About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Elizabeth Strout
Positive BookPage The narrative combines two of Strout’s preoccupations: the reverberating, intergenerational effects of poverty, and the power of connection and empathy, demonstrating how stories can illuminate our worst moments and commemorate our best ... May be most gratifying for Strout’s longtime fans. But these very human characters, with their specific yet universal questions about others’ lives and their own, are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.
Gina María Balibrera
Positive BookPage \"...parts of the story slip by almost too quickly for the reader to connect with them emotionally. Still, Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances. With its depictions of the 1930s Hollywood scene and Paris art world, and its imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history, The Volcano Daughters stands out.\
Siân Hughes
Rave BookPage Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences and images. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis ... Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.
Sarah Perry
Rave BookPage Inventive, atmospheric ... Many of Perry’s sentences are startlingly beautiful, creating an atmospheric sense of setting and character. If some of Enlightenment’s goings-on are a bit elliptical, and if some secondary characters feel a little wispy, not quite coming into focus, that too seems part of the novel’s aim and its charm.
Sarah McCammon
Positive BookPage McCammon renders exvangelicals’ search for life after evangelicalism with sensitivity, showing the difficult balance of gaining self-acceptance and a broader understanding of the world while often losing the comfort of families and worship ... A welcome addition to the story of faith in 21th-century America.
Leslie Jamison
Positive BookPage \"Jamison’s descriptions of life with a newborn are spot-on, conveying the glory and tedium of new parenthood, as are her descriptions of the patched together life of a working parent and writer ... Still, there is a hole in this story when it comes to the details of the rupture between Jamison and her ex-husband. Of course, these are not episodes that any reader has the right to know, but when the narrative refers to \'the unforgivable thing she did\' and offers anecdotes about her ex’s continuing fury after they’ve separated, the reader is left wanting to know what happened. That said, Splinters’ close look at early parenthood, baby love, the uncertainties of relationships and how feelings of inadequacy play out in one woman’s life, rendered in Jamison’s elegant, vivid and often sensuous prose, makes her latest work stand out.\
Maria Hummel
Positive BookPage Atmospheric ... An inventive, immersive book recounting the particular past, old hurts and late healing of two singular characters.
Michael Cunningham
Positive BookPage Day has a dreamy, timeless feel. Using gorgeous, often heightened prose, Cunningham offers intimate glimpses of weighty moments instead of big scenes to examine the family’s strands of connection and disconnection, along with the ripple effects of the pandemic. Day may be a spare, short novel, but it’s a novel that asks to be read meditatively, rather than rushed through.
Donna Leon
Positive BookPage Perfectly captured that serendipitous nature in the personal essays that make up Wandering Through Life ... Leon may be a prolific novelist, but in this memoir, she turns her focus elsewhere.
Kristi Coulter
Rave BookPage Funny, candid ... Coulter is a delightful, funny guide ... An engaging, well-paced, and thoughtful memoir, Exit Interview takes a cleareyed look at women in corporate America, particularly tech, noting how far from parity they remain in those worlds.
Lauren Groff
Rave BookPage Vivid, feminist ... Propelled by the girl’s struggle to survive, but also by her interiority and what her memories reveal about her previous life in London ... A layered, dense novel, one that can be read as an allegory about the follies of the American experiment and humans’ planetary depredations. While it’s often a dark story with only slivers of hope, Groff’s inimitable style and language makes it a memorable, immersive reading experience.
Ann Patchett
Rave BookPage \"Ann Patchett once again proves herself a master of the family narrative ... The two timelines converge beautifully, and the revelations, when they come, feel both surprising and inevitable ... a gorgeously layered novel, a meditation on love, family and the choices we make.\
Caroline O'Donoghue
Rave BookPage Rachel’s first-person voice and wonderfully off-kilter observations make her a character you want to settle in with. By turns comic and bittersweet, this is a tender tale of platonic and first love, as well as a sharp look at such issues as homosexuality and abortion in the more repressive Ireland of pre-repeal days. The Rachel Incident will likely draw comparisons to Sally Rooney’s work, but there’s more than a hint of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones here: a bright and funny voice in a novel that wears its heart on its sleeve.
Paul Rudnick
Positive BookPage Heartfelt, it’s rarely somber. It’s a good-natured romp through the decades, with a large cast and plenty of clever quips and throwaway lines.
Jane Wong
Positive BookPage Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is experimental in form and dense with beautiful sensory images, particularly of food. In her own indelible way, Wong records her coming of age and finding her place in her family, in poetry and in the world.
Lixing Sun
Positive Publishers Weekly The accessible prose offers an eye-opening take on lying in the natural world and how evolutionary pressures to deceive impact human behavior. The smart parallels between humans and animals make for an insightful outing.
Emilia Hart
Positive BookPage Featuring beautiful descriptions of the plants, animals and insects of rural Cumbria, Weyward also makes good use of objects ... Most of the novel’s men are portrayed as unremittingly villainous, and some readers will wish for a little more complexity there. Still, Weyward is a satisfying, well-plotted historical page turner and a welcome addition to the feminist field of \'witcherature.\'
Stephanie Clifford
Positive BookPage Full of marvelous period details... The Farewell Tour covers a huge amount of ground, with a correspondingly large number of supporting characters, a sometimes dizzying array ... Lillian herself is an appealing mix: determined and hard charging, blustery and often unable to get out of her own way. Like a country ballad, The Farewell Tour offers a bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships and heartfelt songs.
Alice Winn
Rave BookPage An epic love story ... Author Alice Winn so deeply inhabits her characters, their vanishing prep-school world, the end of empire and the arrival of brutal modern war that it’s hard to believe this is her first novel. In Memoriam feels like an old-fashioned door stopper, with a huge cast of background characters ... A gorgeous novel, both a meditation on the futility and trauma of a war that sent a generation of young men to their deaths and a gripping love-in-wartime story, with a bittersweet yet hopeful conclusion.
Katherine May
Rave BookPage Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age offers similar meditative pleasures as her previous collection ... May doesn’t gloss over her feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy ... May details the small disappointments and larger surprises she encountered on her journey, and her sentences, plain yet gorgeous, cast a spell ... Though May’s search for enchantment seems perhaps better suited to the English landscape, with its fairy tale-like ancient sites and villages, than to our American suburban sprawl, Enchantment offers a lovely, meditative way to begin another tumultuous year.
Colm Toíbín
Positive BookPage A Guest at the Feast gathers recent essays that show his full range ... The title essay, \'A Guest at the Feast,\' is the book’s highlight ... A Guest at the Feast is a collection that will remind readers of Tóibín’s power as a writer of more than just memorable fiction. His cleareyed, considered critiques of powerful people and vivid personal essays can make readers long for a place they’ve never seen.
Natasha Leggero
Positive BookPage Natasha Leggero muses, often hilariously, about what it’s like to have a baby at 42 and find your way as a mom ... Leggero’s style is breezy, sometimes over-the-top, with punchline quips punctuating her anecdotes. She’s like the funny friend who’ll say anything after a cocktail or two ... Leggero details her grueling path to pregnancy and her first few years as a parent with humor and insight ... A book with a lot of heart and even some wisdom.
Jonathan Freedland
Rave BookPage Historically significant and riveting ... The brutality and inhumanity of Nazis at every level is chilling and can make for difficult reading. At the same time, Freedland’s depth of research gives a more complete picture of Auschwitz ... Vivid.
Dani Shapiro
Positive BookPage A family story, told in the gorgeous, evocative language she’s known for ... The novel’s narrative occasionally moves into a mystical mode, which feels a little out of place, but Signal Fires is mainly a meditation on families—the secrets we keep, the hurts we don’t mean to inflict—and how those secrets and hurts play out over time.
Ann Mah
Positive BookPage Though Mah mainly remains true to the historical timeline, she adds intrigue and fizzy romance with a speculative connection to a young American writer, Jack Marquand ... The novel’s narration is intimate, full of layered interiority about Jacqueline’s loneliness, her changing understanding of the world and her possible place within it. If Mah’s Jacqueline sometimes feels a little too perfect—sensitive to everyone around her, to Paris’ beauty and class details, and a little too witty for a 20-year-old—it’s a small quibble. The older Jackie’s narration also helps to make the younger more believable ... beautifully evokes postwar Paris. The details are exquisite (for instance, the lacy appearance of thinly sliced roast beef that’s been spoiled by worms), and Mah’s writing shines in its close attention to place and sensory details. In bringing Jacqueline Bouvier’s transformative Paris interlude to the page, Mah offers readers a lovely, immersive visit to a vanished city.
Jessie Burton
Positive BookPage Throughout The House of Fortune, Burton beautifully evokes golden-age Amsterdam. It’s as though she has seamlessly incorporated aspects of memorable Dutch still lifes, portraits and landscape paintings into the narrative. If The House of Fortune doesn’t feature quite the same level of sinister gothic atmosphere and suspenseful plotting as The Miniaturist, it’s still a satisfying family drama.
Nell Stevens
Positive BookPage Blanca has a very long memory, but her voice is fresh. She\'s often funny, sometimes enraged, full of longing—an all-too-human ghost ... She can access people\'s memories and see their futures, which helps to give the novel its structure, as the story moves between past and present ... an inventive, imaginative approach to historical fiction, full of comic moments but also sorrow, violence and beauty. If the novel\'s narrative drive is sometimes uneven, that\'s a small quibble. Blanca, though a ghost, is full of life, a wonderful guide to another time and place.
Katherine J Chen
Positive BookPage Chen\'s often-gorgeous prose moves smoothly from Joan\'s village to the luxurious, treacherous French court. Throughout, Joan\'s musings on the hampered roles of women and peasants in a disorganized, beleaguered France are progressive yet still historically believable ... The novel features a large cast of characters, listed at the book\'s opening, and occasionally I had to turn to the list to remind myself about a character. For readers who love Hilary Mantel\'s Wolf Hall trilogy or Lauren Groff\'s Matrix, Joan offers similar pleasures with its immediacy and somewhat contemporary tone. It\'s an immersive evocation of a character whose name everyone knows, all these centuries later, but whom, perhaps, none of us knows at all.
Ellyn Gaydos
Positive BookPage Gaydos\' close eye on the natural world allows us to vividly see the cycle of a farm\'s blossoming and dying seasons. She doesn\'t look away from any part of it, either from newborn pig life, for instance, or from the pigs\' later deaths—the procedures of slaughter and the preparation of the pork that she will eat and sell ... Gaydos\' cleareyed, sometimes intense perspective reminds us that farm work is not always pretty: It often involves constant near-poverty, injuries, even desperation. Still, Pig Years is a poetic meditation on fertility, loss and the farmworkers who eke out a marginal living as long as they can. It\'s a narrative that evokes the pleasures and perils of life and work on a small farm.
David Sedaris
Positive BookPage ... offers deft, sharp commentary on masculinity. One of the collection’s delights is a commencement address delivered at Oberlin College that skates along on the surface with funny throwaway lines and ridiculousness while offering slyly sensible life advice underneath ... These essays offer plenty of laughs, but the tone is often dark as Sedaris contemplates his dad’s failings, and his own ... I teared up at Sedaris’ evocation of both the pain of such abuse and the unexpected moment of connection between the two men at the end of the elder Sedaris’ life ... an entertaining collection, both cringey and poignant as it celebrates love, family and even aging in an inimitably Sedaris way.
Katie Runde
Positive BookPage Runde has written a heartfelt family drama saturated with a sense of place and the passage of time. Brian’s decline occurs over the course of one summer, but the novel also explores the long, complicated history of Margot and Brian’s relationship. Along with the particulars of life in a Jersey Shore town and evocative sensory details of the beach, Runde vividly renders a portrait of a family on the edge. The novel occasionally moves into a more lyrical, meditative mode that imagines the Dunnes in the future, but there is also excellent use of more prosaic text messages and emails.
Jessi Klein
Positive BookPage Some of Klein’s essays are light...while others dig a little deeper ... These voicey, funny essays give unexpected dimension to familiar topics ... Klein...fills in the picture of a woman at midlife who’s beginning to make sense of it all. This collection is as entertaining and heartfelt, personal and comic as they come.
Stephanie Cacioppo
Positive BookPage [Cacioppo] is an engaging guide through the scientific portions of the book, and her own experiences of connection and loss enrich the narrative. Together, these intertwined strands of science and personal narrative make for a sprightly, illuminating book.
Diana Abu-Jaber
Positive BookPage Abu-Jaber, whose family’s story is reflected here, writes with a poet’s attention to language, and the novel beautifully evokes Jordan, from its modern cities and society parties to its ancient desert sites and Bedouin goatherds, all existing together under the whims of an autocratic kingdom and at a time (the mid-1990s) when peace in the Middle East seemed almost within reach. Fencing With the King is a complicated, character-driven and slow-burning mystery with a satisfying yet open-ended finale.
Emily St. John Mandel
Rave BookPage Although readers may question the particulars of the novel’s depiction of the future (wouldn’t the concept of a book tour be impossibly quaint, or even unknown, by 2203?), Mandel’s character development will sweep them along. Turn-of-the-century character Edwin’s sections are particularly well rendered ... Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly, the suspense building not only from the questions about that one strange moment but also from the actions of those investigating it. In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.
Julia May Jonas
Positive BookPage ... sweeps us along on a sometimes claustrophobic ride ... Part dark comedy and part satire, with a dash of the gothic and plenty of literary allusions, Vladimir is a little hard to pin down ... Jonas’ first novel, but she’s also a playwright who teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York. With her background as a dramatist, she brings notable verve and drama to this sharp campus novel.
Kerri Maher
Positive BookPage Background characters are occasionally placed a bit too far into the background, but this is Sylvia’s story, and Maher has stayed true to her. With its insider’s view of the literary expat world of 1920s Paris, The Paris Bookseller will appeal to fans of Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife.
Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen
Positive BookPage Some suggestions are simple ... Others are complicated and far-reaching, like to create real trust throughout an organization and to make child care a national priority, with a living wage for child care workers. Near its end, the book takes a turn toward self-help ... a well-researched, timely and mostly persuasive book that asks both workers and managers to reimagine the concept of work in a post-pandemic world.
Anthony Doerr
Rave BookPage While the changes in points of view can be dizzying at first, Doerr’s writing grounds the reader in homely but often beautiful details ... This is an ambitious, genre-busting novel, with climate change as a major undercurrent. And while sorrow and violence play large roles, so does tenderness. Like All the Light We Cannot See, Cloud Cuckoo Land resolves into a well-connected plot, with threaded connections that are unexpected yet inevitable, offering hope and some surprising acts of redemption.
Ellen Feldman
Positive BookPage ... we get vivid glimpses of life in this unsettled landscape, with uncanny scenes of American military officers enjoying beers in former Nazi halls, German Fräuleins by their sides, and the abundance in military black markets contrasting with the extreme lack faced by Berliners ... The Living and the Lost moves along quickly, and its descriptions and dialogue feel true to the era. While the novel would have benefited from more interiority from both Millie and David, it’s still an illuminating historical drama with plenty of action and even some romance, evoking a lesser-known historical period—the immediate postwar era and Berlin before the wall—and the complications and compromises that come with the end of war.
Kat Chow
Positive BookPage Chow recounts both her own youth and episodes from the lives of her parents, immigrants who met and married in Connecticut and whom Chow portrays with love and candor ... Wing Shek, Chow’s dad, became unable to throw anything away in the years after his wife’s death, and Chow portrays this reality with compassion ... Like the experience of grief itself, Seeing Ghosts is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.
J. Michael Straczynski
Positive Bookpage Straczynski...uses text messages, emails, online journal entries and audio transcripts to reveal the characters’ thoughts and actions, creating a 21st-century epistolary novel. Because of this format, the novel moves along quickly, although the characters’ thoughts occasionally blur together, especially when musing philosophically on the state of the world and their places in it. But a late plot twist is satisfying, intensifying the characters’ bonds as they decide what to do. While a novel about characters planning to end their lives is not for everyone (as the introduction notes, \'discretion is advised\'), Together We Will Go is, in the end, about friendship and learning to love.
Julie Klam
Positive BookPage In her conversational, often funny style, Klam takes us along on her intrepid search for the truth, near-truth and outright lies embedded in her family’s colorful lore about the Morris sisters ... Along the way, as Klam weaves anecdotes with uncovered records, the sisters emerge as distinct individuals and, yes, almost legendary women. But in the end, The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters isn’t about the sisters so much as it’s about Klam’s search, her wrong turns and dead ends, and the sadder truths that family members papered over ... an entertaining read that offers a substantial meditation on the meaning of family and what our ancestors mean to us, even when we can’t get as close as we’d like to their stories.
Tracey Lange
Positive BookPage Each chapter follows a family member, beginning with a repeated line of dialogue from the previous chapter, an intriguing structure that links the characters and offers a wider perspective while also propelling the reader along ... well plotted, offering plenty of action, but it shines brightest in depicting family relationships, love mixed with resentment and guilt, and in character development. The Brennan siblings are believably flawed, their troubles multifaceted. The family house and Denny and Kale’s bar are almost characters, too, well depicted throughout ... is firmly in the vein of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions, though not as literary in its prose style. It’s a page-turner in the best way, slowly doling out the family’s life-altering secrets. We root for the Brennans the whole way through, waiting for them to face hard truths about one another and, we hope, to move forward together.
Sean Flynn
Positive BookPage Have you ever thought, What my household needs is a few peacocks? Me neither. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying Sean Flynn’s Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird, which details what happened after his family took on some pet peacocks ... [Flynn] he approaches his subject with a science writer’s eye for detail ... The narrative of Why Peacocks? alternates between this family’s story and more journalistic accounts, as Flynn leads us through a natural and cultural history of peacocks, including the evolution of male peacocks’ shimmering feather trains and the roles peacocks have played in religious traditions, making entertaining digressions along the way ... Although this book is a quick read, it’s well researched with an extensive bibliography. Sweet and often funny, Why Peacocks? is an engaging mix of memoir, history and journalism.
Lauren Hough
Rave BookPage Oh, does Lauren Hough have a story to tell ... These essays are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar. But they’re also well crafted and make unexpected connections ... Hough’s writing is about voice, and her distinctive style is what carries the reader through. By the collection’s end, you feel you know her, and you know she’s finding her own way through writing. Hough is a writer to watch.
Elizabeth McCracken
Positive BookPage In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might be merely meditative, even dull, but a McCracken story is never boring, and this one offers plenty of surprises ... A new collection from McCracken is always welcome. Grief, loss and the passage of time run through these stories, but so does humor, both the wry and laugh-out-loud varieties. Comedy lurks in even the smallest, sharpest observations.
Helen Fisher
Positive BookPage ... gentle time-slip story ... Faye’s voice is charming, funny, sometimes philosophical and occasionally digressive. Her first-person perspective is in direct conversation with the reader, asking us if we’re still with her and assuring us that she understands if we’re not. Faye, Faraway is a welcome escape.
Liese O'Halloran Schwarz
Positive BookPage This sounds like a setup for a suspense novel, and What Could Be Saved does offer suspenseful moments and surprising reversals. But two other elements make this novel uniquely satisfying: the portraits of each Preston family member, and the novel’s depiction of the unintended consequences of late 20th-century Americans abroad ... Genevieve is an especially memorable character, depicted at first as a shallow expat wife but when confronted with extreme loss is forced to change dramatically. Schwarz also gives wonderful texture to life in early 1970s Bangkok, although occasionally those details go too far, lending weight to moments that don’t need them ... juggles a complex story and structure, creating believable characters in its portrait of a family shattered by loss.
Rachel Joyce
Positive BookPage ... balances the light with the dark, such as Margery’s trauma-filled youth ... The novel also has a marvelous, economical way of contrasting the drab gray of postwar London with the vivid colors, sounds and smells of New Caledonia ... Joyce’s fiction has been slotted into \'uplit,\' a publishing term for novels that contain some dark moments but ultimately offer an uplifting ending. For readers who seek escape, Miss Benson’s Beetle is just right.
Mary Gordon
Positive BookPage Payback resists categorization; it’s part satire and part meditative character study with a lot of interiority ... Still, Payback offers many pleasures, not only the range in voices but also the evocation of two eras, the early 1970s and the current decade, with the right amount of period detail. Agnes’ sections offer some of the novel’s most beautiful writing, with wonderful observations on families, life in Italy, aging and the passage of time. This is an intriguing addition to Gordon’s body of work.
Claudia Rankine
Rave BookPage If Rankine’s essays are wide-ranging (blondness, police violence, Latinx stereotypes) and well researched, they’re also conversational and personal ... These images and asides expand on the essays while offering a glimpse into Rankine’s process as a writer ... She is one of our foremost thinkers, and Just Us is essential reading in 2020 and beyond.
Yiyun Li
Positive BookPage Lilia bears some resemblance to Elizabeth Strout’s indelible character Olive Kitteridge ... both old-fashioned—an epistolary novel, more or less—and experimental, a kind of collage ... Lilia\'s notes...are often funny, taking the self-important Roland down a peg ... Li [is]...a wide-ranging writer who can brighten dark themes with humor and hope.
Sandra Tsing Loh
Positive BookPage Loh’s tone is breezy and self-deprecating—it’s like having a glass of wine or a long phone call with your witty, goofy friend. Because the narrative is loosely structured, you can read straight through or just dip into an essay when the mood strikes ... I wish that Loh had riffed on her amazing jumble of a creative life, and how switching genres works, or doesn’t work, for her. But maybe that’s a wish for Loh to write another book.
Anna Solomon
Positive BookPage Although the characters and their stories differ markedly from one another, Solomon’s omniscient narration serves as a lovely, wry guide ... >em>The Book of V. offers plenty of thoughtful interiority while spinning a fast-moving story. Lily’s meditations on feminism, motherhood, friendship and middle-class striving will resonate with many readers. The novel’s unexpected retelling of the Esther story is imaginative yet, in its own way, faithful to the original ... As with The Hours, The Book of V. connects its three characters’ stories not only thematically but also narratively, with a surprising yet inevitable and satisfying conclusion.
Carter Sickels
Positive BookPage Sickels does an excellent job showing the mix of panic, homophobia and bullying that AIDS once engendered. He also evokes the mid-1980s and rural small-town life with the right amount of period and place detail. Brian’s narration occasionally feels too composed and lyrical for a 24-year-old man talking into a camera, but that’s a small quibble ... While the story is bleak, it moves along at a clip, offering some surprises and a couple of unlikely, brave heroes. The Prettiest Star is a sensitive portrayal of a difficult time in our recent history.
Crissy Van Meter
Positive BookPage The novel’s structure is intriguing and unusual, but it can be hard to follow ... filled with evocative writing, particularly in the descriptions of the natural landmarks familiar to Evie, which witness essential moments in her growing up. Likewise, Evie’s first-person narration is vivid and close, although some scenes, and some of the novel’s other characters, seem underdeveloped. For instance, I wanted more of a sense of Evie’s friend Rook and Rook’s son Tommy, and a clearer sense about Evie’s dad’s early death ... Still, with its beautiful writing and redemptive ending, Creatures is an imaginative, atmospheric debut.
Therese Anne Fowler
Positive BookPage Throughout, a chorus of neighbors intrudes to speculate and offer background information, an intriguing mix of omniscient narration and gossipy lamentation. Although the transitions between the chorus and the other perspectives aren’t always seamless, this structure adds depth to the sense of Shakespearean tragedy ... fast-paced and thoughtful.
Shannon Pufahl
Positive BookPage ... offers many painful reminders of the damage that repression can do, but it’s also a deep-breathing, atmospheric novel. Pufahl renders postwar San Diego, the characters’ rural poverty and 1950s closeted gay life in careful detail, spinning plain language into beautiful images. Her prose carries hints of other writers who combine the bleak and the hopeful, such as Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner and Kent Haruf. While the novel’s middle drags a little, Muriel’s and Julius’ journeys are compelling and surprising. Pufahl is a novelist to watch.
Liza Palmer
Positive BookPage Joan is stubborn, angry, self-deprecating and funny. Humor is a strength of the novel, and Joan’s first-person narration allows for lots of introspection, although it sometimes comes at the expense of the story and the development of the novel’s other characters. Joan’s co-workers fall in line with her investigative plan quickly, none of them giving more than a slight pushback, even though they stand to lose jobs and health insurance ... As I read The Nobodies, I thought of the HBO show Silicon Valley, for its funny, bumbling characters, and then Younger, whose main character connects with her 20-something publishing co-workers, and finally, The Inventor: Out for Blood, the documentary about the fraudulent tech startup Theranos. Combining elements from all of these narratives, The Nobodies is a fast-paced, contemporary novel with a main character who’s determined to get the real story and maybe find herself along the way.
Sarah Elaine Smith
Positive BookPage It’s a compelling premise for a suspenseful novel, and short chapters keep the story moving, as Cindy makes a choice that harms others. But Smith isn’t solely interested in plot; she’s a poet as well as a fiction writer, and her interest in language shows ... Marilou Is Everywhere’s language mixes the inventive with the plain, which adds another dimension to the first-person narration, making Cindy’s lonely world more vivid. Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor in Cindy’s narration. The story comes to a lovely conclusion, allowing Cindy and the novel’s other characters some redemption ... Smith is a writer to watch.
Bruce Holsinger
Positive BookPage Although the novel’s point of view shifts with each chapter, Holsinger has made an interesting and smart decision to offer the perspective of only one of the four moms ... Yes, it’s a lot of characters to keep track of. But the novel’s frequent perspective shifting, interspersed with faux newspaper articles, texts, Facebook posts and video narration, keeps the story moving through the months leading up to the gifted school’s opening ... An astute reader may predict part of the outcome, but the story still offers satisfying surprises
Gretchen McCulloch
Rave BookPage McCulloch is fascinating on emojis, those tiny digital smiley faces, hearts and flamenco dancers that we add to texts ... McCulloch is convincingly reassuring about teen internet use ... Although the concept of internet linguistics might sound dry, McCulloch takes a sprightly approach. She’s funny as well as informative. Because Internet just might lead you to see the internet, and how you (and your kids) use it, in a whole new way.
Jennifer Weiner
Mixed BookPage With its long timespan and its focus on cultural change, Mrs. Everything is a departure for Weiner, a founding godmother of fun, fluffy, women-centric popular fiction ... Mrs. Everything’s flawed but approachable female characters, well-examined friendships and romantic relationships and often-joyful sex scenes make this vintage Weiner ... some details and secondary characters are skated over, and some sections feel rushed. Still, this is a warm, readable novel about figuring out what it means for a woman to be true to herself.
Erika Swyler
Rave BookPage Although Light From Other Stars includes plenty of science fiction elements, it’s also a coming-of-age story, as the young Nedda gains a new understanding of her parents and then works to rescue them and the rest of her town. Juggling dual timelines, wonderful mid-1980s period details and a large cast of secondary characters, Swyler has set herself an ambitious task. But the novel is well-paced, with a satisfying twist near the end that readers are subtly prepared for but that still feels surprising.
Lori Gottlieb
Positive BookPage As Gottlieb’s patients proceed (often painfully) through their sessions, so does Gottlieb with her new therapist, Wendell. And we get to listen in through this unusual combination of memoir, self-help guide and therapy primer ... warm, approachable and funny—a pleasure to read ... As we watch Gottlieb and her patients learn to tell the rest of their own stories and move beyond their pain, we find some surprising insights and even a bit of wisdom.
Boris Fishman
Positive BookPage The author of two novels, Fishman lets his narrative move novelistically back and forth in time through key moments like his family’s emigration ... Fishman’s writing is brisk and vivid, and despite generations’ worth of trauma the family suffered, from pervasive anti-Semitism to the brutalities of World War II, his memoir is often funny ... where this book departs from other memoirs: Most chapters end with detailed recipes, adding a lovely, homey dimension.
Alice Robb
Positive BookPage \"... lively, immersive ... Robb neatly uses her own and others’ dream experiences to introduce current research, including how dreams help us learn and remember, recover from trauma and stay mentally healthy ... Robb offers a range of suggestions for better attention to dreams, from keeping a dream journal to starting a dream group.\
Deborah Blum
Positive Bookpage The phrase \'celebrity chemist\' sounds like an oxymoron, but at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was just that, a crusading chemist who fought for safe food and accurate food labeling. In The Poison Squad, Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, tells Wiley’s story, as well as the larger story of what happened to our food supply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ... The Poison Squad offers a well-researched portrait of Wiley, rather unappealing food facts and an era of rapid American growth, with a government scrambling to catch up.
Bart Van Es
Positive BookPage The narration of the war years has a novelistic feel and takes on the viewpoint of Lien as a child. This method works well to convey the trauma Lien felt after losing her parents ... The book also makes wonderful use of Lien’s childhood poesy book (a kind of autograph book) and family photos and mementos. Van Es sets scenes well, contrasting the Netherlands of the 21st century—with its liberal outlook and high-tech industries—with the far more rural and traditional Netherlands of the 1940s ... though Lien isn’t named as a co-author, her own voice and the story of her survival, not just of the war but also of the decades afterward, come through clearly.
Karen Auvinen
Positive Bookpage Rough Beauty, opens on a beautiful March morning, when Auvinen, out delivering the mail on her rural Colorado route, notices the deep blue of the sky, the signs of early spring and smoke from a fire—a fire that turns out to be her own house burning...Auvinen can only watch as firefighters work to contain the fire, which destroys everything she owns ... Auvinen then drops back to detail her difficult adolescence: an abusive dad, an impassive mom, a peripatetic childhood. But she dispatches with her youth quickly, focusing instead on the years that followed the devastating fire and describing life at the edge of the wilderness.
Simon Winchester
Rave BookPage The book’s complicated scientific explanations have the potential to be tedious (at least to nonengineers like me), but Winchester’s prose is engaging, describing concepts like the role of precision time-keeping in the development of GPS, and the mind-boggling set of factors that allow a jet engine to power an enormous airplane without the engine overheating and melting. A late chapter gets a little philosophical, weighing the gains and losses that precision has brought us as Winchester delves into the history of the Seiko Watch Company in Japan, where craft and precision work side by side. But what remains with me are the stories from Winchester’s life, as well as those of the men (yes, almost all men) who measured, tinkered and persevered to build, for better or worse, our ultraprecision-driven world.
Daniel Stone
Positive BookPage The book retraces Fairchild’s journeys and includes enough cultural and political history to situate the reader in early 20th-century America, though Stone does not looking too closely at the ethics of Fairchild’s work, which sometimes involved stealing plants and seeds ... Despite occasionally awkward phrasing, The Food Explorer does a wonderful job bringing Fairchild’s story to life and giving this American original some overdue recognition.