About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Anne Eekhout, trans. by Laura Watkinson
Positive Booklist A nuanced, beautifully atmospheric portrayal of a young woman’s intense inner life, foreshadowing Frankenstein’s themes of grief, loneliness, and the desire for love.
Jenni Nuttall
Positive Booklist Scholarly and authoritative, but joyful, never dry, leavened with vivid etymological tidbits and Nuttall’s wry asides.
Ore Agbaje-Williams
Positive Booklist Wonderfully witty ... This wry comedy of manners unfolds in a trio of engagingly self-absorbed, revealingly unreliable first-person narratives. Agbaje-Williams sharply renders each character’s unique voice, building depth and tension as the story is told and retold.
Daniel Wallace
Positive Booklist Poignant ... Wallace’s storytelling skill captures the vibrant personality Nealy showed the world, and his emotional candor delineates the tragedy of a good man \'who was toxic only to himself.”\'
RJ Young
Positive Booklist A compelling, extensively researched history of Greenwood and the massacre. He argues forcefully that since then, prevailing historical narratives tailored to white sensibilities have impeded a true reckoning and meaningful reparations for the massacre and, more broadly, for the legacy of slavery in Tulsa and the country. Young writes with the storytelling power of immersive journalism and the emotional immediacy of memoir. He uses personal experience to illuminate the human impact of systemic racism, particularly in education and employment ... Young pulls no punches here, and Requiem for the Massacre will challenge every reader to examine their assumptions about race in America.
Andrew Miller
Rave Booklist Miller renders character and setting in immersive, everyday details with highlights of poetic imagery ... Examining broadly relevant topics—namely the complexity of war, in which the line between innocents and enemies becomes blurred—this is a moving, beautifully written portrait of a legacy of shame, loss, and regret from one traumatic, morally ambiguous moment.
Victoria Finlay
Positive Booklist ... bundles history, travelogue, and memoir, flowing easily between exposition, narrative, and intimate accounts of Finlay’s travels and her grief. The writing is authoritative and engaging, packed with memorable vignettes and trivia: for example, seamstresses from a lingerie factory constructed the first NASA spacesuits. In Scotland, Finlay discovers hidden colors and patterns woven into tweed; in Fabric, she reveals dimensions and textures from the material world woven into human history.
Tom Sancton
Positive Booklist Sancton merges true-crime drama and family saga ... Sancton’s briskly paced narrative moves smoothly through three generations of family history, a complex crime plot, and a century’s worth of social and political background.
James Runcie
Positive Booklist Runcie, author of the popular Granchester Mysteries series, vividly imagines a young chorister as witness to the creation of J. S. Bach’s renowned St. Matthew Passion ... Runcie beautifully renders each character’s humanity and convincingly portrays a creative environment, grounded in faith, where \'music-making [is] a mixture of rules and invention, discipline and playfulness.\' Knowledgeable readers will appreciate the author’s extensive use of music history and technical detail balanced with notes of poetic imagery, such as a flute line \'skipping and quicksilver.\'
Jon Kalman Stefansson, Tr. Philip Roughton
Rave Booklist Stefánsson is a superb storyteller with a metaphysical bent. He draws characters with empathy and wit, and frames their condition in existential dichotomies: modernity versus the past, mystical versus rational, destiny versus coincidence. A mix of casual and poetic imagery animates the philosophical point.
Rebecca Frankel
Positive Booklist ... [an] extradordinary story ... Her well-flowing narrative includes synopses of crucial political and military episodes. Backstories and telling details bring major and minor characters to life. Sisters recall the minutiae ... The Rabinowitzes gave Frankel access to a trove of family documents, photos, and memories for this account of a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust, which includes source notes and citations.
A K Blakemore
Positive Booklist Manningtree Witches is notable for the beauty of Blakemore’s language. Her poetic imagery exquisitely conjures ambiance, character, and period detail ... The well-realized principal characters are more than simply victims and villains.
Georgina Pazcoguin
Positive Booklist Pazcoguin’s irreverent, conversational writing is appealing: funny, poignant, and sometimes understandably angry. Word pictures, such as anxiety \'whir[ring] inside of me constantly, not unlike a high-powered blender,\' evoke her personality. Although this story takes place within an elite ballet company, it speaks to a broad audience.