RaveBookPageLevy’s slender, enchanted novel August Blue has all the piercing detail and bewildering movement of a midafternoon dream ... In addition to being a novelist, Levy is also a poet. Her storytelling moves to its own music. Her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward. The novel offers the reader a dazzling gaze at the conundrums of existence.
Fae Myenne Ng
PositiveBookPageLuminous ... This family story will resonate with readers partly because of the crackle of its conflict but also because of the keen observations of its writer. Orphan Bachelors feels intimate and evocative, quiet rather than strident. Ng’s grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one’s bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations.
Mai Phan Que Nguyen
PositiveBookPageAt certain junctures, the plot creaks and shudders as it turns. But Quế Mai provides readers with wonderful linguistic play, and through her deft and illuminating descriptions of the intimate details of her characters’ personal lives and difficult choices, we end up caring deeply for them and hoping for their well-being.
Salman Rushdie
PositiveBookPageRushdie tells his tale with a generous and irreverent spirit. Victory City is accessible in a way that suggests he had fun writing it, but this is no lightweight novel. Pampa is the incarnation of the humane values of this (or any) empire, and when she is in ascendance, the empire’s arts and beneficial technologies are ennobled. Women serve as warriors and empire officials. People of all religions are embraced. The empire comes close to being what today we would call an open society, and its collapse is a direct result of turning its back on these values.
Allegra Goodman
PositiveBookPageStands out among realistic coming-of-age novels about contemporary American girlhood ... Sam is a very appealing character, and so are the friends who sustain her. Sam’s struggles aren’t uncommon, but the way Goodman imbues them with weight and clarity is. We care deeply how Sam’s story turns out, thanks to Goodman’s brilliance and empathy.
Dipo Faloyin
RaveBookPageFaloyin is a smart, often scathingly funny writer ... While much of the history of Western involvement in Africa is sordid and depressing, Africa Is Not a Country is not. It brims with the sort of outrage that speaks of hope, of change. Faloyin points to the younger generation of Africans: educated, business-savvy, united by Afrobeat and Nollywood, moving toward a leaderless revolution ... Throughout, the continent of Africa—home to 1.4 billion people in 54 countries where more than 2,000 languages are spoken—comes alive as a diverse, creative and complicated place.
Kevin Wilson
RaveBookPageKevin Wilson once again deploys his customary humorous, off-center storytelling to artfully delve into deeper matters ... In the end, Wilson’s deceptively transparent prose, with a touch of humor, a dash of satire and a good bit of insight, carries the reader to a humane and satisfying conclusion.
Stacy Schiff
RaveBookPageTerrific ... The effect is electrifying, and Schiff writes with keen insight and wit throughout. By the end of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, attentive readers will vibrate with questions about the parallels between Adams’ political era and our own.
Hua Hsu
RaveBookPage... becomes a remarkable examination of the experience of immigration and assimilation ... a questing exploration of the elusive nature of friendship as it shifts and reshapes with the passage of time.
Stacey D'Erasmo
RaveBookPageFull of lingering questions ... D’Erasmo is admirably skillful in moving the story backward and forward through time ... Intriguing and sharply drawn characters ... D’Erasmo’s descriptions are vivid. Her similes and metaphors are often explosive.
Andrea Barrett
RaveBookPage... you need not have read earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History ... Barrett demonstrates that while history organizes and distills events, fiction brings messy humanity gloriously to life.
Linda Villarosa
RaveBookPage... wonderfully written. It’s not an inaccessible academic work or a polemic. Rather, its points are made amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences. The book also serves as a stake in the ground for Villarosa as she powerfully discloses what years of reporting have led her to understand: \'The something that is making Black Americans sicker is not race per se, or the lack of money, education, information, and access to health services that can be tied to being Black in America. It is also not genes or something inherently wrong or inferior about the Black body. The something is racism.\'
Jody Rosen
PositiveBookPageWhat develops out of these entertaining chapters is a story of the bicycle as a great disrupter ... In a chapter about his own bicycling experiences, Rosen says he’s not a gear hea...But he is crazy about bicycles, and that love shines through in these pages. In fact, it glows so brightly that even a confirmed nonrider may give in to the urge to make her next grocery run on an e-bike.
Vanessa Hua
RaveBookPageHua brilliantly conveys the emotional and physical reverberations of the rivalries among the girls, who are more vulnerable and less worldly than they understand. Similarly, Hua keenly portrays the discord among Mao’s underlings ... By its end, Forbidden City has brought the reader into the beating heart of human history. It is literary historical fiction at its finest.
Liz Scheier
PositiveBookPageA tense and heart-rending story ... Scheier is sometimes as sardonic as her mother, as well as funny and frequently clever ... The narrative sometimes feels undercooked, but ultimately Never Simple writhes with the sorrow and guilt only a deep and complicated love can arouse.
Gayle Jessup White
PositiveBookPageMultilayered ... The long process White went through to establish her lineage will be especially interesting to amateur genealogists. But it is also of great interest in general because of the subtle and not-so-subtle obstacles she faced as a Black person claiming to be a descendant of the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Lily King
RaveBookPageWho knew she was such an exceptional short story writer? ... About half of these stories are new. All of them flash with brilliance ... Very satisfying title story ... King’s observations are both sharp and generous. Five Tuesdays in Winter is a collection worth dipping into again and again.
Jonathan Franzen
RaveBookPageFranzen, one of our best chroniclers of suburban family life, does not disappoint with his terrific new novel ... Franzen writes about all of this with penetrating insight delivered through incisive sentences. By turns funny and terrifying, Crossroads is promised to be the first novel in a planned trilogy. I can’t wait to read what happens next.
Ash Davidson
RaveBookPage... exceptional ... There is so much that is right and particular about this novel. Rarely will a reader have such a tactile experience of life in a forest logging community as one receives here. Davidson also sensitively portrays the fraught relationship between the Indigenous tribe of Yuroks and the white members of the logging community. Here, all politics are local ... Davidson was born in Arcata, California, just south of the redwood forest she writes about in Damnation Spring. She’s studied the lay of the land, and she expresses the heart and soul of this place and time.
Clint Smith
RaveBookPageSmith’s gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read about places where the story of American slavery lives on ... vital ... At each stop, Smith’s vivid descriptions of the landscape and his response to the site give readers a visceral sense of place ... quite moving ... Smith has an appreciation of nuance. He wields few cudgels here. And yet, How the Word Is Passed succeeds in making the essential distinction between history and nostalgia.
Nikita Lalwani
PositiveBookpageBorn in India and raised in Wales, author Nikita Lalwani moves us through the first parts of her third novel with ravishing, insightful prose ... This is just a tiny sample of Lalwani’s great skill and empathic heart ... Lalwani’s novel takes the reader under the skin and inside the souls of these characters. Its early pages are a magical read, as we are invited to ponder generosity and human kindness. But when the story bends toward plot—danger, rescue, relief—a bit of the magic is lost. It remains a very good novel, just not the very great novel we’d hoped for.
Judy Batalion
PositiveBookPage... scrupulously researched ... a huge achievement that brings an overarching coherence to this largely unknown story ... Batalion uses a kind of you-are-there approach that at times feels awkward but dramatically makes its point in the end ... also offers arresting insights into community life during this perilous time. It is astounding to read about the number and variety of Jewish youth groups that commanded the loyalties of young people. It’s also surreal to learn that mail continued to circulate among Jewish communities even as the Nazi killing machine was roaring down the tracks ... Batalian interviewed many survivors’ families, and these passages in the book invite us to wonder what it would be like to battle and survive for half a decade, witnessing the loss of friends and family, only to resume a \'normal\' life after experiencing all that trauma.
Bruce Levine
PositiveBookPageLevine restores Stevens’ reputation and contextualizes his political views ... not a full biography. We learn very little of Stevens’ personal life ... Levine writes in lucid prose with a great depth of understanding so that we see the evolution and occasional backsliding in Stevens’ thinking about race, slavery and economic and social justice. It’s impossible to read this book without seeing a reflection of our own combustible times. In the 1850s, for example, immigration was a hot-button national issue, though the targeted minorities at that time were German and Irish. Levine quotes liberally from Stevens and his contemporaries, allowing the essence of the man to shine through.
Michael E. Mann
RaveBookPage... punchy and illuminating ... Mann, a world-renowned climate scientist who teaches at Penn State University, uses both peer-reviewed climate science research and combative wit to expose the strategies of people and industries bent on deflecting responsibility and limiting the systemic change necessary to move the world away from dependence on planet-destroying fossil fuel ... Mann clearly has skin in this game. Both his professional and personal reputations have been viciously attacked in response to his work. Here he fights back, settles some scores and argues for the necessity and possibility of aggressive, systemic changes. It’s a bracing read—both eye-opening and even fun.
Chang-Rae Lee
RaveBookPage... wildly inventive ... Pong is one of the most intriguing figures in recent fiction. He is generous, curious and full of energy and ideas, a kind of life force ... Tiller’s travels with Pong are filled with wild, eye-opening, often hilarious adventures ... a surprising, spirited, keenly observed novel, full of the crazy and the profound.
Michael Farris Smith
PositiveBookPage...brave and ambitious ... One of Smith’s most compelling insights is that many of the high-flying men partying through the Roaring ’20s, as depicted in Fitzgerald’s great novel, had only recently returned from the harrowing trench warfare of the First World War ... In previous novels, Smith has written eloquently and sometimes in excruciating detail about masculine brutality and trauma. He does so again in Nick ... Smith’s descriptions of warfare are cinematic, chilling and unforgettable ... This is just an outline of a deeper investigation of war and its consequences.
Ed Caesar
RaveBookPageEd Caesar’s irresistible book The Moth and the Mountain tells two essential stories. Its primary story is an account of Maurice Wilson’s ill-fated 1934 attempt to be the first solo climber to summit Mt. Everest ... The important second story Ed Caesar tells is about his own obsession with solving the mysteries of Maurice Wilson. What gave Wilson his bold determination? ... The Moth and the Mountain has many, many riveting moments of storytelling and insight, and yet, some answers to the mystery of Maurice Wilson remain shrouded in the mists of Mt. Everest.
Samira Leakey, with Meave Leakey
RaveBookPage... masterful ... [Leakey] demonstrates the astonishing amount of knowledge that can be gained, for example, through meticulous examination of something as seemingly unimportant as a prehistoric baby tooth ... Best of all, Meave and her co-writer, her youngest daughter Samira Leakey, write clearly and compellingly about what these discoveries mean. In a fascinating chapter inspired by the birth of her grandchildren, Meave explores the advantages for our species of having parents who live long beyond childbearing years. Other chapters concern the development of our most distinguishing features: walking on two feet, the amazing mobility of our hands and the size of our brains. Some readers may find this all goes too deep into the sands of time, but many more will find it a thrilling account.
Jonathan Lethem
PositiveBookPageLethem is a beguiling and very smart writer. Told in short, breezy chapters, The Arrest vibrates with sharp, satiric observations and layers upon layers of strange, often funny mashups of popular 1970s and ’80s end-of-the-world books and movies. Ultimately, Lethem’s plot resolves itself, but in ways that do not fully satisfy. This is deliberate. As his fans know, Lethem often plays a deeper game. There are some answered and many unanswered questions in The Arrest—so many that Lethem seems to be suggesting that even at the end of days, the familiar shapes of stories are insufficient, and life itself offers fewer resolutions than we hope for.
Sue Miller
RaveBookpage... unbelievably good ... Miller is excellent at conveying and illuminating the inner lives of her characters, and she remains one of the best writers at depicting the day-to-day normality of sexual desire. Events occur in this novel—normal sorts of things—and Miller’s attention, her descriptions and the tempo at which she reveals them help us feel these events truly and deeply. She has found in Monogamy probably the best expression of her longtime interest in sociograms, an exercise to demonstrate how lives intersect and influence each other. Among the relationships of the characters in Monogamy, there are reverberations upon reverberations ... How great is Monogamy? If this is not Miller’s best novel, it is surely among her very best. One measure of that is how the experience of it deepens with each reading.
Marilynne Robinson
RaveBookPagePulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful, profound novel Jackwill not be for every reader ... it\'s a slow read ... If you allow yourself the time, you could easily spend a month reading and thinking about Jack, about old-time Christian debates regarding grace, redemption and love ... spirit-boggling ... [a] glorious new novel.
Jason Diamond
PositiveBookPage...an idiosyncratic road trip through America’s suburbs ... Like all road trips, The Sprawl has its lolling moments. Diamond’s suburbs are lonely and boring places in need of a sense of community or at least a trip to the mall. Our attention wanders, and we focus on what Diamond reveals about himself ... The very blandness of these burbs is at the root of an ongoing restless, creative explosion.
Akwaeke Emezi
RaveBookPage...remarklable ... Answers emerge incompletely, surprisingly and in fragments as the novel progresses and casts its spell ... One of the brilliant aspects of this novel is how Emezi makes a person’s invisibility visible ... a profound exploration of the boundaries of personal, sexual and cultural transition.
Yu Miri, Trans. by Morgan Giles
PositiveBookPage... brief, moving, poetic ... Time collapses in this novel, with the present, past and historical past interwoven. There is a mesmerizing, wavelike tumult and calm in the story’s movement.
Tara June Winch
PositiveBookPage... engaging ... Even with a slightly pat ending, this thread of Winch’s narrative is irresistible, as she offers the reader both a tactile and spiritual feel for the forbidding landscape. Her portrayal of August’s rediscovery of herself and her ties to her home is moving. She presents the legacy of oppression and strife among local indigenous people and European settlers with great nuance...But it’s when this initial thread intertwines with two other storylines that the novel fully realizes itself ... Winch, an award-winning Aboriginal Australian writer who is now based in France, uses this dictionary of recovered indigenous words to transmit the deeper story of Gondiwindi family history. We read it—and the novel as a whole—with both sorrow and hope.
Emily St. John Mandel
RaveBookPageMandel follows her bestselling post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, with a more intricately layered—and better—novel ... Mandel’s narrative does not unfold as directly and cleanly as this summary suggests. Rather, the story circles through time, deepening with each pass. This is one of its wonders. Another is how lively and sometimes mysterious the novel’s minor characters are ... Mandel is a vivid and observant storyteller. Some small observations make you laugh out loud ... a dark, disturbing story but also an enthralling one.
Candacy Taylor
RaveBookPage... [an] electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book ... amazing ...Taylor generated so much fascinating material in working on this book ... Overground Railroad is an eye-opening, deeply moving social history of American segregation and black migration during the middle years of the 20th century.
Miranda Popkey
RaveBookPage... bedazzling, psychologically fraught ... In the abstract, Topics of Conversation is about social and sexual power, anger, envy, pain, honesty, self-delusion and female identity. In the moment, the novel is riveting, disturbing and thought-provoking. It’s a slender volume with the power of lightning.
Maaza Mengiste
RaveBookPage... stunning ... One of the thrills of the story is to witness Hirut, who is often harshly mistreated by some of her wealthier countrymen, develop into a determined and powerful person. But that is by no means the only wonder of the novel. Mengiste has said that at first she felt trapped by the need to stay true to historical facts. Luckily, she broke away from that suffocating exactitude and produced a work of fiction that is epic in reach, with brilliant borrowings from the forms of classic tragedy ... the range of her Ethiopian characters portrayed here is something closer to the truth: There are some bad actors on the side of the righteous ... Mengiste often writes lyrically, but she also writes bone-chilling descriptions of the terror and savagery of the war. The book is impossible to put down or put out of mind.
Dina Nayeri
PositiveBookPage...a searing, nuanced and complex account of her life as a refugee and of the experiences of other more recent refugees from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. The stories are terrifying, disheartening, sometimes uplifting and definitely worth reading and meditating on ... Then there are the government bureaucracies that certify some refugees’ stories as \'believable\' enough for asylum and others not so much. Through her narrative, Nayeri makes vividly clear the Catch-22 of the process, especially for those asylum-seekers who are poorer, less educated and more desperate ... Nayeri is neither a journalist nor a polemicist. She’s a storyteller who invites our moral engagement. She doesn’t write directly about the situation at the U.S. southern border, but an engaged reader will certainly infer the stark human costs of our current official attitudes and policies.
Monica L. Smith
PositiveBookPageThere’s much to wonder about in archaeologist Monica L. Smith’s thought-provoking, capacious, often witty new book ... An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade ... In other chapters, again drawing on her knowledge of ancient civilizations, she notes the vital importance of infrastructure ... She describes these projects and project managers in surprisingly, almost shockingly contemporary terms. Can it be that ancient city-dwellers were not so different from 21st-century urbanites?
C.J. Hauser
PositiveBookPage... sharply and mysteriously illuminating ... At times the storyline of Family of Origin creaks and groans and seems overly intricate. But sentence by sentence, Hauser is a sharp and often witty observer of human behavior. She brilliantly portrays some of the central issues of contemporary life, particularly issues for the lives of millennials. And she raises provocative questions about how contemporary human beings will survive and make full lives for themselves in the future ... In the end, Family of Origin is worth a serious read and some serious thought.
Mary Beth Keane
RaveBookPage...well-wrought, emotionally affecting ... [a] beautifully observed story ... a narrative that holds many surprises, large and small ... Ask Again, Yes is a tale that will compel readers to think deeply about the ravages of unacknowledged mental illness, questions of family love and loyalty and the arduous journey toward healing and forgiveness.
Josh Levin
PositiveBookPageIt’s a wild story. But that’s not the only story Levin tells here. With careful sleuthing, he tracks Taylor back to Tennessee in 1926 ... Themes of rejection, racial confusion and possible mental illness create a strong undercurrent beneath this fascinating story. Much is murky about Linda Taylor’s life. But one thing is certain: She wasn’t a stereotype. She was one of a kind.
Rick Atkinson
RaveBookPage\"This book is, in a word, fantastic. It offers all the qualities that we have come to expect from the author: deep and wide research, vivid detail, a blend of voices from common soldiers to commanders, blazing characterizations of the leading personalities within the conflict and a narrative that flows like a good novel.\
Siddhartha Mukherjee
PositiveBookPage... remarkable ... [Mukherjee] is extraordinarily good at explaining complex medical and scientific issues and controversies ... Science and medicine, like all human endeavors, are driven by the knowledge, intelligence, ambitions and egos of the people involved, and Mukherjee presents lively thumbnail portraits of doctors and researchers and of the battles that engaged them. He writes vividly of the political struggles to fund cancer research and to limit known carcinogens like tobacco. He quotes poets, philosophers and writers, particularly Susan Sontag, and he writes with empathy about the experiences of his own patients. All of this makes The Emperor of All Maladies not just an exceptional work in the history of science but a fine example of literary nonfiction ... Mukherjee makes a large contribution to a better general understanding of this dread disease.
T.C. Boyle
PositiveBookPage\"... captivating ... Boyle, who apparently had his own days of wild and weird, is insightful and sometimes humorous in depicting the allure and chaos of attempting to live communally under the egocentric leadership of Timothy Leary ... The novel vividly conveys what was seductively tactile, profound and sometimes scary about this moment in time.\
Toni Morrison
RaveBookPageThere is the faintest whiff of the moralizer in the final pages of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison\'s short but stunning new novel, A Mercy ... Morrison\'s story unfolds in overlapping perspectives and is carried forward by astonishingly beautiful, often incantatory language that summons vivid dreamscapes and suggests an American history that seems more emotionally and physically real than reality itself. In A Mercy, Morrison creates a vast living, breathing world in very few pages. It is a marvel.
Adam Higginbotham
RaveBookPage\"... spellbinding ... Based on nearly 80 interviews with survivors and a deep dive into declassified Soviet documents, this account pulses with the human dramas that unfolded as people, including more than half a million conscripts, contended with the deadly explosion and its aftermath. Midnight in Chernobyl also offers profound insights into the failing Soviet system ... This is an excellent, enthralling account of the disaster and its fallout.\
Patrick Radden Keefe
RaveBookPage... gripping, revelatory and unsettling ... With visceral detail, [Keefe] describes life in the embattled neighborhoods, where suspicion and betrayal festered on all sides. Keefe also offers compelling portraits of some of the leading figures in the conflict ... the most riveting figure in this narrative is Dolours Price...She was, allegedly, not an inherently violent person, and she was left wondering what it was all for. Which is one of the most profound and unanswerable questions this searing book will leave in a reader’s mind.
John McPhee
PositiveBookPageExquisite, meditative detail ... worthy of any curious, thoughtful reader’s attention.
Mark Kurlansky
RaveBookPageEvery chapter of Milk! entrances with I-did-not-know-that facts and observations. The book also includes 126 milk-based recipes that Kurlansky thinks are tastiest. His own childhood favorite? Creamed potato leek soup, or vichyssoise. Early in the book, Kurlansky says that milk is \'the most argued-over food in human history.\' A skeptical reader will wonder, but in the end, they will likely be convinced of this statement’s truth.
Rachel Kushner
RaveBookPage\"...the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape ... Kushner is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.\
Rachel Kushner
RaveBookPage\"...the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape ... Kushner is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.\
Jennifer Egan
RaveBookPageEgan writes with great skill and illustrative power. Particularly beautiful are her descriptions of the sea and its mesmerizing effects on her characters. In her afterword, Egan describes the vast amount of research she did on the World War II-era Brooklyn Navy Yard, and it shows. Her portrayals of life in the yard and the perils and mechanics of the work of divers are marvels to behold.
