RaveThe A.V. Club... it’s a socialist wizards narrative built entirely on the magic of show, don’t tell—a pretty sharp contrast to the Potter books’ largely aimless optimism ... All this and it features a solid will-they/won’t-they plotline and the same sharp world-building and narrative voice that made A Deadly Education such a delight. Admittedly, the focus on El coming into her power robs some of The Last Graduate of the desperation that made its predecessor so hooky; by rendering the main character’s situation less horrific through personal growth, Novik saps the sequel of some of its, well, horror. But for fans who devoured the first book...her ability to combine pointed commentary with one of the more engaging first-person narrators in recent memory ensures the sophomore Scholomance book will be as refreshing, if slightly less harrowing, as the first.
Stephen King
PositiveThe AV. Club... a first act of stunning formal control gives way to a second half that is frequently unfocused, lurid, and, at times, clichéd. All of which builds to a climax that seems to pull from the darkest recesses of home-brewed Twitter and cable news paranoia; it’s wish fulfillment for those living in a world where the rich and powerful orchestrate acts of monstrous evil, while we’re all stuck at home, brokenly clicking along. The action then settles, almost miraculously, into an epilogue that brings the book’s best qualities back to the forefront ... a delicious engine of tension ... King has written so many author-protagonists over the years that it’s tipped over from a running joke into simply being part of the background radiation of his oeuvre. But he’s rarely put this much time and energy into depicting the actual cathartic work of the job ... The rapture with which Billy realizes he can finally peek out from behind the masks and speak in his own voice (if only to himself) could have been corny in another book, but in King’s hands, it comes off as infectiously genuine. In addition to those loftier ideas, these excerpts are also a chance for King to engage in a bit of metafictional gamesmanship, crafting text that reads like the work of a gifted beginner, distinct from the more familiar tone used in the rest of the book ... At least in the early going, the bulk of Billy Summers is a delightfully tense crime thriller ... All of this holds true until the halfway point, when, with the pull of a trigger, King jettisons huge swaths of the tension that made Billy Summers such a compulsive, memorable read. What replaces it is a sort of surreal vigilante road trip tale, shot through with sexual violence and revenge, which adds a seemingly unintentional queasy element to the book’s central relationships. The complicated layers of identity fall away, and what we’re left with verges on the simplicity of a morality play ... it’s strange that the portions of the book in which its hero fritters away his days playing Monopoly with local kids are far more compelling than those in which he roams the country, executing crime lords and rapists. Given King’s experimentation with serialization over the years, it’s hard not to wish that the two stories—and that is, ultimately, what this feels like—could have had more separation between them, if only so the second half didn’t suffer so much by comparison ... It’s the writing that saves Billy Summers—both the prose itself and the depiction of the act. Together, they give the book the lifeline it needs as its ripped-from-the-headlines ending looms. Even in the most hoary of crime scenarios, King can still build tidal waves of tension from the smallest deviation from plan, sending Constant Readers plunging deep into the flop-sweat insecurities of his heroes as they watch a situation potentially spiral out of control. In situating Billy’s atonement in communication and creation, not violence, King manages to find a space for redemption that might otherwise have rung hollow. For a book whose only supernatural element is the occasional looming ruin of the distant Overlook Hotel—where another King writer stand-in once fared far more poorly with his isolation and \'gifts\'—Billy Summers is winningly optimistic about the life of the creative mind. More than almost any other King book in recent memory, it’s a product of its time, but not a victim of it.
Tom Scharpling
RaveThe A.V. Club\" Scharpling is a natural storyteller, with an eye for absurd minutiae, and he brings those talents to bear in the written word just as easily as he does on the radio ... Sincere revelations about the host and writer’s lifelong struggles with depression, suicidal impulses, and the harsh psychiatric treatments he endured in his teenage years all appear ... Scharpling’s nervousness in opening up about these experiences is both palpable and endearing, as he writes honestly about many of the hardest chapters of his life with bracing clarity. If there’s a downside to this rigorous self-examination, it’s that Scharpling’s understandable discomfort with the subject matter—and the sense that he’s trying to work out, on the page, all that has happened to him during his darkest days—also impose a degree of distance on his naturally wry voice. The wit never recedes fully, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that those chapters are for their author first, and the person holding the book second. The paradox, then, is that it sometimes feels like the reader learns more about Tom Scharpling from a chapter in which he recounts his obsession with a Wizard Of Oz arcade machine on the Jersey Shore than from meditations on his mental health. Not because Scharpling’s writing on the heavier stuff isn’t compelling, but because the way he embraces the goofy workings of the coin-pusher game provides such a clear window into the parts of his mind that bring him joy. The Best Show has always been a program predicated on dumb, delightful play, and it’s in the embrace of that spirit—and the showing, not telling—that Scharpling’s memoir really shines.
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Susanna Clarke
RaveAV ClubPiranesi operates as a tight, brisk, existential mystery—albeit one just as interested in delving into the satisfying mysteries of loneliness as the question of who did what to whom. When finally unraveled, that plot ultimately proves to be far less interesting than the presentation, and the protagonist. (The book occasionally feels like a short story unnaturally extended, or a novel cut short, somehow all at once.) But Piranesi himself remains an endlessly engaging travel guide, a spotless mind whose strange knowledge and odd blind spots provide just as interesting a labyrinth as the one he spends his days wandering through.
John Hodgman
PositiveThe AV ClubSimultaneously intimate and at a remove—the tone that used to coldly dismiss readers in the form of fake trivia footnotes is still occasionally present, just more personable in its mostly mock disdain—Hodgman has moved from early autobiography and home ownership to tales of his own wildly improbable career ... Hodgman has dozens of funny stories to tell ... far less gabby or tell-all than its subtitle, True Stories From Secret Rooms, might suggest ... can occasionally lose itself in the weeds of naval gazing, even as Hodgman’s attitude toward name-dropping sometimes threatens to breach the walls of coy and spill over into outright twee. Every once in a while, one feels urged to yell at one of his euphemistic references, \'Just call it the Chateau Marmont!\' And yet even as Hodgman waxes eloquently on the trials and travails of being a supporting player on the canceled FX series Married, Medallion Status stays grounded by never blinking when examining the self-loathing inherent to its titular pursuit ... is by no means a depressive or dour slog—Hodgman relates these stories, about Paul Rudd, about Disneyland, and, yes, also, about airlines, to his readers in a style that is conversational, funny, and still filled with clever little switchbacks and verbal tricks. But the underlying sense never stops being of a man who has accepted that part of him will always be an outsider, no matter how many secret rooms he’s invited into.
John Hodgman
PositiveThe A.V. Club\"The book’s two halves correspond to the character of the territories they contain: the first is warmer and more chaotic, centering on memories of its author’s younger life, while the second is more desolate, even as Hodgman is careful to keep a home fire burning against the onset of the coming cold. In both, a current of naked honesty prevails; the writer obscures the names of many of his friends, neighbors, and family members, but lays his numerous anxieties bare for readers to relate to … When it achieves profundity, it does so by avoiding profundities; in many ways, this is a book about death, but it rarely tackles the subject head-on, instead sketching in the details of the beautiful, silly, time-wasting minutiae and pleasures we all use to run out our personal clocks.\
