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Niall Williams
Rave The Star Tribune Gorgeous, wry, and humane ... May have the best sentences of any novel this year. Williams has an extraordinary gift.
Kate Atkinson
Positive The Star Tribune Don’t pick up Rook expecting a clever puzzle. Atkinson is capable of creating them, as she has in several Brodie books, but she leans away from that in favor of a zesty cast of characters ... A bit of a trade-off: Not as much Jackson Brodie as fans might like but, in return, we get what may be Atkinson’s funniest book yet.
Ian O'Connor
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune O’Connor is a terrific writer ... But the hot goss is not so hot ... O’Connor’s interview with Rodgers doesn’t seem to have produced much new, off-the-field information, but if an insightful look at the magic he has made on the gridiron is what you seek, Out of the Darkness could be for you.
Rick Jervis
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune It’s gripping stuff. It’s also moving because Jervis takes care to put the women — Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Luera, \"Chelly\" Cantu and Janelle Ortiz — at his book’s center. Despite its title, Devil is really about the poverty, addiction and racism that put these four in the path of danger.
Peter Heller
Rave The Star Tribune Heller’s string of gripping adventures gets darker and a bit more political in his latest ... Occasionally feels more didactic than Heller at his lean, spare best ... Those are minor flaws, though. Because Burn grabs you from its first chapter.
Mikita Brottman
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Brottman gets a little too cocky — muddying her book with less-pertinent references to, for instance, Hamlet — but... she has the ability to make sense of seemingly inexplicable behavior by zeroing in on the banal desires that lead to it.
Julia Phillips
Rave The Star Tribune A page turner that\'s full of insightful writing ... Calm, hypnotic prose.
Simon Van Booy
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune The motivations of the characters — Helen, in particular — are nuanced and only gradually revealed, but the writing is pure and unadorned ... In its quiet, loving way, Sipsworth feels as rare and special as a friend.
Caroline Alexander
Positive The Star Tribune It\'s not a ton of fun to read, though. Alexander\'s account is beautifully researched and clear, but it\'s also slow to get off the ground ... Sections come alive with memorable details about the startled residents of southeast Asia.
Emily Henry
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune I feel like 50 pages could easily be edited out of Henry\'s 410 but, that quibble aside, it\'s a breeze to read, with nuanced characterizations, brisk setpieces... and Henry\'s deft wit.
Erik Larson
Mixed The Star Tribune I wish Demon told us more about Black people of the time. There are references to enslaved men fighting for the South and about others fleeing plantations, but their untold stories will have to wait for another book.
Holly Gramazio
Positive The Star Tribune The Husbands plays like a wildly entertaining variation on Groundhog Day ... One conclusion about a woman who rejects literally hundreds of spouses in her year-long round of speed marrying is that she doesn\'t want a husband. Gramazio allows for that possibility in Husbands, which she seems to have had a little trouble figuring out how to end.
Amor Towles
Rave The Star Tribune These are jam-packed, juicy stories with lots of plot ... It\'s incredibly satisfying, old-fashioned storytelling with characters you care about, surprising but logical situations, liberal use of cliffhangers and, in each story, an ending that deals out fate in a way you won\'t have seen coming ... This is a book so packed with pleasure that even the letters are delightful.
Chris Bohjalian
Mixed The Star Tribune Bohjalian writes with verve and humor, and his depiction of a seedy, past-its prime casino feels just right ... Princess finds Bohjalian trying an interesting experiment that really pays off: We\'re not entirely sure if we\'re supposed to identify with Crissy.
Rita Bullwinkel
Rave The Star Tribune The experience of reading it is exciting ... The prose is not flashy but Bullwinkel...comes up with one brilliant descriptive phrase after another.
Thomas Mullen
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Anna and Devon are memorable characters ... The way Mullen constructs Rumor, alternating between the two protagonists\' individual investigations, smartly invites us into the story ... Mullen\'s lean prose captures a variety of attitudes about both the war in Europe and at home.
A J Finn
Positive The Star Tribune \"If you\'re up for being kept in the dark, one of the early pleasures of End of Story is not knowing precisely what sort of book it is. It\'s set in the present but if Charlotte Brontë had a laptop and access to social media, you could imagine her crafting End of Story, which begins in the Gothic territory of her Jane Eyre ... Eventually, there\'s also a murder. It takes about 200 pages to get there and that feels too long. Finn ratcheted up the tension immediately in Woman in the Window, in which an unreliable narrator witnessed evildoing at the beginning of the book, but End spends a lot of time on scenery-setting. That\'s tricky, since it\'s difficult to invest in the disappearance of two characters who were gone well before the book begins ... Luckily, Finn is an assured, witty writer with a gift for entertaining description and sharp instincts about how many references to other mysteries he can get away with ... It could be dangerous to name-drop Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and others. Those legends raise expectations and plenty of writers since them have invented compelling situations that they couldn\'t figure out how to resolve. Finn, however, knows what he\'s doing. The way he wraps up End of Story is so satisfying that it fits comfortably in that august company.\
Rae Giana Rashad
Rave The Star Tribune Provocative ... Rashad is terrific at characterization — we feel deeply Solenne\'s confusion, pain and hope. As she ponders her mother\'s words and tries to take control of her own life, she springs to vivid life.
Michael Wolraich
Positive The Star Tribune \"Even though she\'s dead before Bishop begins, Gordon emerges fully formed in Wolraich\'s account ... I\'d read an entire book about Gordon and I\'d love more on the atmosphere of the Jazz Age itself. But I was intrigued by Wolraich\'s account of Tammany and by the connections he makes between the politics of 100 years ago and 2024. There\'s a sense throughout the book that the world doesn\'t work so differently today and that we could be just one splashy murder away from a similar comeuppance.\
Leslie Jamison
Positive The Star Tribune Jamison\'s essays...are so compassionate and insightful that she interests you in topics you may not think you care about and shows you new ways to view topics you already do care about it ... Jamison is hilarious, with a dry and usually self-deprecating wit in which the jokes are so graceful and surprising that you may need to read them twice ... I was less dazzled by Jamison\'s writing about her painful relationships with men.
Margot Livesey
Rave The Star Tribune The Scotswoman is such a graceful, distinctive writer ... Lizzie is able to use her premonitions to head off disaster, but one of the wisest things about Livesey\'s book is that it insists that being able to (sometimes) predict the future won\'t save messy, foolish humans from stumbling into it anyway.
Olivia Ford
Positive The Star Tribune If you love British Baking Show, you\'ll eat that stuff up but, even if you don\'t, you may respond to Jenny, an extremely likable creation who never thought of herself as a real baker until she took a chance and entered the competition ... Warm and cozy.
Alexis Soloski
Positive The Star Tribune It\'s a sturdy premise, with echoes of a movie I won\'t name because it would give away too much. Soloski\'s plotting is brisk and her writing is hilarious ... Soloski has a good ear for dialogue, with distinctive voices for most of the suspects and pals in Vivian\'s orbit. The best of the lot is her brash friend Justine, an actor who keeps Vivian supplied with a steady supply of illicit meds.
Rebecca Renner
Positive The Star Tribune \"Renner has a dandy story and a great, mythic figure to hang it on: a poaching legend named Peg Brown, who hunted illegally in the late 20th century but whose poaching may have helped the environment. Renner also helps us understand that alligators are animals that can inspire fear, but ultimately deserve our thanks and care.\
Gabriel Bump
Mixed The Star Tribune The New Naturals is two-thirds of a great novel. Gabriel Bump\'s satire boasts lively prose that feels like it races to make its points ... Natural, conversational dialogue drives the book to such an extent that for pages at a time, it\'s almost like a play ... The trouble is the utopia — which, not surprisingly, becomes a dystopia. After a couple hundred pages of preparing us for the dreamed-of society, The New Naturals skips over how it works, proceeding almost directly from utopian dreams to collapse, which comes about because a deus-ex-machina benefactor grows bored with the project ... The last section of the book disappoints because it starts to seem like The New Naturals is a bait-and-switch.
Barbra Streisand
Rave The Star Tribune \"Chatty and sincere, the book reads like a conversation, complete with asides and self-corrections ... The effect is like she\'s sharing coffee cake with us ... It feels like it\'s Streisand telling us all the things she\'s wanted to say for all of her 81 years on Earth ... If you\'ve ever been a fan, even if it has been a while, I can\'t imagine you\'d want to miss it.\
Tim O'Brien
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Part of what makes Fantastica such fun is O\'Brien\'s tangy, slangy dialogue, which zips the story along ... Hard-boiled and funny.
John Grisham
Pan The Minneapolis Star-Tribune A baffling book ... An international kidnapping melodrama, with a victim we don\'t care about and a bizarre opening 40 pages that have nothing to do with anything that comes after.
Elizabeth Hand
Rave The Star Tribune Hand is funny ... Also is adept at connecting the creepy noises and disappearing objects of Hill House to the psychology of the four characters, each of whom is hiding something ... Of course there\'s something malevolent happening at Hill House. We know it on Page 1 and, although it takes these four dolts about 200 pages to get with the program, it\'s a measure of Hand\'s precision and skill that we have so much fun watching them put together the pieces that doom them.
Jessica Knoll
Mixed The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Knoll has a sharp ear for the myriad ways women, especially young women recovering from tragedy, can be discounted ... Bright Young Women is a smart, absorbing book, but it\'s in the Cannon story that it loses its grip. Knoll\'s structure is way too elaborate.
Richard Osman
Rave The Star Tribune Another madcap mystery ... The murder club books are not really about crime but about friendship and finding ways to stay involved in life, even if that means — as it does here — a missing cache of heroin and an alarmingly high pile of corpses with bullet holes in their heads.
Daniel Mason
Rave The Star Tribune Although this is Mason\'s sixth book, he writes with the glee and curiosity of a writing student who was given dozens of varied assignments by his teacher and who nailed every one of them. It\'s a dazzling high-wire act — and it\'s thrilling to read because it never feels like Mason is showing off, just that he thought way outside the box as he searched for the perfect format for each story ... There are a lot of great books coming out this fall but, if I were you, I\'d start with this one.
Mick Herron
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Secret Hours delights in complicated plotting that occasionally makes you despair whether you\'re understanding as much as you should be. Don\'t worry. You are ... There\'s wit and suspense on almost every page of The Secret Hours, where the good guys are bad, the bad guys are worse and the reader is in luck.
Hannah Carlson
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Entertaining, slightly academic ... Stories of long-ago people who constantly misplaced items will make readers happy they have a place to stick car keys.
Jesse Q Sutanto
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Jesse Q. Sutanto\'s novel isn\'t really a mystery — the murder is solved even though the clues are not in place for us to figure it out — but her Vera is an indelible comic creation who will hopefully pop up in many future books.
Laura Meckler
Positive Minneapolis Star-Tribune Dream Town may skimp on descriptions, but the people emerge vividly through their extraordinary actions ... Arranging the chapters by \"character\" leads to some structural issues — the chapters feel almost like individual essays ... But it pays off because it helps us see the human costs to the community of not achieving, or getting close to, racial equity.
Anna Funder
Rave The Star Tribune Almost impossible to characterize Anna Funder\'s book about Eileen Orwell, known — if she\'s thought of at all — as \'wife of George Orwell.\' But this dazzling, infuriating book argues that she deserves a bigger place in history ... It can\'t have been easy to write a quasi-biography of someone who was Wited Out of the historical record, but Funder has the receipts, and she shows them.
Peter Heller
Mixed The Star Tribune Heller has shifted from the meditative, almost poetic tone of his first couple books to out-and-out thrillers that are set in beautiful places where people do stupid things to mess them up ... Last Ranger doesn\'t have the narrative momentum of The River or his last one, The Guide ... Has the feel of a series launch but if it is, Heller will need to interrogate the motives of Ren, whose split-second decisionmaking turns him into a vigilante in a way that the book doesn\'t acknowledge.
Ann Patchett
Rave The Star Tribune \"Patchett...glides so effortlessly between time frames that we\'re barely aware Tom Lake tells two very different stories. One is a coming-of-age tale, in which Lara learns about love and herself ... a warm, funny book about kind people who do the best they can. It\'s a joy to spend a few hours with these people, which is where that never-wanted-it-to-end trope comes into play\
Laura Lippman
Mixed The Star Tribune Absorbing ... Something Lippman, whose characters tend to be smart, underestimated women, often writes about. It\'s satisfying territory but Lippman has explored it better — with more compelling protagonists — than she does in Prom Mom.
Dwyer Murphy
Rave The Star Tribune \"The fun of Stolen Coast is in how Dwyer messes around with what he knows we know about this sort of novel. There are sly allusions to the noir-ish movie Body Heat— including a cameo appearance by its late star, actor William Hurt — and Dywer gets lots of mileage out of the idea of Elena as a femme fatale. Jack knows she’s using him; he’s not an idiot. But he isn’t sure how much she’s using him and whether she’s being straight with him when she invites him into the jewelry heist plot. Stolen Coast is more deliberate than most thrillers because Dwyer is less interested in plot than character dynamics ... In those ’30s and ’40s novels, the hero may have been crooked, but he seemed to be searching for a code of honor that made sense to him. That’s what Betancourt is doing, too. The ending of Stolen Coast leaves us with some questions about what might come next and its hero with the knowledge that there’s more good in him than he realized.\
Paul Tremblay
Positive The Star Tribune \"The Beast You Are takes its title from the longest and least successful piece, a novella in verse that mashes up Animal Farm and The Hunger Games...Tremblay\'s style does its part ...but the payoff takes too long to arrive ... The 14 short stories, though, are dazzling in a variety of ways. A couple of them have actual monsters but more often, characters work at jobs that make no sense. Or they go to parties where they feel unwelcome. Or they retell the story of finding a dead loved one, slightly altering the details each time until we\'re not sure if the alterations are lies or an attempt to keep the loss\' wound open and sore ... Tremblay has spoken admiringly of George Saunders\' disquieting work and he dedicates one of his Beast stories to author Shirley Jackson, who knew about creating unease. Somewhere in there is what Tremblay is attempting — and the difficulty of pinning it down probably means he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do.\
Caitlin Shetterly
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Wise about humans\' ambivalent feelings and often wryly funny ... Alice\'s relentless, un-comma-ed overthinking of everything is both relatable and entertaining, as is Shetterly\'s ability to zero in on how many of us were feeling in the summer of 2020 ... You could be annoyed by the family\'s wealth, with two luxurious homes and an endless stream of Amazon purchases. I was, initially. But I became involved in their lives and in hoping they\'d use their time in Maine to find a way back to each other.
Patrick DeWitt
Rave The Star Tribune I think each Patrick deWitt novel is going to be the one that helps everyone fall in love with his writing, but The Librarianist could finally do it ... DeWitt\'s dialogue moves with the speed and precision of great conversation and its jokes sneak up on you, more like a wisp of wind on your cheek than someone tapping you on the shoulder to tell you something funny ... Bright and entertaining from beginning to end.
Leila Slimani, trans. by Sam Taylor
Positive The Star Tribune Reads like loosely linked stories in its first half ... Themes emerge gracefully in Slimani\'s languid, atmospheric prose, translated from French by Sam Taylor.
Paul Rudnick
Positive The Star Tribune Comic, but with a fair amount of tragedy ... Things bog down toward the end but, like Curtis Sittenfeld\'s Romantic Comedy, Farrell deconstructs rom-coms while embracing their many pleasures.
Megan Abbott
Positive The Star Tribune Abbott, who has written 11 previous novels, isn\'t at peak form in Woman, which isn\'t as ingenious as You Will Know Me, but Woman fits comfortably with her other feminist updates of thriller tropes.
Tom Hanks
Mixed The Star Tribune Opens with a prologue followed by 80 pages about uneventful life in a Northern California town where a young man meets his drifter uncle, a hero in World War II. Not much happens, so the long second chapter in Masterpiece may make you think, \'Why am I reading this?\' and \'Where\'s the \'motion picture\' stuff?\' ... The trouble is that Hanks is guided by an actor\'s instincts, not a writer\'s ... In Masterpiece, Hanks includes all of that back-story stuff — he\'s constantly introducing minor characters, only to dive back into their childhoods — and most of it feels extraneous. That, readers, is why skimming was invented ... Entertaining, guided by Hanks\' verbally dexterous humor, knowledge of film and idiosyncrasies.
Timothy Egan
Positive The Star Tribune Riveting, with a subject who\'s a gift to anyone hoping to make history come alive for readers ... Egan...is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer. He packs Fever with details. Some are revelatory ... Egan is also great at depicting the context of the KKK\'s rise ... The author treads lightly on parallels between 1920s Indiana and our present day. But in the closing chapters, it\'s clear that one reason Egan wrote this book is because the appalling KKK rhetoric sounds so much like what we hear on news channels and in Congress right now.
Jacqueline Winspear
Positive The Star Tribune Unlike le Carré, whose good guys and bad guys are tough to tell apart, Winspear resists ambiguity. Her The White Lady, set in a simpler time, gives readers a new do-gooder to enjoy doing good.
Matthew Desmond
Rave The Star Tribune Lively ... A book-length, unapologetically wonky essay ... Desmond spends the bulk of Poverty talking about society\'s ills but also points out what the poor could contribute if we thought of them differently ... And he has remedies. He figures it would cost $177 billion to solve poverty in the U.S. ... A hopeful book.
Ilyon Woo
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Ilyon Woo\'s subtitle... undersells her spellbinding book of nonfiction ... Woo\'s occasionally academic writing works because it gives us confidence when she uses narrative nonfiction techniques to fill in \"likely\" or \"probable\" details that aren\'t available in the historical record. But Master Slave is propulsive storytelling, powered by breathless cliffhangers.
Tracy Kidder
Rave The Star Tribune O\'Connell is a fascinating protagonist ... The picture that emerges over the course of the absorbing, inspiring Rough Sleepers is that O\'Connell is not only one of the good guys but a good guy who is vigorous, self-critical and even funny ... Kidder describes with modesty and compassion.
Alexander McCall Smith
Positive The Star Tribune That title could apply to virtually all of the 23 cozy, lyrical novels McCall Smith has written about Botswana\'s Precious Ramotswe but it\'s particularly applicable to this one, in which the subject is frequently furnishings ... as in all of the books featuring the resourceful women, the cases hint at sweetly sensible lessons about learning to get along with each other.
D. T. Max
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune D.T. Max seems like the wrong person for the New Yorker to have assigned to profile the late, legendary composer ... But these transcriptions of five long chats from 2017-19 sing because they\'re more like gabfests or tutorials than interviews. Sondheim doesn\'t say anything new (or, as Max had hoped, anything at all about his private life) but he phrases old news in fresh ways that will appeal to fans.
Michael Connelly
Positive The Star Tribune Both cases are absorbing and Ballard\'s outings with Bosch have made her a sharper (and crankier) character. Best of all, Bosch gains intriguing depth as he faces down death, unsure of the legacy he\'s leaving his daughter, also now a cop, or the corpse-strewn streets of Los Angeles.
Daniel Stashower
Rave The Star Tribune There\'s no definitive solution to the murders in American Demon, but Stashower\'s portrait of Ness is layered and he vividly re-creates a broken system where a well greased cop often called ahead so gambling houses could tidy up before an imminent bust.
Ada Calhoun
Positive The Star Tribune ... dazzling ... A generous writer, Calhoun spends much of Also giving others the benefit of the doubt. Still, she becomes disillusioned by dude-centric, mid-century Greenwich Village ... We learn about O\'Hara and Schjeldahl but the vividest portrait is of frank, un-self-pitying and effortlessly hilarious Calhoun as she struggles with her dad and with crafting the very book we\'re reading ... It\'s tempting to give Schjeldahl the last word on what he calls \'the best book I\'ve ever read\' in Calhoun\'s acknowledgments. But I prefer thinking about how I put down Also a Poet for a moment, believing I had one chapter to go, only to pick it up and realize I\'d reached the end. But it\'s not the end of Calhoun and Schjeldahl\'s relationship, which the gifted memoirist gives us room to hope has more, brighter chapters to come.
A J Jacobs
Positive The Star Tribune Although Jacobs has been accused of smugness in previous books, he\'s a self-deprecating guide to these puzzles (most of the 18 chapters come with several for us to solve, along with offering tips). He steps back to ponder why we love puzzles even though he still stews over one from his youth and a more recent example convinced him that one of his books has the wrong title ... Those stories build to the kind of conclusion that wasn\'t as clear in books where, for instance, he threw away polyester clothing because the Bible says not to wear mixed fabrics or insulted strangers because he\'d taken a vow of truthfulness. In a way, The Puzzler is a self-help book that assures us there\'s good reason to spend an hour in the bathtub with a pencil and a Sudoku or months fiddling with the world\'s largest Rubik\'s Cube (a task he farms out to a college student).
Dennis Duncan
Positive The Star Tribune Readers — even those who think the subject of this witty book could be filed under \'Books, dullest parts of\' — will be delighted by Duncan\'s breezy survey of the kinds and uses of indexes.
Nina De Gramont
Mixed Star Tribune It boasts many lyrical sentences, particularly in the final chapter, but The Christie Affair feels like it was abandoned in the middle of the editing process ... De Gramont has concocted an intriguing if implausible theory, but it\'s a struggle getting there because Christie, the lone sympathetic person in the story, is only a minor character and because O\'Dea is such a confusing narrator ... De Gramont spends far too much time on O\'Dea\'s repetitive back story, invents a murder mystery but gives us no clues to solve it, muddles the timeline and, worst of all, has O\'Dea describing events for which she could not have been present and diving into the thought processes of people she doesn\'t even know.
Anthony Doerr
Mixed The Star Tribune ... experiences more growing pains as it grows and grows across 626 pages ... Whereas Doerr\'s previous novel was so enthralling that we didn\'t mind shifting between its equally fascinating protagonists, Cloud wants us to be charmed by half a dozen main characters. I wasn\'t and, as a result, chunks of the novel — the Konstance parts, mostly — had me wishing that Doerr would get back to the more captivating people ... Doerr also misses an opportunity with the children who are creating the play ... Doerr has not lost the gift for making us love his characters, though ... Doerr\'s excesses are part of this novel\'s big-hearted, sprawling appeal.
Edward White
Positive The Star Tribune Edward White divides the legendary director\'s life into 12 categories, including his Catholicism, childhood, weight and artistry. The approach can be confounding—early on, White refers to Hitch\'s formative 20s in Germany but doesn\'t get to why they were formative until the end—but when it works, it really works. By far the most compelling of the chapters is \'The Womanizer,\' which grapples with whether the mind behind \'Vertigo\' and \'Psycho\' was a total perv. White balances admirers (Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman loved him) with detractors such as Tippi Hedren ... As good as [White] is at differentiating between acceptable behavior across the decades, he doesn\'t seem to consider that Hedren\'s view of her relationship with Hitchcock may have changed over the years not because she made up stories but because she came to see her trauma differently ... White also occasionally falls into the trap of conflating Hitchcock\'s art with his life but, even there, he draws interesting parallels between the director\'s childhood traumas and violence depicted in his films ... The book will mostly appeal to fans who know those movies but some chapters hint at subjects of broader interest[.]
Jacqueline Winspear
Mixed The Star Tribune That\'s gripping stuff and, as always, Winspear finesses the thriller elements without losing sight of the character stuff that readers probably care about most: Even as Maisie is puzzling over the murder, she\'s also finding a safe place for the boy and his loved ones, who are being hunted by the killer and by Freddie\'s violent father. Where Winspear isn\'t as successful is in integrating the bucolic life that dominated a couple of previous novels in the series ... It feels like Winspear is building up to a turning point ... Winspear still offers entertaining insight into midcentury detective work (Maisie capably demonstrates how to search a bomb site and another scene outlines how to respond to an air-raid warning) ... Winspear has gotten Maisie out of and into plenty of jams before so I don\'t doubt that she\'s working on compelling new dilemmas, and no one will blame her for granting tragedy-plagued Maisie a novel or two of perfect bliss.
Claire Thomas
Rave The Star Tribune ... ingenius ... Full of perfectly observed details ... There\'s a bit of Mrs. Dalloway in Thomas\' three streams of consciousness, and you may wish the theatergoers would pay more attention to what\'s happening onstage, but our glimpses into the women\'s thoughts are a sharp way to illustrate how, based on our unique histories and views, each person who sees a play experiences a very different version of it.
Charles Finch
Rave The Star Tribune ... witty ... Finch sketches the manners of this snooty resort town with a Jane Austen-like precision ... I haven\'t read all of the Lenox novels but this is my favorite of those I have read. I\'d enjoy its graceful prose and keen observations even if it weren\'t a dandy mystery. Which it is.
Gabriel Byrne
Positive The Star Tribune It feels torn between two editors, shifting non-chronologically from idyllic recollections of an Irish boyhood, alive with nature and church-centered performances, to sardonic stories about showbiz ... It shouldn’t mesh but the In Treatment star is a graceful stylist who candidly describes his sister’s mental illness and his own molestation by a priest while finding elegant connections between childhood longings and adult mistakes.
T. Jefferson Parker
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune ... a dandy yarn whose pages turn at a Michael Connelly-esque clip ... Parker goes a little heavy on the outsized sexual appeal of his hero but his fast-paced novel contains just enough real-world stuff — domestic terrorism, election chicanery — to make it as unsettling as it is gripping.
Eleanor Herman
Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune To be fair about the current occupant of the Oval Office, none of the Stormy Daniels/Miss America anecdotes in Sex With Presidents date to his presidency, so the title is inaccurate in his case. Same goes for the chapters on Gary Hart and Alexander Hamilton, both of whom had plenty of sex without the benefit of a presidency ... Because Herman’s un-footnoted Sex With Presidents is a work of \'popular nonfiction,\' not scholarship, she cuts corners elsewhere, too. Faced with no historical record on what a Hamilton conquest looked like, Herman invents one ... I’m not sure why she declines to call Thomas Jefferson a rapist, since that’s what his treatment of underage, enslaved Sally Hemings amounts to. And Herman seems to confirm 15th president James Buchanan’s long-rumored homosexuality, for instance, but offers no sourcing other than a chapter where she says her stories about presidents have been well-documented elsewhere ... I’m not sure why she declines to call Thomas Jefferson a rapist, since that’s what his treatment of underage, enslaved Sally Hemings amounts to. And Herman seems to confirm 15th president James Buchanan’s long-rumored homosexuality, for instance, but offers no sourcing other than a chapter where she says her stories about presidents have been well-documented elsewhere ... Herman is correct that many readers will have heard these tales, but she tells them with a gimlet eye and a talent for underscoring absurdity. There is value in collecting them the way Herman has, not just for trivia buffs but also for study of the American presidency.
Alice Feeney
Positive The Star Tribune Feeney is forced to do a lot of heavy lifting to set up the unlikely scenario but, once things are in motion, her dazzling ability to twist and twist again is fun to read. Even if you don\'t buy the final switcheroo, you have to hand it to Feeney for daring to give it a go.
Rosalie Knecht
Positive The Star Tribune Knecht handles the Graham Greene-esque elements briskly, but the biggest pleasure is how she evokes a not-so-distant time with specific, slightly outdated language...and period details ... Kelly narrates Mystery in a sharp, sardonic voice and Knecht is able to help us see why, frustratingly, Kelly keeps making the same mistakes. As a result, we understand that the real puzzle our heroine must solve is who, exactly, does she want to be?
Joseph O'Connor
Mixed The Star Tribune In description, Shadowplay sounds like it\'s all about plot but, in reality, it\'s all about sentences so lush you could wrap them around you like a cloak ... lacks narrative momentum because O\'Connor is more interested in crafting passages.
Wendy Williams
Positive The Star Tribune ... anecdotal ... in love with its subject ... comic asides are balanced by poetry ... she has a clear, logical style and a reporter’s instinct for telling stories through the people. One of the pleasures of the book is how gracefully Williams shifts between mini-profiles of pioneering butterfly fans and experts, the majority of whom are female or children or both ... It’s a charming, even suspenseful tale, courtesy of the sly cliffhangers with which Williams concludes most chapters.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Mixed The Star Tribune Hillary’s life story literally begins when she meets Bill Clinton, launching a passionate relationship described in terms sure to skeeve out many readers ... one difficulty is that the book’s point of view—Hillary’s point of view—is a puzzle. She’s writing in the present, when we know for sure that the real Hillary has a sense of humor, but she depicts herself as a self-serious prude, only growing a sense of irony when she reaches 60 ... Sittenfeld captures both the charisma that made Bill Clinton a national figure and the snake-oil salesman odor that still clings to him. The novelist really hits her stride when Hillary runs for president, under different circumstances than she did in real life ... Sittenfeld’s depiction of Trump is pitch-perfect, giving this witty writer an opportunity for her humor to come through. Sittenfeld also is wise about the nuances of doing work that is always visible/criticizable ... In Sittenfeld’s take, Hillary is an expert judge of character but her fussy voice sometimes rings false ... Maybe the real message of the novel is that the complicated Rodham is impossible to pin down? It feels exactly right to identify Bill’s marriage proposal as a turning point, but I’d be curious for Sittenfeld to explore, as she did in American Wife, how that marriage might have worked. Yes, it’s unfair to ask a novelist to write a different book, but surely the most confounding mystery about Hillary is not \'What might have happened if she left?\' but \'Why did she stay?\'
Witold Szablowski, Trans. By Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Szablowski is most interested in the confounding contradictions that make us human ... \'We simply have to trust the cooks,\' Szablowski writes, with the kind of analysis the book could use more of. \'Just as we would trust them if we met them and they cooked for us. We must allow them to tell their stories — and remember them just as they wish to be remembered\' ... Even the book’s structure nods to the precarious existence of the cooks, as well as the relationship of food and power. Its chapters are titled \'Breakfast,\' \'Lunch,\' \'Snack,\' etc.That seems logical in a book about food until you arrive at the last chapter and discover that the titles don’t refer to courses. Those seeming antidotes to hunger are the names of the waves of bombs the U.S. dropped on Cambodia in 1969, secretly trying to carpet-bomb it into submission.
Claudio Saunt
Positive The Star Tribune Saunt’s book is both thoroughly researched and quietly outraged ... These events have been well documented but Saunt puts them in broader context ... The scope of Unworthy Republic is enormous ... Saunt so persuasively makes the case that events of the 1830s cost Native Americans a whole lot more than tears.
Serena Zabin
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Zabin begins in Ireland, where women waited to find out if the British army would send them with their husbands to the American colony. Zabin’s research unearths fascinating details about these women, whose stories have not been told: about their fight to stay with husbands they worried they’d never see again and how they adjusted to life in America ... Memorable anecdotes also reveal how crucial the British women were to their country’s efforts ... Zabin’s writing is clear, even witty ... The result is a complex picture of a society where, yes, some were beginning to chafe under British rule but where others were happy to have that protection. Where, yes, officials told wives of the soldiers who were displaced after the massacre that the city was not obliged to provide for them since they weren’t citizens, but where the city ended up caring for some of them, anyway ... Also, we tend to view America as a country on the brink of war in this time period but Zabin finds details and anecdotes that depict Boston as it would have felt then, when there was no such thing as the American Revolutionary War, rather than as it looks to us now. Her Bostonians and Brits-in-Boston don’t think of each other as combatants or enemies of war. They think of each other as neighbors.
Anne De Courcy
Mixed The Star Tribune Chanel’s Riviera is best when it remembers Chanel, the Riviera and the pervy excesses that characterize both ... De Courcy offers choice gossip about many...and paints vivid images about how this playground for the rich adjusted when World War II dropped off its calling card ... Chanel emerges as a fascinating and contradictory woman. Plenty of biographers have tried and failed to figure her out, so it’s a smart choice for De Courcy to depict the designer/perfumer’s competing impulses and admit that she’s un-figure-outable. I enjoyed Chanel’s Riviera but, too often, it’s about neither the creator of the little black dress nor her adopted home. De Courcy offers some surprising specifics about the impact of war on the Riviera...but she gets distracted by war stories that have nothing to do with her topic, devoting chapters to the Vichy government and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Paris. It’s disappointing, too, that Chanel’s Riviera is not illustrated.
Hannah Rothschild
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...bittersweet, comic ... Elinor Lipman fans will recognize this latter-day comedy-of-manners territory, which has the additional pleasure of letting us watch privileged, clueless aristocrats squirm.
Jenn Shapland
Rave The Star Tribune ... sensational ... The neat trick this National Book Award finalist pulls is to balance the stories of McCullers and Shapland. Each is an outsider who is fascinating on her own but, together, they form a provocative look at what we reveal to the world and to ourselves. The more Shapland learns about the legendary writer, the more she learns about herself and the more readers are apt to question the labels we impose on one another.
Sam Wasson
Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune As I read Sam Wasson\'s breezy, cocaine-dusted history, roughly two-thirds of which is about director Roman Polanski\'s Chinatown, I kept wondering: How would it be different if Faye Dunaway had agreed to talk? Dunaway, an easy target in recent years, continues to be in Big Goodbye, which emphasizes her tardiness and unpredictability. But, reading between the lines, it\'s hard not to wonder what it was like to be virtually the only woman on set, one whose director disliked her and whose key scene is of her being smacked in the face repeatedly by her co-star, Jack Nicholson. Wasson didn\'t speak with him, either ... And there are other gaps in the book, which bases an analysis of the 1975 Oscars on Cabaret having beaten The Godfather for best picture in 1973 (it didn\'t), which gives Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne\'s ex-wife an oversized role because she agreed to talk and which seems to have been overhauled in editing — so that, for instance, a punchline about Polanski\'s skiing only makes sense when you get to the setup for the joke 50 pages later. Wasson, whose biography of Bob Fosse is riveting, makes interesting observations about 1970s moviemaking, but Big Goodbye reads like a book by a writer/researcher who too often was forced to write around missing material and say, \'Forget it, Jake. It\'s Chinatown.\'
Emily St. John Mandel
Mixed The Star Tribune It’s in construction, rather than storytelling, where The Glass Hotel falls short. Mandel structures it non-chronologically ... Rather than intriguing us about how seemingly disparate events are connected, Mandel’s book frustrates us because, just when we’re beginning to warm to new characters in a new situation, she introduces a whole new set of characters in another new situation with another new narrator ... Mandel is adept at creating believable dialogue and situations ... The other stuff, though? Yawn ... Mandel’s prose is such a pleasure to read, and I remained curious about her protagonist. But my let’s-wrap-this-up attitude gave way to real delight in the skill with which Mandel brings together themes that have occupied previous sections of the novel, revisiting earlier characters and incidents from surprising new perspectives in a narrative sleight of hand ... Mandel’s conclusion is dazzling, and even though there are moments in the book where you may wonder if it’s going anywhere, The Glass Hotel is absolutely worth checking into.
Cassie Chambers
Rave The Star Tribune In this engaging memoir, Cassie Chambers honors her eastern Kentucky mountain roots ... With humility and humor, Chambers tells not just her own story, but those of her parents, grandparents and other kin, as well as those of her clients, women who struggle to get schooling and work, escape abusive relationships and raise their children despite poverty, isolation, the opioid epidemic and a legal system that makes every action and transaction especially difficult ... Chambers\' story is especially effective because she tells it without outrage or indignation, rather with gratitude and pride ... a fine memoir that shines light on an American region far too often denigrated and stereotyped.
Emma Copley Eisenberg
Rave The Star Tribune I was pretty sure I was going to love Emma Copley Eisenberg\'s true crime/memoir hybrid on page one ... the deal was sealed when it became clear that, in addition to being a thorough reporter and creative thinker, Eisenberg is dryly funny ... The murder Eisenberg investigates is of two women hitchhiking to a 1980 West Virginia be-in. A local bully was convicted of the crime, but Eisenberg\'s gripping account offers a different solution, one rooted in the idea that injustice happens whenever we judge each other too quickly.
Deepa Anappara
Rave The Star Tribune ... dazzling ... an enthralling narrative, grounded in Jai’s growing awareness that fairness does not guide his world and that happy endings are hard to come by.
Kate Winkler Dawson
Mixed The Star Tribune The latest nonfiction page-turner from Kate Winkler Dawson is really two books, one of which is great ... Blood spatter patterns, fingerprinting, stomach content analysis, specifics of decomposition—Heinrich seems to have been at the forefront of all of it, which Dawson demonstrates in case studies that focus on his splashier work, including failed efforts to nail comic actor Fatty Arbuckle for the death of a starlet ... Less successful are the biographical details Dawson uses in an attempt to explain why Heinrich was driven to bring criminals to justice. As too many stories pile up about, for instance, Heinrich’s spendthrift son, one can almost hear Dawson’s students at the University of Texas parroting her advice: Edit, edit, edit.
Matthew Dicks
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Once you get accustomed to the lists, it does feel like there’s narrative progression, even suspense ... Dicks is an amusing guy with a feel for life’s little annoyances ... Many of the deliberate repetitions — Daniel’s obsessions with penises and his wife’s laundry habits — are tedious ... You can breeze through a month quickly, or you could just tackle a list or two and call it a night.
Andy Greenberg
Mixed The Star Tribune There’s a riveting story to be told in Sandworm, but Andy Greenberg hasn’t figured out how to tell it ... One roadblock for Greenberg is helping us understand the enormity of the situation. At least in this country, we’re used to computer viruses being something that are annoying but can be handled with $150 and a trip to the Geek Squad. There’s also the problem of language, since Greenberg is forced to scatter computer terminology (BlackEnergy) and proprietary computer systems (Stuxnet) throughout his prose, and he’s already given to jargony language, anyway ... Where Greenberg does succeed is in scaring the heck out of his readers ... what Greenberg also makes clear is that Ukraine was a test case, and that, as election meddling has already shown, cyberterrorists have everything they need to hack into American government, health care and power grids. Which leaves readers with this unpleasant pair of questions: Which is worse, that terrorists disrupted life in Ukraine for no other reason than to prove they could? Or that they’re already doing the same thing here and we’re not paying attention?
Shannon Pufahl
Positive The Star Tribune The best sections of Shannon Pufahl’s episodic debut, On Swift Horses, have the terse impact of Larry Watson’s novels and, like them, it’s an intimate portrait of everyday lives that make violent shifts as a result of one fateful decision ... Pufahl creates a potent sense of place even if the time period, the 1950s, never feels right because the language and openly fluid sexuality of the characters don’t ring true. What does register, though, is the dual protagonists’ yearning, which is as powerful and wild as the mustang that Julius presents to Muriel and that gives On Swift Horses its title.
Ed. by Andrew Blauner
Positive The Star Tribune Some of the best pieces come from cartoonists acknowledging their debt to Charles M. Schulz, who preferred to be called \'Sparky,\' the nickname he earned as a child in St. Paul ... Chris Ware...is particularly smart on Schulz’s mastery of comic timing, and he tells a sweet story ... Ann Patchett, who crafts the book’s finest piece, insisting that her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was nowhere near as valuable as her early exposure to Snoopy’s attempts to write the great American novel.
Augusten Burroughs
Mixed The Star Tribune It\'s called Toil & Trouble but Bait & Switch is more like it. Despite a title that references the cauldron speech in Macbeth, a pre-Halloween release date and marketing that positions it as the book in which Augusten Burroughs comes out as a witch, Toil & Trouble is just barely about witching ... Whatever you want to call the small revenges against enemies and covert attempts to convince his husband to move, they make for an uneventful but amusing book that carves out territory somewhere in between Burroughs\' painful early memoirs and the humorous, domestic essays of David Sedaris.
Amy Stewart
Positive The Star Tribune America\'s entry in the war is still in the future as the book ends but what it lacks in action it makes up for in the cramped, all-in-this-together atmosphere of the camp. When one woman whips open her tent to introduce its martini-swilling residents with, \'Girls, meet the girls,\' Kopp recalls the breezy fun of classic, female-centered movies such as Stage Door.
Leslie Jamison
Rave The Star Tribune Jamison’s essays are united by her insistence that we mustn’t read her as the last word on anything. Should the people she interviews trust her? Should she trust them? Will her attempts to describe subjects be their undoing? These central questions make Jamison’s 14 provocative essays scream and burn ... [Jamison] is compassionate, curious and humble ... Jamison’s self-criticism welcomes us into her book. I can see how it could be irritating, in the way that the half of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that was about whether Dave Eggers should even be writing the book was irritating. But, in Jamison’s hands, the second-guessing never feels dithery or masturbatory. When she questions her judgment or expresses skepticism about a source, it’s not because she’s unsure if she should be telling these stories. It’s because she’s hellbent on getting them right.
T. Jefferson Parker
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Parker unravels the lies at a briskly entertaining pace. It\'s too bad an editor didn\'t steer Ford away from a few weird generalizations...but when the plot kicks in, involving a cult, a kidnapping and those white supremacists, Parker doesn\'t waste a single word.
Josh Levin
Rave The Star Tribune The verve and humor of Levin’s writing mirrors the brazenness of the crimes Taylor committed under various false identities ... You can feel Levin’s respect for Taylor’s daring ... Taylor is like a one-person, low-rent Ocean’s 11, and you can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity with which she kept it up for decades. Neither can Levin, who ends virtually every chapter with a cliffhanger, tantalizing us with clues to Taylor’s next big scam ... Levin makes sure that her story is heard and that we know its tragedy, which is that Linda Taylor was doomed from the moment she was born.
Julia Phillips
Rave The Star Tribune The individual stories are sharp portraits that add up to something deeply rewarding ... [a] riveting debut ... Phillips’ writing is spare but canny ... we want to shout at the characters ... Phillips’ work reminded me of Dan Chaon’s...beautifully written fiction that might be called a thriller if it weren’t so clear that none of the devastated characters is the least bit thrilled.
Alice Feeney
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Either Alice Feeney is messing with us, or the conventions of the Girl/Woman subgenre of unreliable-narrator thrillers is so deeply ingrained that she can\'t help dropping breadcrumbs ... Feeney knows how to keep the pages of this brisk read turning, with a cliffhanger at the end of almost every chapter, and she can insert 10 new twists faster than you can say, \'Roger Ackroyd.\' True, plausibility is not her strong suit, but maybe Know Who You Are is a promise that she\'ll work on that, since its last sentence is \'I never make the same mistake twice.\'
Louis Bayard
Rave The Star Tribune A house divided against itself cannot stand, Abraham Lincoln warned us. But a book divided against itself stands up quite nicely in Louis Bayard’s wonderful Courting Mr. Lincoln ... The structure is suspenseful and revealing of the contrasting ways in which two vivid characters see the object of their affection ... Mary Todd...claims center stage ... Stubborn and occasionally impolitic, Bayard’s version of Mary resembles one of Jane Austen’s spirited heroines ... it’s a tribute to Bayard’s entertaining novel that he has imagined a love story for Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln that embroiders the truth but that also fits perfectly with what we know about these very famous figures.
Jacqueline Winspear
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"Winspear’s desire to keep a steady stream of drama coming has in recent years been rough for resourceful Maisie, who has lost a mentor, a husband, a friend and a child in the past few books. But caring for another person seems to be sending Maisie in a direction that’s more fulfilling for her and satisfying for fans of this heartfelt series.\
Myla Goldberg
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"The faux catalog entries are the best parts of Feast Your Eyes ... Goldberg expertly differentiates the voices of the interviewees who help Samantha figure out who her mother was ... One of the big pleasures of the novel is Goldberg’s uncanny ear, which nails everyone from Grete, a Scandinavian-American friend with a wry sense of humor, to Nina, a bulldozerish gallerist who spearheads an obscenity court battle that overwhelms the increasingly unwilling Lillian and Samantha ... Lillian remains a frustrating character, too obtuse to see the damage she’s doing to her own daughter and too work-obsessed to understand how much she’s harming herself. For most of its length, “Feast Your Eyes” is a fascinating attempt to know a person we suspect is unknowable, but the best approach to reading Goldberg’s book may be to realize from the beginning that its shutterbug subject will forever remain a blur.\
T.C. Boyle
Mixed Minneapolis Star Tribune \"Boyle\'s timing is good, with microdosing still a hot topic. But, since his is a \'Gatsby\' story, there\'s only one way this can go. And, with his numerous, dull attempts to visualize the LSD trips that Michael Pollan has recently told us are indescribable and his near-total lack of interest in anything about women except their physical appearances, Boyle hasn\'t figured out how to make these dopes\' grim journey compelling.\
Andrew Ridker
Positive The Star To enjoy The Altruists, you will need to get past the disgusting fact that the wise, witty book was written by someone who was about 27 when he completed it ... Ridker is preternaturally smart about the traps that even bright people set for themselves, he loves his all of his messed-up characters and he finds hopeful-but-not-unrealistic ways for them to live their better, if not best, lives.
Janet Malcolm
Rave The Star Tribune Every word of Janet Malcolm’s latest nonfiction collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, is a pleasure to read, even if you have no built-in interest in her topics. The author of \'The Journalist and the Murderer\' comes off like a proponent of the \'Life is short, eat dessert first\' philosophy, placing her snappiest pieces in the first section ... [The essays] show off Malcolm’s way with quick, vivid word pictures...and her gift for the telling detail ... [and] reveal the breadth of Malcolm’s wit and insight[.]
Peter Heller
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"... [Heller] leans into the thriller aspect of the tale, with gripping results ... Former Outside magazine editor Heller puts his knowledge of canoeing and currents to fascinating use. He has created indelible characters in Wynn and Jack, pals who are almost exact opposites...\
Bill Berkson
Positive Minneapolis Str Tribune \"Since When is a pleasingly scattered series of reminisces, interviews, lists and character sketches by Berkson, who hung out in the 1950s, \'60s and \'70s with scads of poets, artists and other creative types ... Berkson died in 2016 without ever seeming to have needed to earn a living and he can be obtuse about his privilege, as when he blithely asserts that none of his crowd became soldiers because they weren\'t into war. But he has stories about all of the names he drops, ranging from Judy Garland to Larry Rivers (who sketched Berkson) to Leonard Bernstein, and the name-dropping never seems clubby or gross.\
Charles Graeber
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"Graeber’s writing is swift and clear, as if he can barely contain his enthusiasm for the subject — and, in fact, he can’t contain it ... One or two chapters are weighted down by talk of cell division and the like but, for the most part, Graeber paints vivid portraits of people who have cancer or are trying to conquer it ... The Breakthrough... is a rare and thrilling thing: a hopeful, even inspiring, book about cancer.\
Karen Thompson Walker
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"[Walker] presents even the most heartbreaking details... as if they’re simply the facts of life in stressful times ... But, while Walker is ruthless in insisting that the disease strikes at random (meaning: no, being adorable will not save a newborn), she seems reluctant to make us invest too heavily in any of the novel’s dozens of characters ... Walker writes beautifully about the things that define how a society either endures or collapses in crisis, a theme that may never have been more timely than it is now.\
John Boyne
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"... a a more soulful, better written entry in the Woman in the Window/Girl on the Train category of domestic thrillers ... [Maurice\'s] His behavior grows more and more reprehensible across several decades and it may not be until you close this devilishly entertaining novel that it occurs to you to wonder if, by continuing to devour his exploits, maybe you were encouraging his villainy.\
John Boyne
Rave The Star Tribune A deft plotter, Boyne has fun with the idea that vampiring is simply part of what novelists do, and he implicates readers in their acts of thievery-as-creation by making us like despicable Maurice, almost against our will ... it may not be until you close this devilishly entertaining novel that it occurs to you to wonder if, by continuing to devour his exploits, maybe you were encouraging his villainy.
Sue Hubbard
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Sue Hubbard’s quiet, gorgeous Rainsongs doesn’t rely on plot — there is not very much to the story — but it is a haunting read nonetheless ... Much of Hubbard’s book is taken up with meticulous descriptions of the land, the weather, the cottage, the terrain, the ocean and the Skelligs in the distance ... So careful is her prose, so beautifully wrought and thoughtful her passages, that the reader is swept along in this...quiet novel about a woman picking her way carefully through loneliness, grief and healing.
Ken Krimstein
Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune \"The wisdom of telling Arendt’s story with words and drawings is that — much like Lauren Redniss’ graphic bio of Pierre and Marie Curie, Radioactive — lots of complex information can be packed into one pungent illustration ... And no words could achieve the effect Krimstein does with the recurring outline of a girl, representing someone who haunted Arendt after she failed to save her from the Nazis ... The happiest surprise of Three Escapes is that, despite the often dark subject matter, it’s packed with wit... As a result, it’s a fun and, especially in a final illustration that encapsulates Arendt’s hopes for a better world, inspiring work.\
Amy Stewart
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"The fourth, funniest and best of the Miss Kopp books finds Constance Kopp at a crossroads ... Kopp\'s first-person account is wry and un-self-pitying, despite the long odds she faces both at the job and at home, where her quirky sisters are after her to bring home more money and less notoriety. The novel is more interested in characters than plot but it\'s great fun — fans of the Maisie Dobbs series will love it — and a timely reminder that women have been fighting the equity battle for generations.\
Sally Field
Pan The Star Tribune The title of Sally Field’s memoir, In Pieces ... could just as easily refer to the book itself: chunks that never form a coherent narrative ... Field’s writing is often disorganized and baffling ... But she writes with passion about the day when, after a breakdown on the set of The Flying Nun, co-star Madeleine Sherwood dragged Field to the Actors Studio, to a class for working performers ... The pieces of her life, though, remain puzzling, especially in the memoir’s rushed conclusion, which zips through four decades in fewer than 40 pages ... Like diary entries presented semi-chronologically, the book’s pieces just hang there, especially when it comes to men ... Field...doesn’t explore why she gravitated toward men who used her.
Elliot Reed,
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Why do we make lists? To remember to get Drano or to get Uncle Al a holiday present, for sure, but A Key to Treehouse Living suggests that lists don’t just help us organize our lives. They help us make sense of them ... Elliot Reed’s first novel is presented as if it were an alphabetical, autobiographical glossary, with entries that range from a paragraph to a couple of pages on topics such as Journey Into Deep Space and Podunk Town ... There are many more ominous notes in Reed’s elliptical novel. While supposedly writing about frogs or skipping stones, Tyce makes frequent references to exploited or abandoned children, lawbreaking and betrayal. Gradually, we begin to piece together the story of an unwanted, un-self-pitying child who figured out how to raise himself because nobody else wanted the job. The occasional brush with authorities aside, he has done an improbably good job of it.
Bill Cunningham
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune ...[a] charming memoir ... Cunningham comes off as a screwball mix of sophisticate and naif ... He seems to have dished more as a young man than as the elder version, since in the film he doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone. In the memoir, he calls out designers he thought were coasting (ahem, Christian Dior) ... What Cunningham does not do is reveal himself. A childhood incident, when his mother discovers him wearing one of her dresses and beats the daylights out of him, is the only clue about what the memoirist felt deep inside ... Maybe the best we can hope for is that, somewhere in a trunk above Carnegie Hall, there’s a second volume that will bring us up to date?
T. Jefferson Parker
Mixed The Star Tribune There’s...vague Islamophobia in Parker’s collection of Saudi and Syrian suspects, every one of whom is defined by the violent events of their lives, but the man knows how to keep the pages turning. Investigator Roland Ford’s client has been threatened with beheading, possibly in retaliation for her part in the drone killing of civilians in Aleppo. Parker keeps quite a few balls in the air, skillfully steering us toward and away from a batch of possible killers while maintaining a twisty, relentless pace. As a result, his Vengeance is swift, indeed.
Joshua Mattson
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune Mattson\'s wordplay (Noah Body = Nobody) and low-key sarcasm are reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov ... Like much of Nabokov\'s work, Mattson\'s novel is really about language ... Mattson also shares Nabokov\'s gift for precise wit ... Short Film is equally sharp about the way movie critics work ... A Short Film About Disappointment grows wearying in the second half.
Patrick DeWitt
Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune ...it’s hilarious and it’s about the travails of people with more money than sense ... deWitt — who bills his delightful novel as a \'tragedy of manners\' — owes more to Edith Wharton than Austen ... DeWitt’s characters behave with the precision and affectlessness of the people in Wes Anderson films ... DeWitt is aiming for farce and to say something about characters who cannot get out of their own way, and he achieves both with élan.
Joyce Carol Oates
Positive Minneapolis Star-Tribune \'What if Edgar Allan Poe’s stories actually cared about women, instead of turning all of them into comely, corseted objects of obsession?\' That’s the idea behind most of the six stories in Oates’ new collection ... A few of the stories ask us to identify with a protagonist and then pull a switcheroo, revealing that we’ve chosen to side with someone who’s cooking up a nasty plan ... honestly none of the stories approach the creeping dread of Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, who inspired the title tale. But even when they’re not especially thrilling, Oates’ stories remain insightful meditations on the notion that the real monsters are not zombies or vampires but loneliness, inhumanity and despair.
Emma Healey
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"Healey makes Whistle fresh and surprising by connecting Lana’s recovery from the trauma of her disappearance to the painful reckoning of her mother, Jen, who is equally lost ... Like her first book, Whistle is a hybrid of psychological thriller and domestic drama with a protagonist whose viewpoint is unreliable and a set of mothers and daughters whose relationships feel complicated and real. Healey is especially sharp on the specifics of the bond between Lana and Jen.\
David Housewright
Positive The Star Tribune As fans know from earlier installments, McKenzie rarely listens to his inner voice, but we get to. Readers are treated to his witty, self-conscious thoughts as he weighs the next dangerous step or tries to talk himself out of a bad move. He usually does it anyway. As is his signature, Housewright strikes a tone that is light on crime and grit but loaded with lighthearted exploits and peppered with Twin Cities references to keep us connected. A pleasure to read.
Jake Tapper
Positive The Star Tribune Tapper is a professed history buff who has done copious research, and it shows, often obtrusively. Famous figures of the day (Hey, there’s Jack Kennedy! Look, it’s Lyndon Johnson! That Joe McCarthy can be awfully charming!) wander in and out, and a good chunk of the book feels like leaden exposition for those who never cracked a textbook. The dialogue can be clunky ... And yet you’ll overlook these eye-rollers when the action heats up ... Perfect for an airplane or the beach, The Hellfire Club is a worthy distraction from the real-life news cycle Tapper presides over.
Todd S. Purdum
Rave The StarTribune \"With a jacket illustrated with a classic Al Hirschfeld cartoon of the dual biography’s subject, Something Wonderful is a thoroughly researched and chatty ... Todd S. Purdum makes elegant use of candid correspondence between the two and others, as well as previously published material, to make us feel like we’re waiting in the wings while masterpieces are created and staged. Although Purdum concentrates on the theater world, he does take side trips to cover the movies, highlighted by the rocky path of Oklahoma to the screen.\
Carl Hoffman
Rave The StarTribune Hoffman remains a gifted, suspenseful storyteller and, fortunately, both stories are compelling. Tough-talking American art dealer Michael Palmier, who tries to find bargain treasures for museums, reveals his clever methods for spotting fakes. And gonzo Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser is, like Michael Rockefeller, an inspiring individual who allows his passions to overrule common sense. Palmier and Manser may not come together in any meaningful way but another way to look at The Last Wild Men of Borneo is that it's two books for the price of one.
Joseph Cassara
Positive The StarTribune The first half of Impossible Beauties is wicked fun ... Cassara deftly captures the tough-minded compassion of the performers ... Unfortunately, the tragic second half of Impossible Beauties feels like it’s punishing us for enjoying the first 200 pages. It’s true that many of the real-life characters whose stories Cassara imagines did meet with tragic ends, but those tragedies aren’t earned in a book that doesn’t help us understand why so many of these characters ended up overdosing or getting stabbed in the neck. Reading the book, it feels like the writer is much more interested in the madcap creation of the House of Impossible Beauties than its sordid collapse and, given how much fun it is to read about that creation, who can blame him?
Ned Beauman
Positive The StarTribune It’s a good thing the ornate Madness Is Better Than Defeat is studded with sly winks to the reader ... because a road map helps us navigate its daunting journey ... The novel is clever as all get-out, but, as it begins to resemble an attempt to smush four Kurt Vonnegut novels into one, it’s also exhausting.