... Co-written by poet and journalist Asha Bandele, this personal and political book, subtitled 'A Black Lives Matter Memoir,' is also timely. It comes during a still-unfolding moment when women are demanding to be heard... She learned early all the ways African-Americans are barred at the door, and how their lives are under constant threat from the police, the government, and the institutions that are intended to protect but instead oppress ... Yet what she also experiences is the strength of a community that understands it can best take care of its own ... Like Baldwin, Khan-Cullors wants only for her nation to live up to its ideals, and afford everyone the same opportunities and protections.
Zadie Smith
RaveThe Boston GlobeFeel Free, Zadie Smith’s second collection of essays, reflects a time that feels both familiar and remote, before our political divisions caused so many to recede deeper into tribes and prejudices ... These essays, reviews, and columns bristle with Smith’s probing desire to understand the world and share her own obsessions with humor and insight. One gravitates to her words, as you would if she were holding court with a group of really astute friends ... Smith writes with such clarity, it’s a reminder of how beautiful unfussy writing can be. She trusts herself enough to let her thoughts breathe ... It’s either a breezy psychedelic throwback summoning the wide-open possibilities of decades past or it’s a bull’s-eye disguised in bright colors so we don’t realize we’re in the crosshairs. With Smith, it may well be both.
Uzodinma Iweala
RaveThe Boston GlobeUzodinma Iweala has written a novel about the perversity of war, and the fragility of humanity. It's all the more shattering viewed through the eyes of a schoolboy who is both terrified and seduced by the meaningless slaughter which first claims his father, then his own childhood … Iweala graphically details Agu's atrocities, but never fails to relay, with aching poetry, the most shocking act of all — an unwilling child plunged into the physical horrors of war. Yes, the evil here is banal. Yet it is also the corrosive agent gnawing at the divided soul of a boy, who seeks both survival and redemption, in a nation shrouded by menace, and soaked with the blood of its own people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
RaveThe Boston Globe\"We Were Eight Years in Power is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s modern book of lamentations — of a nation’s hope in tatters and change stifled by bigotry emboldened ... Coates maps his own career path from unknown blogger to revered journalist invited by Obama \'into the Oval Office to bear witness to history.\' His professional ascension, including his National Book Award-winning bestseller, Between the World and Me, coincided with Obama’s presidency, and this was not a coincidence. Too many people who should have known better declared Obama’s election as the Big Bang of a post-racial America, and Coates’s probing essays about race, politics, and history became necessary ballast for this nation’s gravity-defying moment ... After spending much of this essential book looking backward, Coates stares squarely at our chaotic present in his most recent essay, \'The First White President.\' It’s a scorching takedown of Trump, his calamitous presidency, and his open embrace of racism, something in which he was well versed long before he moved into the White House.\
Jesmyn Ward
RaveThe Boston GlobeA furious brew with hints of Toni Morrison and Homer’s The Odyssey ... Race and racism are constant threads in Ward’s novels, but not in predictable ways. Unlike cities where different groups uneasily co-exist without interacting, the rural poor, regardless of race, are entangled in each other’s lives. They’re friends; they fight; and they have relationships and children. They are bound by having to make do with less and find commonality and company with each other. Until they don’t ... these lives are pockmarked by bad luck and bad choices, yet Ward presents them without judgment. Neither does she sift for some phony nobility, as though the recompense for being poor is to be imbued with amazing grace. Perhaps these are not characters to be loved, but they earn respect. Either by strength or stubbornness, they persist though the tumult of blood ties, the scourge of prejudice, and the long grind of disappointment, always searching for a safe way back home.
Roxane Gay
PositiveThe Boston GlobeHunger is Gay at her most lacerating and probing ... If this seems like so much guilt-inducing drudgery, it’s not. Anyone familiar with Gay’s books or tweets knows she also wields a dagger-sharp wit ... Early in Hunger, Gay writes, 'The story of my body is not a story of triumph.' No one should interpret that to mean this is a story of defeat. Gay has done much more than survive, despite events that could have destroyed a weaker heart and soul. She has persevered and succeeded not just as a writer but as a woman coping, on her own terms, with scars both forced and self-inflicted.
Lesley Nneka Arimah
RaveThe Boston Globe...[an] electrifying debut ... These are designed to leave marks. With its fluid blend of dark humor, sorrow, and excursions into magic realism, some of Arimah’s stories feel like a jazzy cross between Octavia Butler and Shirley Jackson. Yet there is nothing derivative here ... In this sharp, meticulous collection, Arimah is more concerned with the ways, for better or worse, people try to navigate love, the meaning of home, and the hard corners of their lives.
Roxane Gay
RaveThe Boston GlobeIn these bittersweet lives, Gay finds fierce tenacity that bends but doesn’t always break ... Her writing is unfussy, well matched to the women and men she’s created, and she finds a distinct rhythm both elegant and plainspoken. This makes even uncommon situations relatable ... Because Gay is such a vivid writer, her stories have a remarkable visual sweep. She puts her readers there ... Gay writes of chances missed and unexpected joy, love gone awry or resurrected, and the slivers of hope that keep these fascinating women alive.
