‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Dennis Lehane

Rave The New York Times Book Review Dennis Lehane spares nothing and no one in his crackerjack new novel ... Lehane’s language about these events is so unsparing it has shock value. It’s not quotable here. The white characters’ mildest thought is that the dead kid must have been a drug dealer, and it gets uglier from there, as Lehane draws on every vicious, bigoted slur he must have heard growing up in Dorchester ... Joltingly fierce. It’s as hard-hitting as his particular brand of optimism, which regards racism as a form of self-pity and hope as perhaps the opposite of hatred ... He does wrap this one up with genuine closure and a surprising toast between the story’s most symmetrical figures. But if his last words in a novel turn out to be these, so be it: Here, he writes, is \'life in all its highs and lows, all its dashed dreams and surprising joys, its little tragedies and minor miracles.\' As epitaphs go, you could do a lot worse.

Chris Pavone

Mixed New York Times Book Review With each new effort, Pavone’s novelty value has diminished ... Pavone’s latest protagonist, Ariel Pryce, is so fretful and talky ... Pavone still has game. He’ll dupe any reader who takes the plot of Two Nights in Lisbon at face value ... In a maneuver that tangles his book significantly, Pavone gives it a time span much longer than the \'two nights\' of the title ... Pavone risks whipsawing the reader as he springs surprise after surprise about how these two got to Portugal and what they were really up to. And he trots out a villainous character from an earlier book to cast a shadow over this one, which feels like recycling ... Two Nights in Lisbon strays so far from its original setup that it feels like more than one book ... Pavone ratchets up his story to create impossibly high stakes. There is contemporary political resonance in the real story he’s telling ... Ariel has experienced victimhood throughout her multiple lives, and the author has trouble balancing her obvious strength with her history of having been exploited. You could argue that this matters to the book’s denouement or just deem it hard to buy ... He is setting up a whopper of an ending, one that may be too much for even his most devoted readers, who have had to grapple with the implausible before ... Although Pavone fans may find Two Nights in Lisbon quite a stretch, this smart, calculating author remains many notches above others in his field. He is worldly and inviting when it comes to the book’s mostly European settings. His book captures a vacation’s escapism even as its heroine feels walls closing in. And his smaller scenes, like those set in Ariel’s bookstore, feel much less forced than his high-stakes ones.

Jennifer Haigh

Positive The New York Times Haigh’s style is so unflashy. All she does is write straightforwardly about people she seems to know inside out. They’re the kinds of people who don’t often get close attention. Her books might feel traditional if she relied on simple structure, but she likes Altmanesque ways of weaving characters together. In her case, there’s nothing woozy to it. When some of these people collide, the eureka moments feel like car crashes ... Haigh does as well with the book’s embittered male figures as she does with a woman whose beliefs she likely shares. They could easily be caricatures, but she tries to plumb their anger.

Joshua Ferris

Rave The New York Times Ferris\' fifth and most dazzling book, which should appeal even to those who never warmed to the other four ... Ferris’s abundant skill has been evident since his debut novel, Then We Came to the End, was published in 2007, but here he has taken a huge leap forward, twisting semi-autobiographical material in such serpentine ways that even the author’s note is devious ... This is a more tender novel than Ferris’s others, but that doesn’t keep it from being murderously funny from start to finish. He can’t help being hilarious, and this material can’t help being tough ... the book zigzags artfully through time, gradually amplifying and modifying each phase of Charlie’s life, in ways that keep it constantly surprising ... There are real people and real wounds buried in here somewhere ... Ferris’s prose remains taut and gorgeous, even when bleak ... give him props for finding precisely the right way to meld memoir with satire, to do this with bracing originality and to keep heads spinning from this novel’s first page to its last. Gamesmanship and love don’t mix easily. But Ferris has found a way to do it, and he’s risen to the top of his game.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The New York Times Whitehead’s own mind has famously gone thataway through nine other books that don’t much resemble one another, but this time he’s hit upon a setup that will stick. He has said he may keep Ray going into another book, and it won’t take you long to figure out why ... brings Whitehead’s unwavering eloquence to a mix of city history, niche hangouts, racial stratification, high hopes and low individuals. All of these are somehow worked into a rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It’s much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels. It reads like a book whose author thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing ... The author creates a steady, suspenseful churn of events that almost forces his characters to do what they do. The final choice is theirs, of course ... Quaint details aside, this is no period piece ... Though it’s a slightly slow starter, Harlem Shuffle has dialogue that crackles, a final third that nearly explodes, hangouts that invite even if they’re Chock Full o’ Nuts and characters you won’t forget even if they don’t stick around for more than a few pages.

Jake Tapper

Rave The New York Times The gears of this thriller move expertly and fast... Tapper complicates this setup in savvy ways ... The seriousness of this book never gets in the way of the breathless fun. Tapper obviously enjoyed sourcing it, writing it and using can-you-top-this gamesmanship from start to finish. Just when you think he’s pulled the biggest rabbit out of his hat, he turns out to have been hiding something bigger ... humanizes Sinatra as a victim of forces he never understood and as one of the least objectionable members of the Rat Pack — less racist and more decent than either Dean Martin or Peter Lawford...He also makes Margaret a wonderful role model for the many people who will enjoy this buoyant book.

Lee Child

Mixed The New York Times ... readers of this series will forever think of as the handoff book. It has hiccups. Reacher isn’t quite himself. He talks too much, gets off fewer great one-liners, isn’t as clever and has stopped being ugly, even if \'children had been known to run screaming at the sight of him.\' That’s a long way from looking \'like a condom crammed with walnuts,\' as Reacher was described in Tripwire in 1999 ... shows the same grisliness that was beginning to turn up in Lee’s later books; Andrew wrote that way from the start. It’s also action-packed to a fault, which robs it of the leanness that is one of the series’ main attractions ... There are those of us who always enjoyed the idea of Reacher’s rambling into another little Nowhere, finding somebody in distress, setting things right, draining the diner of coffee and ambling on. Not this time. Reacher doesn’t even arrive alone ... The Childs need to get back to Lee’s sharp writing game too ... The best thing about The Sentinel is the amount of action it generates, given that the dull-sounding Pleasantville area is full of generic locations ... The authors have added on many, many layers of plotting, to the point where three books seem compressed into one ... I have no idea why Reacher needs to do so much shopping this time, but he does. To be fair, the duct tape gets used.

Tana French

Rave The New York Times ... an audacious departure for this immensely talented author ... there’s a lot at work in The Searcher, even if its story sounds simple ... One of this book’s many pleasures is French’s way of building Cal and Trey’s bond ... These scenes are keenly observed, with a strong sense of place, and unfailingly entertaining. They’re also ominous, given what we know about the close-knit, gossipy nature of the town ... Nobody beats French when it comes to writing pub scenes fraught with tension ... This is why you read Tana French: for the nuances that go into an ambush like this, and for her ability to immerse you in the moment completely. As you read this scene, the sidelong glances and daggers in the small talk come flying off the page ... Where does The Searcher” stand in the lineup of French’s books? It’s an outlier: not her most accessible but not to be missed. It’s unusually contemplative and visual, as if she literally needed this breath of fresh air. It steps back to examine the policing powers she has traditionally taken for granted. And it’s her foray into the natural world, which is so welcome right now. It’s also slower than some of her other books. But as Cal says in the folksy western voice he often affects here, \'All’s you can do is your best.\'

Carl Hiaasen

Rave The New York Times If you are wearing a MAGA anything, you won’t like this book...But if you could use some wild escapism right now, Hiaasen is your guy. In its themes and its wild imagination, Squeeze Me offers some familiar pleasures, akin to a Greatest Hits collection. Anyone who’s read him will know what a prime recommendation that is ... Hiaasen has always been a genial satirist, but Squeeze Me shows he can also be plenty tough when it counts.

Ron Rash

Rave The New York Times ... mesmerizing ... takes Serena to such a fever pitch of destruction that in a lesser writer’s hands it might seem overheated. But Rash maintains the deep keel that has always distinguished him and has perhaps led to him being characterized as \'Southern,\' a designation he apparently finds dismissive. He shouldn’t; he’s one of the best living American writers, and his laconic understatement is much more powerful than excess. There’s nothing rash about Rash. The way that influenza deaths figure in In the Valley is as terrifying as anything you may find on the subject, even if its crescendo is ... The novella’s minor characters, human and otherwise, are all drawn with exceptional care. That’s also true in the nine other stories in this slim volume, though some are very short.

Kevin Kwan

Mixed The New York Times Sex and Vanity is what A Room With a View might have been if E. M. Forster’s characters had been micron-deep, Instagram-obsessed and unable to make conversation. To understand Kwan’s novel it’s probably best that you revisit Forster’s, or at least watch the Merchant Ivory film adaptation...Then you will know which Edwardian plot device Kwan has replaced with drones ... This author is savvy enough to preserve his winning formula, at least in pieces. He takes care to include an insanely lavish wedding, in this case early in the book ... But neither Lucie nor any of her friends has anything smart or funny to say about their tourism. This is a surprise and a disappointment, since Kwan’s barbed insights made the earlier books so much fun ... Perhaps the world has changed more than he has. Maybe we’re not in the mood for a bookload of meringue ...But consider this, as others have already suggested: There’s no other way you’re getting to Capri this summer. Here’s a ticket. Too bad it’s not first class.

Scott Turow

Rave The New York Times ... true-to-form, pleasingly substantial ... In this meticulously devised courtroom drama, rich with character detail, Turow again demonstrates what he does best: roll out a complex, keenly observed legal case yet save a boatload of surprises for its ending. And make it personal. There’s a lot of Sandy’s own life wrapped up in the case with which he’s exiting ... A lot of plot and keen observation keep this book moving. Turow’s regular readers will find him in gratifyingly good form ... The book proceeds just as a trial would, with chapters devoted to procedural stages and the different charges Pafko faces. No writer invests these gradual legal developments with the kind of micro-suspense that Turow does.

John Grisham

Positive The New York Times If Camino Winds is breezy, that’s mostly because its plot involves a ferocious hurricane. This is a Camino book with elements of a more traditional Grisham thriller thrown in ... While Camino Island offered a sexy plot hook in the form of those Fitzgerald manuscripts, Camino Winds turns out to have a more serious, issue-oriented one. It has nothing to do with Camino or the bookstore and is more like the for-profit law school scam found in Grisham’s last legal thriller, The Rooster Bar ... Grisham knows how to tell stories like that. And to his credit, he doesn’t entirely jettison the vacation mentality here, even if Camino itself is sidelined by disaster. There’s only so much time he can devote to having Bruce and his friends clear debris, after all, so over the course of the yearlong narrative he finds reasons to send them to hotels and meals elsewhere. But the island, the bookstore and the heroine were the first book’s main attractions, if only for their novelty in the Grishamverse. They are missed ... was intended as escapist entertainment, but its timing unavoidably gives it a different resonance.

Don Winslow

Positive The New York Times Book Review If you’ve read only a few of Don Winslow’s books, you may not realize what a shape-shifter he is ...Winslow has now delivered a collection of six novellas that show off his range. It’s called Broken, after the first (and weakest) story in the bunch. A better title might have come from the next one, \'Crime 101\' — an elegantly choreographed pas de deux that is dedicated to \'Mr. Steve McQueen\', and that lives up to that level of cool. It certainly captures Winslow’s stature as a writer from whom others can learn the ropes ... The feeling of brokenness is palpable here, and it’s a big part of the author’s sensibility when he isn’t being clever ... \'Broken,\' the novella that opens the book...[is] well executed and propulsive, but its unalloyed viciousness makes it a tough read for the moment ... \'Broken\' would work better if it had more context. But there’s only so much Winslow can do with a 60-page format and a lot of varied physical damage on the menu.

Sam Wasson

Rave The New York Times The Big Goodbye, Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film, is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie ... a scrupulously researched and reported book with a stellar cast of players, not to mention some astonishing sources ... the book makes a detailed case for how changes to Towne’s version transformed Chinatown into a counterintuitive classic ... There are layers upon layers to this account, just as there are to the film, and it flags only when Wasson violates the color scheme with purple prose.

Steve Inskeep

Positive The New York Times ... revelatory ... a fresh look that brings 21st-century vision to bear on the 19th-century story. In writing about both Frémont and his wife, Jessie, the aggressive promoter of his career, Inskeep does two important things. He shines an unsparing light on his subjects, and he finds unnerving similarities between the Frémonts’ America and our own ... To Inskeep’s credit, it’s an open question whether the book’s true hero is Frémont or his wife ... Regardless of where your sympathies lie regarding the slippery Frémonts, there’s no denying the new importance Inskeep has given them ... written in a streamlined, occasionally biting style that successfully pares down potentially sprawling material and sends constant warnings that history can repeat itself. There’s not a lot of showiness here, but the material suffices. If the book’s purpose is to illuminate and chill, mission accomplished.

Laura Lippman

Rave The New York Times Ms. Lippman’s stand-alone novels have been much more nuanced and interesting than her Monaghan books. And When She Was Good is the latest case in point ... there’s nothing that strains credibility in Ms. Lippman’s view of Heloise’s profession, and a lot is observed ... Heloise is especially well drawn ... Ms. Lippman is too smart to wallow in the obvious. She is less concerned with the psychology that would draw Helen to a father figure than she is with Val’s Pygmalion role in Helen/Heloise’s transformation ... And When She Was Good is a steady, surprising tale about how Heloise adapts when her business is put in jeopardy. It would spoil this story to describe the warning signs, but Heloise is quick to pick up on every little whiff of peril ... Call it sustainability: this book gives Heloise power, versatility and the gift of foresight, all of which serve her well in a crisis.

Tina Fey

Rave The New York Times Book Review ...[a] dagger-sharp, extremely funny new book for which even the blurbs are clever ... Bossypants isn’t a memoir. It’s a spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation ... For all Ms. Fey’s efforts to depict herself as \'a little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind,\' she comes off as a strongly opinionated dynamo with a comedic voice that is totally her own. Ms. Fey, like Ms. Ephron, is at her most hilariously self-deprecating when it comes to her attractiveness and vanity ... Ms. Fey deftly contrasts her show business and homebody aspects in Bossypants, very much the way her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon, flits between drudgery and fantasy. The voice of this book is quite similar to that of the television show, though Ms. Fey attributes much of the success of 30 Rock to Alec Baldwin. She can’t say the same for her domesticated side.

Kevin Wilson

Positive The New York Times Book Review The Family Fang...in less adroit hands might have been a string of twee, deadpan moments and not much more. But Mr. Wilson, though he writes wittily about various outré Fang performance pieces, resists putting too much emphasis on the family gimmick. These events have name...and dates and artistic goals. But they also have consequences. That’s what makes this novel so much more than a joke. Mr. Wilson explores the damage inflicted on children raised in an atmosphere that is intentionally confusing ... Although Mr. Wilson sometimes hints too neatly at where his book is headed, he manages to make the final stages genuinely shocking. This last part of The Family Fang packs a wallop because the rest of the book has been so quirky and seemingly light. But the stakes in the Fang war of wills get higher as the book proceeds, and they move from the specific to the universal ... Mr. Wilson...has created a memorable shorthand for describing parent-child deceptions and for ways in which creative art and destructive behavior intersect. But he never generalizes.

Elton John

Rave The New York Times ... a hairplugs-and-all memoir that pushes the envelope for aging rock star candor ... If John had no material other than the job his foul-tempered parents did on him, he’d still have a riveting story to tell. But Me is a very crowded book by a man who’s kept a lot to himself until now. Earlier this year the movie Rocketman gave a reasonably accurate overview of the Elton John story — but it barely scratched the surface of what’s in this memoir. The lurid parts will get all the headlines. But the man’s hard-won self-knowledge is what the book’s really about ... carefully apolitical about anything but L.G.B.T.Q. issues ... Aficionados of rock star memoirs, take note: This one also gets into John’s bout of prostate cancer, complete with his surgery and use of adult diapers. The latter may be a first in the genre ... Even the worst of it can be ghoulishly funny ... the voice here sounds just right, even if it has been unfamiliar until now. It’s a gift to finally hear from someone who has delivered so many of Taupin’s words and so few of his own.

Walter Isaacson

Positive The New York Times His story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson’s Steve Jobs does its solid best to hit that target ... Mr. Isaacson treats Steve Jobs as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint ... So Steve Jobs, an account of its subject’s 56 years, must reach across time in more ways than one. And it does, in a well-ordered, if not streamlined, fashion ... Its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering.

Rebecca Godfrey

Pan The New York Times This book loves specious details ... the sources of [Godrey\'s] information are not made clear, nor is the extent of her own presence on the scene. Aficionados of crime nonfiction may also notice the book\'s inability to distinguish important facts from minor ones, the oversupply of similar-sounding characters and the near-universal inarticulateness with which they explain themselves ... Ms. Godfrey\'s account reveals the terrible indifference of some of these participants, as well as the conscience pangs of others. And it confirms the idea that popular culture can have egregious effects. It also looks into the difficult family situations that heightened the teenagers\' unhappiness, the abundant drug use that clouded their judgment, and the West Side Story momentum building up to a fight both tragic and cathartic. All this is readily exploitable ... In her book\'s second half...Ms. Godfrey fares better. It helps that much of her material here comes from police and courtroom records and takes a number of unexpected turns. It does not have to be artificially flavored.

Attica Locke

Positive The New York Times Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising uses Jay’s unease as a determinative character trait, one that will shape much of his behavior during Ms. Locke’s atmospheric, richly convoluted debut novel ... Black Water Rising is overloaded with back stories: the Jay-Cynthia relationship, the threat of a dockworkers’ strike in Houston, the sinister machinations of oil companies and the racial violence that humiliated and killed Jay’s father before Jay was born ... Yet she is able to write about Jay’s urgent need to behave manfully and become a decent father with a serious, stirring moral urgency akin to that of George Pelecanos or Dennis Lehane ... Subtle and compelling as it is, Black Water Rising is at times overwritten.

Tana French

Rave The New York Times ...[a] devious, deeply felt psychological chiller ... This may sound like a routine police procedural. But like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl...Broken Harbor is something more. It’s true that Ms. French takes readers to all the familiar way stations of a murder investigation: the forensics, the autopsies, the serial interrogations and so on. But she has urgent points to make about the social and economic underpinnings of the Spain family murders. And she has irresistibly sly ways of toying with readers’ expectations ... Ms. French’s books all give the same first impression. They start slowly and seem to need tighter editing. But...she patiently lays her groundwork, then moves into full page-turner mode ... That Ms. French is also an actress surely accounts for her skill with minor characters.

Tana French

Rave The New York Times Book Review ...[an] expertly rendered, gripping new novel ... The first thing that Ms. French does so well in Faithful Place is to inhabit fully a scrappy, shrewd, privately heartbroken middle-aged man. The second is to capture the Mackey family’s long-brewing resentments in a way that’s utterly realistic on many levels. Sibling rivalries, class conflicts, old grudges, adolescent flirtations and memories of childhood violence are all deftly embedded in this novel, as is the richly idiomatic Dublinese ... neither [Frank] nor Ms. French’s most prescient readers can be sure where the suspenseful, ever-twisting Faithful Place is headed. Even after a basic idea of what happened to Rosie has been made clear, this author still has major surprises up her sleeve.Perhaps Ms. French’s training as an actor at Trinity College contributes to her three-dimensional characterizations of every last person in this book.

Tana French

Positive The New York Times ... teases considerable suspense ... some resemblance to Donna Tartt’s Secret History ... the conventional approach to this suspenseful setup would have been to make one Whitethorn resident or Glenskehy villager a secretly murderous figure and save the details for a frenzied denouement. But The Likeness intends a much longer and more leisurely look at the householders’ domestic arrangements, their inner lives and the yearnings they trigger in Cassie, who has no real home of her own ... Ms. French resists genre conventions defiantly enough to have written a long, rambling book, one that is more interested in character revelations than in \'Aha!\' moments about the plot. She could have achieved the same effects much more succinctly in a more tightly edited version of this same story. But Cassie herself remains a strong enough character to sustain interest, even if many of her observations about Whitethorn have a vague, hazy quality. All she needs is a sparring match with Frank, and Cassie quickly returns to the land of the living — and to the subtle demands of her perilous, suspenseful masquerade.

Lara Prescott

Mixed The New York Times The true stories within Lara Prescott’s first novel are by far the best thing about it. That’s saying a lot, because the job of weaving together bombshell espionage material long kept secret by the C.I.A. with the creation story of a now-dusty Russian novel and tartly-observed Mad Men-era feminism and sexual bigotry was tough. Prescott has managed to shape all of this into an above-average entry in the I-Knew-Hemingway genre ... Prescott has the first whopper novel, and it set off a bidding war, more likely on the basis of its commercial potential than its caliber as a page-turner ... Prescott, who once worked as a political-campaign operative, obviously knows her stuff, but she’s less adept at drawing individual characters than at conveying the women’s groupthink ... their inner lives here are less developed than the details of their wardrobes ... Prescott’s writing is putdownable. In a book this complicated, that’s a liability. It trundles on, full of interesting details and less interesting prose, with the occasional toe-stubber of a simile along the trail.

Sam Wasson

Positive The New York Times Mr. Wasson is a smart and savvy reporter, and his book abounds with colorful firsthand tales ... Fosse picks up steam, just as its subject did, when he hits the big time ... It heats up further when he meets Gwen Verdon, who became his third wife and most stellar dancing partner ... Fosse sprawls with details of each production. But it is less successful at conveying what the finished works were like ... A tighter book would have been welcome, though it might not have had room for the feuding and jealously that Mr. Wasson captures so sharply ... Whoever Fosse was and whatever his work meant, Mr. Wasson’s book is required reading for anyone eager to understand his brand of — to use a term that appears here constantly, and can’t be outdone — razzle-dazzle. And to see through his darkness

Adrian McKinty

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... isn’t as silly or one-note as it initially sounds. And because McKinty hangs on to his wit and literacy even under duress ... Where McKinty succeeds, in a book that feels heavily worked over to ensure no tangents detract from main events, is in making sure the premise isn’t the main event. Which could easily have happened with a premise like this ... Some scoffing is in order when the disguised, disembodied voice of The Chain recommends antiquated gimmicks like burner phones, the dark web and Bitcoin as the basics of this operation. But the long arm of the crime novelist Don Winslow, the \'Cartel\' wizard who turned his own career into the kind McKinty now hopes to achieve, is also visible ... To McKinty’s great credit, he can make readers wonder at any point whether the ground may fall beneath their feet and how much evil they might be pushed toward ... Beneath its surface of high-speed thrills, The Chain is clearly the work of the philosophical thinker McKinty has always been.

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

Rave The New York Times It all fits real good, don\'t you think?\' the painter Willem de Kooning once asked his assistant while showing him a painting. The assistant concurred. \'That\'s the whole problem,\' de Kooning replied. \'There\'s no contradictions.\' As Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan brilliantly illustrate in their sweeping, authoritative biography, that idea was central to his nature ... The elusiveness of its subject makes the achievements of de Kooning: An American Master that much more dazzling ... a remarkably lucid narrative. Most unusually, it explores the details of a messy personal life without compromising its subject\'s dignity ... If their book is at times preternaturally thorough...Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan justify that meticulousness. They look everywhere for the specifics that might have contributed to de Kooning\'s raging, ever-changing abstractions ... A lesser book would be more interested in the fact that he once nearly spiked his coffee with weed killer or other details of that nature. But de Kooning takes the high road. And it is smart and unflinching enough to earn its place there.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman

Positive The New York Times In this midst of such voluminous scholarship, how can Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin\'s American Prometheus purport to be \'the first full-scale biography? The reason, beyond its having the best title, is its span ... These authors compile all of it under a single roof ... American Prometheus is a work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer\'s essential nature ... While its forte is clearly not physics, American Prometheus does capture the world in which Oppenheimer established his credentials: thick with future Nobelists, bristling with innovation, cattily competitive ... American Prometheus is a thorough examination and synthesis, sometimes overwhelming in its detail.

Howard Stern

Positive The New York Times For anyone who still thinks of Stern as a jokey voyeur, overgrown teenager and smutmeister, he would like you to know how much he’s evolved. He’s become more sensitive. He’s in therapy, to the point where it becomes a constant refrain. He feels his subjects’ pain. Which might be problematic if he weren’t still such a sharp, funny, conversational sparring partner. Bragging rights for Howard Stern Comes Again really do go to Donald Trump, who is far and away its most arresting subject ... It matters a lot how this handsomely produced, notably well-edited book is ingested. I don’t recommend reading it straight through. That will make it seem long and repetitive, with Stern frequently hitting on his favorite themes—which is to say, the ones that have the most to do with him. He likes asking about masturbation, money, making it big and psychotherapy, all of which demonstrate more narcissism than curiosity. It’s much better to pick the book up and choose interview subjects at random. And don’t do it on the basis of your pre-existing interest in the person ... The real standouts are people who are thrown off guard by the fact that Stern has found out so much about them ... It’s the intimacy Stern establishes with his subjects that makes this collection worthwhile, as when Jon Stewart opens up about the father who abandoned his family. The stories Stern elicits are astonishing ... It’s unfortunate if authentic that [borderline racist] queries remained in the book’s otherwise slimmed-down transcripts. And even for his most ardent fans, his ways of talking about girls and hotness may no longer be part of his charm.

Isabel Wilkerson

Rave The New York Times [Wilkerson\'s] hard work, keen insight and passionate personal commitment make The Warmth of Other Suns a landmark piece of nonfiction ... a mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann’s study of the Great Migration’s early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’s great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston ... Although the book contains its share of much rougher stories, it is these seemingly workaday ones that hit hardest. One interviewee’s remark that leaving the South \'was like getting unstuck from a magnet\' best sets Ms. Wilkerson’s tone in a book sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience ... does a superb job of capturing the way whole lives can be changed by small outrages, and the way those changes are neither irrevocable nor simple ... Her closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection. It creates a wide swath of human drama. And it shapes a new understanding of why Southerners’ new lives in strife-torn cities far from home may not have been easier than the lives they left behind.

Chris Pavone

Mixed The New York Times The Expats was so intricate that it is essential to read it before tackling the sequel. If you pick up The Paris Diversion cold, you’ll spend a lot of time wondering who the Moores are ... The Paris Diversion provides an unearned frisson from the fact that its sections are named for Paris’s most famous places, with accompanying photos ... The idea that the key word in The Paris Diversion is \'diversion,\' and that we are being put through something very petty, is just unthinkable ... The Paris Diversion does have a tight, extremely clever bit of exposition, in which all its diverse pieces suddenly fall into place and its many red herrings are exposed as empty trickery. But it comes much too late ... This is his first eyebrow-raiser.

Kate Atkinson

Rave The New York Times This book has a lot of drastic scene changes, is packed with minor characters and is in no hurry to get where it’s going. But somehow Atkinson never seems to be treading water ... There is no stray anything in Big Sky. That’s one big reason Atkinson’s devotees love her. No detail is too small to come home to roost ... it’s worth rereading the beginning once you’ve finished this novel just to see how well the author has manipulated you. Atkinson is also adept at weaving the mundane details of her characters’ lives (or perhaps her own) into the Brodie books as a way of humanizing them, despite the stark malevolence that lurks beneath this workaday surface ... Atkinson opens Big Sky with one perfect page. It’s a bit of a red herring, but it couldn’t do a better job of throwing the reader off base and commanding instant interest ... It’s a prime example of how Atkinson tells a great story, toys with expectations, deceives by omission, blows smoke and also writes like she’s your favorite friend. Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over.

Douglas A. Blackmon

Positive The New York Times Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren\'s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming ... many zealously researched episodes shaky start, if only because many of Blackmon\'s wordings are speculative ... But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, Slavery by Another Name becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife ... The torment that Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated here. But it loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.

Don Winslow

Rave The New York Times \"The Cartel is a big, sprawling, ultimately stunning crime tableau that can be read as a stand-alone ... There are so many murderous grudges and so many shifting gang allegiances that parts of the book require close attention; you may even find yourself backing up a time or two ... The Cartel, like The Power of the Dog, can be better appreciated for its gritty, gasp-inducing knowledge of true crime’s brutal extremes, and for its unflinching awareness of what Mr. Winslow calls \'evil beyond the possibility of redemption\' ... The Cartel culminates in a near-symphonic array of lethal coups de grace, written with such hallucinatory intensity that the whole book seems to have turned into a synchronized fireworks display. And still Mr. Winslow adds one last, hellish image that \'takes the freakin’ cake.\' To make sure this story is something you won’t forget.

Don Winslow

Rave The New York Times \"Of all the blows delivered by Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy, none may be as devastating as the timing of The Border, its stunner of a conclusion ... This is a book for dark, rudderless times, an immersion into fear and chaos. It conjures more lawlessness, dishonesty, conniving, brutality and power mania than both of the earlier books put together. Because of that chaos, it might have benefited from an indexed cast of characters. But Winslow can’t provide one. For one thing, it would be a spoiler. You just have to watch these miscreants as they drop ... Winslow describes sting operations with immersive, heart-grabbing intensity. You don’t read these books; you live in them ... Last and never least with Winslow: the matter of languages. He is fluent in many of them, and The Border once again shows off those talents.\

Joe Ide

Mixed The New York Times Books Wrecked is not the best place to jump into this series, but these books are written in sequence, and you skip one at your peril ... The third book in his blazing IQ series, Wreked is less cerebral and more breathless than its predecessors ... There are lots of cinematic chases ... No matter how well such things are described, though, they’ll be more fun to watch than they are to read about ... Wrecked fares much better in its small details.

Michael Ovitz

Positive The New York Times As Michael Ovitz reached his breaking point at the all-powerful talent agency C.A.A., which he had run like a warlord since cofounding it in 1975, he did the unthinkable: He insulted a superstar. It was 1995. Barbra Streisand was on the phone, complaining at length about sexism and unequal pay for women in Hollywood, when Ovitz blew a fuse. \'Barbra,\' he said, \'you know my 15-year-old son? All he and his friends think about is girls, but you’re no longer on their list.\' ... Ovitz is in his 70s, and claims that he’s trying to make peace with his rivals and amends for his terrible reputation. He’s written this book hoping to accomplish that, but the memoir defines him better than he might like. Who is Michael Ovitz? A killer turned would-be sage. A visionary who won’t look inward. A guy who can’t get over who he used to be.

Tana French

Rave The New York Times Book Review The title tree in The Witch Elm, the Irish writer Tana French’s best and most intricately nuanced novel yet, is a mysterious character in its own right. Stately, 200 years old and burned into the collective memory of the Hennessys, this tree embodies the family’s idea of stability. It anchors a garden so lush that as you sink into this book, you can practically feel tendrils twisting around you ... [French] is in a class by herself as a superb psychological novelist for whom plot is secondary ... Death and mystery hover over the book, and French has some serious fun with twisting such conventions of the mystery genre as the locked-room puzzle ... French’s intense interest in identity and self-deception might make this a slow-building book for some. But if you read her as carefully as you should, it’s a seductively detailed start in which every bit of dailiness is made to matter ... French’s pacing goes pedal-to-the-metal for the book’s last section. Get ready for the whiplash brought on by its final twists and turns. Despite the speed, none of the final revelations feel rushed or artificial.

Kate Atkinson

Positive The New York Times When the book spends time in 1950 (the plot doesn’t unfold in chronological order), we get a better idea of who Juliet was, who she became and what her bruising life has done to her ... The book turns rueful, jaded and more than a little melodramatic as the bills come due for certain of Juliet’s heedless past actions. And there is a mess of a denouement ... These are not deterrents to reading this novel; they are hiccups, at worst ... Most lovably, the novel’s espionage-involved dog, Lily, is based on a real dog. Atkinson pays this dog real justice while making it clear that war is as awful for animals as it is for people ... Atkinson loves her research, but she doesn’t need much help concocting original stories that resemble no one else’s and take the breath away.

Kevin Kwan

Rave The New York Times Crazy Rich Asians offers refreshing nouveau voyeurism to readers who long ago burned out on American and English aspirational fantasies. Mr. Kwan either knows, or does a good job of pretending to know, how the very rich of Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai show off their lucre ... Mr. Kwan neither has nor wants a light touch ... Mr. Kwan knows how to deliver guilty pleasures. He keeps the repartee nicely outrageous, the excess wretched and the details wickedly delectable.

Beth Macy

Positive The New York Times [A] timely investigative report ... Macy follows [Oxycontin] through the range of problems it has caused, the people it has hurt, the difficulties in fighting it (with plenty of too little, too late) and the glimmers of hope that remain.

Tara Isabella Burton

Rave The New York Times [A] diabolical debut by Tara Isabella Burton ... she knows her way around good, evil and the eternally reader-friendly realm in between ... Social Creature is a wicked original with echoes of the greats (Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn).

Jake Tapper

Mixed The New York Times \"As a novelist, he makes the rookie mistake of loading every interesting fact he could muster into a plot that can barely support the weight ... Tapper’s interweaving of the usual motives of power and money with the much more sinister pressures of the Red Scare ought to make for much more excitement than it does. It doesn’t help that some characters are so conventionally drawn ... Tapper’s awkwardness with his fictitious characters can improve. His acuity with historical resonance doesn’t have to ... Tapper did not have to include endnotes clarifying facts he modified and details on sources, but the notes are very winning. They reveal his tremendous enthusiasm for this work.\

Lars Kepler, Trans. by Neil Smith

Rave The New York Times With its tight, staccato chapters and cast of dangerous wraiths lurking everywhere, The Sandman is a nonstop fright. It’s able to shift its focus frequently with no loss of tension ... the book’s greatest tension comes from wondering whether either Joona or Saga [the detectives] is any match for this near-supernatural monster, who can implant thoughts in his victims’ heads or turn up as an apparition just staring into their windows. Scared yet? You will be.

Kristin Hannah

Pan The New York Times It’s a heart-tugger written in borderline young adult style, combining terrible troubles with notes of overripe romance…The terrible troubles are completely one-note … The Great Alone is packed with rapturous descriptions of Alaskan scenery, which are the most reliably alluring part of it … Leni’s problems are dramatic enough to keep readers hooked, but she herself is good every minute of the day. Hannah gives her a kind of afterword, in which Leni writes: ‘Someone said to me once that Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.’ Maybe so. But we know who she is right from the start.

A. J. Finn

Mixed The New York Times Mallory also clearly knows a lot about the more diabolical elements in Hitchcock movies. And he hasn’t been shy, as Finn, about plugging them into his plot ... All of this is very familiar, to the point where The Woman in the Window starts off feeling ordinary. It reads too much like another knockoff while the author sets up his very basic story elements ... Once the book gets going, it excels at planting misconceptions everywhere. You cannot trust anything you read ... A book that’s as devious as this novel will delight anyone who’s been disappointed too often ... How well does it all hold up, once Finn’s cards have been fully played? Pretty well, but there are problems. An enormous surprise meant to arrive more than two-thirds of the way through the book was guessable even by me — a terrible guesser — almost from the start. One character has huge credibility problems. And the writing is serviceable, sometimes bordering on strange ... Finn knows commerce but he also knows the classics, old and new. He truly aspires to write in their tradition.

Reed Arvin

Mixed The New York Times Blood of Angels has its literary aspirations. But it fits too neatly into the Wish-I-Were-Grisham mold … Blood of Angels also involves a beautiful, crusading minister whose fight against the death penalty eventually leads her to Dennehy's hot tub. The same book incorporates the following: Dennehy's mentor, on the verge of retirement; Dennehy's beloved daughter, a prime target for mayhem; Dennehy's pet cat, ditto; and Dennehy's ex-wife, now married to a rich plastic surgeon who makes Dennehy feel inadequate.

David Wroblewski

Rave The New York Times Mr. Wroblewski puts Edgar on a warm, cozy, paw-boxing basis with the Sawtelle dogs by rendering the boy mute from birth. Although Edgar’s condition is a terrible liability at certain crucial plot junctures, it is more often a blessing. Edgar speaks his own private sign language to people and dogs alike. He has no trouble making himself understood to his loved ones, whether they have two legs or four … One of Mr. Wroblewski’s most impressive accomplishments here is to exert a strong, seemingly effortless gravitational pull. The reader who has no interest in dogs, boys or Oedipal conflicts of the north woods of Wisconsin will nonetheless find these things irresistible. Pick up this book and expect to feel very, very reluctant to put it down.

Lee Child

Rave The New York Times Child excels at taking a seemingly small matter and going from zero to 60 with it. But this time the acceleration happens credibly, and doesn’t head toward an impossibly outsize denouement, which has happened in too many Reacher books to mention ... The pieces of the plot come together as Reacher’s military pride and the community’s illicit opioid use intersect. The bad actors are nominally the dealers, but The Midnight Line doesn’t demonize its villains the way Child’s books usually do. And the addicts aren’t dismissed or treated as stereotypes. The book voices strong convictions about the issues that are raised here, and it’s no stretch given Reacher’s principled military background. The last chapters have more emotional heft than anything Child has written before ... This book adds its share of classic moments to the Reacher canon...the kind of swagger that has kept this franchise so satisfying. But The Midnight Line is the rare book in which Reacher mostly doesn’t have to act that way. And shouldn’t. And becomes too moved even to try.

John Grisham

Rave The New York Times Grisham’s newly reanimated storytelling skills are what make The Rooster Bar such a treat ... The Rooster Bar is written with the same verve Grisham brought to this summer’s Camino Island; with the same sense that this reliable best-selling author is feeling real pleasure, and not just obligation, in delivering his work. He seems genuinely to like this book’s main characters, even if the two men sound very similar and could be mistaken for young boys if it weren’t for their perfunctory sexual encounters — with the same woman, Hadley, an ace prosecutor who’s young, single and competing with her roommate over how many guys each can sleep with. As in all of Grisham’s best books, the reader of The Rooster Bar gets good company, a vigorous runaround and — unlike those poor benighted suckers at Foggy Bottom — a bit of a legal education.

Uzodinma Iweala

Mixed The New York Times Agu has been forced by circumstance — and by armed guerrillas in his unnamed country — to commit unspeakable transgressions and then suffer bewildering, excruciating crises of conscience. The most important parts of his story are distilled by his dialect into simple but horrific acknowledgments … While Beasts of No Nation is indeed a wrenching book, its thoughts can be painfully self-evident. None of the book's brutality exaggerates recent African history; none of its scenes would be out of place in a melodramatic war story, either. This outstanding first novel would be even better if it did not deliver so much more shock value than genuine surprise.

Paul Murray

Mixed The New York Times Too busy to be stopped in its tracks by any one calamity, Skippy Dies happens to be obsessed with M-theory, lost youth, Irish history and parallel dimensions, not to mention sex, drugs and schoolboy humor. Thus Skippy’s death is better understood as a disappearance, leaving his brighter classmates to wonder where exactly he has gone. In a book that both begins and ends with the eating of doughnuts (and has one character nicknamed for a Frisbee), the idea that death is somehow circular is no accident … Mr. Murray’s elaborate aims are most fully realized in the long Halloween party that concludes the first third of his book. Spooky things happen on that night, and not just because Halloween is an otherworldly occasion … But it takes Mr. Murray hundreds of pages’ worth of ho-hum Seabrook ambience to get where he’s going. And plain old three-dimensional, ghost-free Seabrook can be numbing.

Joe Ide

Rave The New York Times There are a lot of fine reasons to discover Ide’s work, and seamless continuity is just one of them. He writes thumbnail descriptions that rival Elmore Leonard’s. His dialogue, much of it unprintable here, has bite that puts him in the Winslow/Lehane league ... Ide writes about the hostility among ethnic groups — notably black gangs and Chinese triads (whose members’ affectation of American gang habits comes in for some mockery, though their toughness does not) — in ways that would be offensive if they weren’t equal-opportunity insults. The world of these books is one of constant trash talk, and Ide delivers it with style ... Will Ide lead Isaiah toward happiness? The book’s battles play out ingeniously, with Isaiah trying to figure out how he could have been so wrong about Marcus.

Elizabeth Strout

Pan The New York Times The awful act in The Burgess Boys is so strange that the book can hardly accommodate it. Shirley Falls has a sizable population of Somalis, or, as bigoted local residents call them, ‘Somalians.’ Maine has lost much of its young work force, and these Somalis are drawn to its peace, quiet and lack of political strife. But then — and you may have to read this sentence twice — Zach mischievously rolls a frozen pig’s head into their mosque during Ramadan … While Ms. Strout espouses empathy with the Shirley Falls Somalis, she draws them without much specificity. She creates no serious reaction to Zach’s assault on them. And she gives one Somali man, Abdikarim, such preternatural kindness that he cares more about Zach’s well-being than his own group’s … For all its potential and Ms. Strout’s proven skill, The Burgess Boys asks too many questions and offers too few interesting answers.

G. Willow Wilson

Rave The New York Times [Wilson] spins her insights into an exuberant fable that has thrills, chills and — even more remarkably — universal appeal … Alif the Unseen will eventually travel deep into the genies’ world when it gets to the Empty Quarter of the city where Alif and Dina live. And the genies, like everything else that makes Alif the Unseen so appealing, are nothing like what the reader would expect … Ms. Wilson fills Alif the Unseen with an array of observations about contemporary culture: new questions of theology (if a sin is committed in virtual reality, is it still a sin?); fantasy literature and, most conspicuously, Western culture.

Joe Ide

Rave The New York Times Book Review Isaiah Quintabe, a self-made Sherlock operating out of the same part of Long Beach, Calif., that produced Snoop Dogg, is the completely original star of IQ, Joe Ide’s debut novel ...is apt to be a madly lovable new detective series about this smart guy and the vibrantly drawn criminal culture that surrounds him ... Almost all of the book’s characters speak fluent brag and dis, with the exceptions of strait-laced Isaiah and his beloved older brother, Marcus ...features a duct-tape-carrying creep, an innocent teenage girl and Isaiah, a bystander who picks up enough clues to know instantly that an abduction is in the works ... Mr. Ide packs a lot of action and scenery into the book’s investigation scenes. But he has also built and bolstered Isaiah as a fine, durable character for the long run.

Michael Ondaatje

Mixed The New York Times The Cat’s Table prefigures its narrator’s adult life through a series of shipboard adventures and revelations. The table of the title affords him a fine vantage point. He is not one of those select passengers who sit at the Captain’s Table, ‘constantly toasting one another’s significance.’ Instead, he is seated with the ship’s outcasts, all of whom turn out to have wisdom to impart … The Cat’s Table opens in a spirit of exuberant freedom, then constricts a bit as it goes along. At the end of the book, Mr. Ondaatje supplies moments of unexpected and not really necessary denouement. This artificiality serves only to underscore how authentic the novel’s most understated insights and narrative observations have been. Mr. Ondaatje succeeds so well in capturing the anticipation and inquisitiveness of boyhood that the melancholy of adult life seems ordinary by comparison. The past and latter-day sections of the book are slightly out of sync.

Tom Perrotta

Rave The New York Times Book Review Named for the skill with which its adult characters handle their inhibitions, Little Children presents the full cultural and emotional underpinnings of this suburb-shaking event ...will be Mr. Perrotta's breakthrough popular hit, but its undercurrents are more somber ...Mr. Perrotta is too generous a writer to trivialize that. What distinguishes Little Children from run-of-the-mill suburban satire is its knowing blend of slyness and compassion ... In the end Mr. Perrotta presents Little Children as a moment in amber rather than a sudsy melodrama.

Stephen King

Rave The New York Times Books Review ...Mr. King has gone short-winded with Full Dark, No Stars, a set of four spooky moral tales. Two of our most dependably prolific and popular authors have both switched gears ...has a lot of straight-up horror. The sheer size of its rodent population is enough to stamp it with the horror label. But it will serve as a page turner even for the reader who is aghast at some of the whisker-twitching particulars, especially in '1922,' the opening story ... What’s most interesting about this story is not the terrible secret that the wife will uncover. It’s that Mr. King, who seems able to write compact tales or gargantuan ones with equal ease, can invest a bland, coin-collecting accountant with any kind of frisson at all.

John Grisham

Positive The New York Times Book Review ...The Racketeer is an unusual book for Mr. Grisham. Unlike many of his others, it has no soapbox to stand on and is not out to teach lessons about justice ...is much more duplicitous than that. In its early stages it does follow the familiar Grisham template, in which a lawyer finds himself unexpectedly in legal trouble ...this is not a story about a triumph or a miscarriage of courtroom justice. It’s the more devious, surprising story of a smart man who gets even smarter once he spends five years honing his skills as a jailhouse lawyer — and then expertly concocts an ingenious revenge scheme ... Mr. Grisham writes with rekindled vigor here. Perhaps that’s because he hasn’t mired this book in excessive research.

Dan Brown

Positive The New York Times Part of the fun in reading Brown comes from not taking him too seriously as a stylist. He brings to mind Joseph Heller’s Yossarian in Catch-22, who has the job of censoring letters and turns it into an arbitrary game. There are Brown sentences that could happily lose their modifiers: 'The grisly memory was mercifully shattered by the chime of the jangling bar door.' There are phrases that beg you to ask friends to fill in the blanks: 'Clear and penetrating, ____ _ ____.' (Like a bell.) There’s an air of overstatement that’s more gleeful than egregious, but it can’t be mistaken for good. And the hyperbole is sometimes the stuff of giggles ... Then there are the tricks. All that symbology he and Langdon bring to the game is never without its gee-whiz excitement. Brown has told The Times that he loved the Hardy Boys books, and it shows. The hunt here for a 47-character password yields the niftiest feat of gamesmanship in the book, as does Langdon’s self-important analysis of what looks like an exotic symbol on a car’s window. It appears to be something that not even an expert of his caliber has ever seen before. It’s not. Brown loves winking at Langdon, the literally dashing version of himself, and inviting readers to share the joke. And for all their high-minded philosophizing, these books’ geeky humor remains a big part of their appeal.

Stephen King & Owen King

Pan The New York Times Like Under the Dome, Sleeping Beauties is straightforwardly written. There are no long, dreamy passages in italics here. That’s the good news; the less happy news is that this co-authored book is sleepy in its own right. It too has a lot of characters, but very few of them spring to life, and many of them seem repetitive. Without speculating on what the father-son writing process was like, it feels as though some kind of politesse kept this 700-page book from being usefully tightened ... Sleeping Beauties will inevitably wind up on the screen somehow. Whoever adapts it will have to beef up the characters and deflect attention from the nonthrilling main theme ... What you may well come away thinking is: meh. For a book about resetting gender stereotypes, this one clings surprisingly tightly to them. Women are healers (though there are some tough customers here, thanks to the cast of law enforcers and prison inmates); men are either warriors or jerks who deserve to die. Everyone who survives this story is a little nicer by the time it’s over, but the basics still apply. And for a book that separates the sexes, the sudden impossibility of heterosexual sex goes strangely unnoticed ... Stephen King didn’t become Stephen King by waffling this way.

Joe Hill

Rave The New York Times Mr. Hill envisions an epic battle between real and imaginary worlds, makes this fight credible and creates a heroine who can recklessly crash from one realm to the other. She is a brave biker chick named Vic McQueen, who rides a Triumph, of course. When she says ‘Come on, honey’ as the story goes into high gear, she’s talking to that bike … NOS4A2, as in Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau’s classic vampire movie, loves playing with words. The book’s villain is a wizened ghoul who tries to lure children to a place where it is always Christmas, with fun features like a Sleigh House, and you don’t have to be Cassandra to know there’s something nasty about that. And NOS4A2 is not really a vampire story, anyway; Mr. Hill’s imagination is much more far-ranging than that. Which is scarier: bloodsucking vampires or the unexpected sound of treacly Christmas music suddenly playing in the summer?

Justin Cronin

Pan The New York Times The second installment in Mr. Cronin’s trilogy is The Twelve, and it will spoil nothing to reveal that this book is strictly a gap filler. It moves from the steaming wreckage left by The Passage to a battle cry for the third installment: ‘You bastard. Here I come’ … If only this silliness could be enjoyed somehow. But The Twelve gurgles and drowns in it, to the point where it’s impossible to believe this book is 200 pages shorter than The Passage. (Though it is.) Both drag interminably (and strangely unglamorous: The Twelve snakes its plot around the Texas oil business, replete with rust, sludge, shafts and winches.)

Kate Atkinson

Rave The New York Times Ms. Atkinson does not play the same kinds of flagrant time tricks here that made Life After Life so dramatic. She needn’t erase one story to tell the next. But she does skip easily back and forth among decades, so that Teddy’s boyhood in the 1920s or Queen Elizabeth II’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee are both within easy reach of any other point in the book’s timeline … Structure, and its way of coalescing from the seemingly casual into the deliberate, has been a main attraction in other Atkinson books. In this one, the main attraction is Teddy, and the way his glorious, hard-won decency withstands so many tests of time. Everything about his boyhood innocence is reshaped by his wartime ordeals, which are rendered with terrifying authenticity thanks to the author’s research into real bombers’ recollections. And after the war he re-enters a world in which he can take nothing for granted.

Jess Walter

Rave The New York Times The book takes its title from Louis Menand’s New Yorker description of Richard Burton at 54. It takes its essence from Milan Kundera, in a passage about the elusiveness of the present moment. Yet not for nothing is Cleopatra the vortex of the novel: the great Hollywood debacle, the love story as train wreck, the project so crazy it made other, crazier projects look sensible by comparison. And yet it was a romance. Mr. Walter has built his book around Cleopatra as a monument to crazy love.

Tom Sancton

Positive The New York Times Sancton lacks a gift for dish. But he is an excellent straight-up reporter, and he has dug deeply into the many, many elements that complicate this story ... For most of the book, Sancton makes Banier sound like a pure social climber. But suddenly, near the end, he begins to celebrate the man’s protean talents...Sancton’s account leaves Banier in 2016, through with his ordeal and not too much the worse for wear. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but got out of serving any time in a follow-up judgment. He likes fame, though he insists otherwise. This book may give him another shot at it.

Joe Hill

Positive The New York Times The strange thing about Horns is that its opening scenes aren’t all that strange. Its author, Joe Hill, is able to make Ig’s problem seem like the most natural thing in the world … Horns seems to have one or two miscreants too many. But they do allow Mr. Hill to wheel out his full arsenal of demon references, to the point where pitchforks and snakes get to be business as usual … the heart of Horns — and it unmistakably has one — has to do with Ig’s deep love for the woman he has lost. And Mr. Hill is able to equate that love with a quest for goodness.

Ken Follett

Rave The New York Times Book Review ...it dispenses with some of the waxenness of its 985-page predecessor and breathes life into its fictional characters, many of whose parents appeared in the first book ... Winter of the World (covering 1933 to 1949) less strenuously views history through the eyes of purely fictional characters, dim though they may be ... But Mr. Follett is best appreciated as a novelist, not a historian. What he knows how to do is put readers’ hearts in throats...best of this book, the latter half, is as gripping as it is manipulative. It makes the biggest tectonic shifts of its era — the struggle between Communism and Fascism, the irreversible march of science toward nuclear weapons, the laying of groundwork for the coming cold war — feel momentous indeed ...it would be surprising if this second installment did not prove to be the most powerful part of Mr. Follett’s trilogy.

Helen Simonson

Rave The New York Times Grief is what it took to make the rigidly correct Major notice Mrs. Ali, or anything else around him. This 68-year-old widower, a man who has taken some of his greatest satisfaction in reading and rereading his will and is proud to grow a type of clematis vine that his neighbors think is worth stealing, has long been immune to human companionship … As the story hums along, it contrasts change for the better with change for the worse. In the first category there is the Major’s extremely correct yet warm friendship with Mrs. Ali, who is 10 years his junior, is also conveniently widowed and shares many of the Major’s tastes … There is never a dull moment but never a discordant note either. Still, this book feels fresh despite its conventional blueprint. Its main characters are especially well drawn, and Ms. Simonson makes them as admirable as they are entertaining.

Ken Follett

Mixed The New York Times Book Review Fall of Giants begins on June 22, 1911, a time, as Follett fans may longingly note, nearly 100 years before the invention of the e-book reader. But the march of lightweight book technology is hardly its main concern ... Given the pacing that he prefers, that leaves Fall of Giants no room to spare ...it tries to coax forth a grand panorama of history from a mosaic of everyday lives ... Whatever their nationalities, most of Mr. Follett’s main characters enjoy amazing front-row seats to the great historical events of their day ... What he does not have is any great talent for capturing real human interaction — not until his characters have mingled for hundreds and hundreds of scenes, and he has developed some semblance of a story ... He had the building of a cathedral, the Middle Ages and the Black Death to hold interest, but Fall of Giants is less exotic.

Erik Larson

Rave The New York Times ...by far [Larson’s] best and most enthralling work of novelistic history … In the Garden of Beasts has the clarity of purpose to see the Germany of 1933 through the eyes of this uniquely well-positioned American family...There has been nothing quite like Mr. Larson’s story of the four Dodds, characters straight out of a 1930s family drama, transporting their shortcomings to a new world full of nasty surprises … Mr. Larson makes every aspect of the Dodds’ domestic lives reflect the larger changes around them. When looking for a home in Berlin, he writes, the Dodds found many good prospects, ‘though at first they failed to ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so fully and luxuriously furnished’ … The Dodds’ story is rich with incident, populated by fascinating secondary characters, tinged with rising peril and pityingly persuasive about the futility of Dodd’s mission.

Justin Cronin

Positive The New York Times Mr. Cronin gets The Passage off to a vigorous start. We meet Amy Harper Bellafonte, who is modestly billed in the book’s first sentence as someone who will become ‘the Girl from Nowhere — the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years’ … In The Passage scientists aren’t the only ones who treat ‘vampire’ as a word to be shunned. Mr. Cronin avoids it too, preferring to use other terms when undead, bloodsucking creatures start entering his story … This already-exhaustive book is studded with diary entries, academic papers and other ostensible evidence that its fictitious stories of destruction are true. Every now and then, as when the Gulf of Mexico is described as an oil slick, these accounts are even scarier than intended.

Hilary Mantel

Rave The New York Times [Wolf Hall] was a hard act to follow. But the follow-up is equally sublime … Yes, you can read it cold. Knowledge of Wolf Hall is not a prerequisite to appreciating what Bring Up the Bodies describes, because Ms. Mantel sets up her new book so gracefully … Ms. Mantel makes Cromwell a wholly unexpected figure: self-made, belligerent because he had no choice, obsessed by abstract power as much as the actual kind, and confident in his ability to control and fathom what others are thinking. He is wise enough to know that being Henry’s henchman, fixer and stand-in (he even ghostwrites a love letter as Henry courts Jane) is a mixed blessing. So as Bring Up the Bodies tightens its focus suspensefully — in ways that explain what that cryptic title means — Cromwell’s confidence is shaken.

Ali Smith

Positive The New York Times How to Be Both has a lot more allure than its overall rigor suggests, thanks to the obvious pleasure Ms. Smith takes in creating her peculiar parallels and exploring the questions they raise. Strange as it may seem, the British teenager and the painter who must curry favor with wealthy fools if he wants work have quite a bit in common … The inspiration for this mélange of a book, sometimes so ingenious and sometimes just willfully odd, is Francescho del Cossa’s fresco at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy. Take one look at pictures of this work and you will want to race right off to see it, which is apparently what Ms. Smith did. But How to Be Both is not a book that grew out of a tourist attraction. It is a synthesis of questions long contemplated by an extraordinarily thoughtful author, who succeeds quite well in implanting those questions into well-drawn, memorable people.

Howard Jacobson

Rave The New York Times Mr. Jacobson doesn’t just summon Roth; he summons Roth at Roth’s best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson’s comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen’s, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences as surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book. Mr. Jacobson stages a Mad Seder that brings Carroll’s Mad Tea Party to mind … Treslove so loathes his old friend Finkler that he has turned ‘Finkler’ into his own private synonym for ‘Jew.’ So the real meaning of book’s title, The Finkler Question, is The Jewish Question, and that’s only where the Finklerisms begin. Obsessively, and with a razor-sharp acuity that justifies the Roth comparisons, Mr. Jacobson has Treslove begin cataloging what he thinks are Finkler traits, Finkler talents, Finkler customs and so on. What unifies all of this in Treslove’s mind is that they’re things he doesn’t have.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Rave The New York Times It doesn’t take long for Ms. Adichie to weave these characters into a finely wrought, inescapable web. In a major leap forward from her impressive debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, she expands expertly and inexorably on these early scenes. And the many-faceted Half of a Yellow Sun soon develops a panoramic span. Taking its title from an emblem on the flag of Biafra, the book sustains an intimate focus and an epic backdrop as Biafra secedes from Nigeria and genocidal hell breaks loose … Ms. Adichie’s symbolic gestures are delivered both forthrightly and with a light touch. In the later part of the story, Olanna and Odenigbo are raising a little girl they call Baby, and the sisters have become estranged. The novel appears too preoccupied with large, ominous changes in Nigerian society to explain these smaller ones, but it turns out Ms. Adichie has saved them for more dramatic effect.

Peter Carey

Positive The New York Times In a spectacular feat of literary ventriloquism, the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey invites the outlaw Ned Kelly to tell his story. He summons the rollicking, unschooled, hugely colorful voice of Australia's best-known underdog for a bravura book-length performance … In providing Ned's side of the various skirmishes that form the basis of his notoriety, and in drawing upon a post-bank-robbery 8,300-word public statement of Kelly's for some of the book's lively syntax, Mr. Carey delves into the relative minutiae of police and journalistic accounts of Ned's life. These particulars might threaten to eclipse the bigger picture if they were not rendered so atmospherically, complete with wombats and banshees, cockatoo pie and roasting kangaroo.

Michael Connelly

Rave The New York Times Connelly has never had much success writing memorable women in supporting roles, but this new star is a beauty ... The pacing of Ballard’s debut story is breathless. Unless she’s in the water, she never has a peaceful moment: There’s always a lead to follow, a house to scope out, a late-night call to make ... The novel moves so quickly, racking up so many witnesses and suspects, that it ought to be hard to follow. But Connelly expertly hides a trail of bread crumbs that leads straight to the denouement, with so much else going on that it’s impossible to see where he’s heading ... Ballard is complicated and driven enough to sustain the series Connelly doubtless has in mind for her. Connelly writes passionately about, and captures especially well here, the detective’s high when the pieces of a puzzle fall into place.

Eleanor Catton

Mixed The New York Times The book’s astrology-based structure does not exactly clarify anything. Its Piscean quality, she writes in an opening note, ‘affirms our faith in the vast and knowing influence of the infinite sky’ … Here on Earth, The Luminaries is more baffling. The story begins on what is apparently a dark and stormy night (find this witty if you must), that of Jan. 27, 1866. Walter Moody, one of the book’s principals, has escaped a shipwreck to arrive at the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand … This book is well past its midpoint — that is, at about Page 500 — before it truly begins to click. Its later, increasingly breathless sections have the suspenseful option of finally, at long last, putting all these pieces together.

Kate Atkinson

Rave The New York Times Book Review Ms. Atkinson’s wide-ranging body of work includes several novels that resemble mysteries, but she has never had the narrowly deductive mind to suit that genre. Life After Life is a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author’s fully untethered imagination ... It’s more like a narrative multiverse, in which different versions of Ursula’s life compete for the reader’s attention and keep a conventionally one-note story well out of reach ...an exceptionally captivating book with an engaging cast of characters ... As powerful as the rest of Life After Life is, its lengthy evocation of this nightmare is gutsy and deeply disturbing, just as the author intends it to be.

Susanna Clarke

Pan The New York Times Book Review ...those who find enchantment in books about magicians will, by and large, be amazed at the elaborateness of what [Clarke] has done. But this novel can be as fussy and poky as it is clever. It could have been improved by an editor with a magic wand ... The tricks, spells, illusions and footnotes — endless footnotes — also arrive at a tireless yet wearying pace. Inevitably, the book's drama is eroded by so many minor goings-on. They detract from the real wonders that the author has wrought ... Though she sorely lacks Ms. Rowling's expert timing, the two share a similar sense of play ... Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been celebrated as an adult Harry Potter story, but it is more like a flatter and flabbier one ...it does become the basis for a brand new fantasy world, an intricate and fully imagined universe of bewitching tricks. Maybe that's enough.

Jaimy Gordon

Rave The New York Times This novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue … The book’s dramatis personae are of the two- and four-legged varieties. And Ms. Gordon seems to fathom both species equally well … Ms. Gordon is magically adept at fusing the banal and the mythic in a creature like [Lord of Misrule]. She’s also keenly attuned to all the aspects of carnality and power that infuse this story … Lord of Misrule edges toward some drastic final twists without ever escaping the impression that it is more of a short-story cycle than a full-fledged novel. And its texture is thick even when Ms. Gordon is at her most lighthearted.

Richard Russo

Rave The New York Times Mr. Russo has turned Empire Falls into the setting for a rich, humorous, elegantly constructed novel rooted in the bedrock traditions of American fiction … Deceptively casual in tone and modest in scope, Empire Falls begins with a beautifully wrought prologue in which a rich man, one C. B. Whiting, pits himself against divine will and assumes he can win ... In this pre-modern, irony-free (despite the priceless dialogue) world, small-town neighbors actually affect one another through their actions and frustrations. And this is a book, however lighthearted and funny, that means business when it contemplates the sight of the church steeple. That Miles means to help paint the steeple but fears heights, just as he cannot seem to rise out of Empire Falls, is another condition diagnosed by Mr. Russo with a gratifyingly light touch. This book works like a prism, regarding the same people and events from different perspectives until they are finally, deeply understood.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Rave The New York Times Mr. Foer incorporates himself and his family into this dazzling literary high-wire act. He places them at the center of recent history. And he writes so audaciously that no editor seems to have dared to lay a glove on him … Early in Everything Is Illuminated, Mr. Foer describes the act of remembering as a kind of prayer. That is what it becomes here, for all the book's wild flights of fancy and its irresistible humor. By the time it reaches a devastating finale, it has summoned a deep gravitas that has as much to do with Trachimbrod's obliviousness as with its fate … Everything Is Illuminated is a complex, ambitious undertaking...but the payoff is extraordinary: a fearless, acrobatic, ultimately haunting effort to combine inspired mischief with a grasp of the unthinkable.

Herman Koch, Translated by Sam Garrett

Rave The New York Times Book Review Mr. Koch confines his story to one fraught restaurant meal, where malice, cruelty, craziness and a deeply European malaise are very much on the menu ... This book has been widely described as both thriller and chiller, but it really is neither. Nor is it much of a cultural parable, though that seems to be part of Mr. Koch’s intent ... Mr. Koch sets forth a personal history for Paul that is full of dangerous flashes of violence and indicates that Michel, his and Claire’s son, is an apple fallen right off the paternal family tree ...the reader may be propelled by sheer voyeurism about the Lohmans’ capacity for ugliness ...The Dinner has been wishfully compared to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (and enthusiastically endorsed by Ms. Flynn) for its blackhearted deviltry ... Her sneaky spouses were delectable in their evil genius. The Lohmans are indigestible.

Erik Larson

Rave The New York Times [Larson] relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel, complete with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing … The Devil in the White City is given shape and energy by the author\'s dramatic inclinations. He succeeds in affirming the historical and cultural importance of the 1893 exhibition, which, he says, may have helped to spawn such other wonders as Disneyland and Oz. And he unearths a crime story of enduring interest, if only because Holmes, in the words of The Chicago Times-Herald, was ‘so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.’ A smart nonfiction writer did it instead.

Ernest Cline

Mixed The New York Times With its Pac-Man-style cover graphics and vintage Atari mind-set Ready Player One certainly looks like a genre item. But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative … Real life on an impoverished, resource-depleted Earth has grown increasingly grim. So the characters in Ready Player One spend their time as avatars bewitched by online role playing. They live as shut-ins and don’t know one another in the flesh … The breadth and cleverness of Mr. Cline’s imagination gets this daydream pretty far. But there comes a point when it’s clear that Wade lacks at least one dimension, and that gaming has overwhelmed everything else about this book.

Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin & Philip Gabriel

Pan The New York Times You, sucker, will wade through nearly 1,000 uneventful pages while discovering a Tokyo that has two moons and is controlled by creatures that emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. These creatures are called Little People … 1Q84 has even [Murakami’s] most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book’s glaring troubles. Is it consistently interesting? No, but Mr. Murakami is too skillful a trickster to rely on conventional notions of storytelling … It used to be customary, in a book of this magnitude, to explain unanswered questions and tie up loose ends. Mr. Murakami clearly rejects such petty obligations, and he leaves many of the parallels in 1Q84 cryptic and dead-ended.

Markus Zusak

Positive The New York Times The Book Thief is perched on the cusp between grown-up and young-adult fiction, and it is loaded with librarian appeal ... Mr. Zusak's narrator offers constant manipulative asides, as in the clever Lemony Snicket books, although in this case wit is not much of an option. The narrator is Death ... While it is set in Germany during World War II and is not immune to bloodshed, most of this story is figurative: it unfolds as symbolic or metaphorical abstraction. The dominoes lined up on its cover are compared to falling bodies ... a long, winding tale, punctuated by Death's commentary ... It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures.

Don Winslow

Rave The New York Times \"The Force recalls Sidney Lumet’s great New York police films (Serpico, Prince of the City) and makes their agonies almost quaint by comparison. Winslow’s novel takes place in 2017, but he doesn’t frame it as a time of good cops and bad cops, black or white. He paints a realistic tableau of police privilege, pragmatism, racial bluntness, street smarts, love of partners and loyalty to what they call the Job ... The Force has a lot of exposition to get through in its initial pages. Denny’s background is kept deliberately incomplete, because key parts of it are needed for the book’s cinematic denouement. There are many characters and locations and illicit police habits to introduce. But the pace is kept up by the Winslow way with words, which almost entirely defies being quoted here, either because of the slang (Elmore Leonard league) or because of the everyday obscenities that lace every funny line.\

Michael Chabon

Rave The New York Times Mr. Chabon has fashioned a big, ripe, excitingly imaginative novel and set it in the world of his grandfather, a New York City typographer at a plant where comics were printed. The book's world is also one of impending crisis, with World War II looming and Joe's Jewish parents and brother still in Czechoslovakia, from which they urged Joe to escape … Even when Mr. Chabon is slipping deftly from realistic narrative into wittily hyperbolic comic-book-ese, as he does to take part in the characters' bursts of creativity each time a new character is invented, the book's essential seriousness and thematic heft are never diminished.

Cormac McCarthy

Rave The New York Times This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see … His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that The Road will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.

Stephen King

Rave The New York Times Mr. King pulls off a sustained high-wire act of storytelling trickery. He makes alternative history work — but how? It’s at least as interesting to examine Mr. King’s narrative tactics as to discover his opinions about conspiracy theories … Perhaps it’s the gravity of the Kennedy assassination that makes this new book so well grounded, but in any case 11/22/63 does not lay on the terror tricks. Mr. King’s description of America in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, fearing imminent nuclear annihilation, is at least as scary as anything he ever made up.

Philipp Meyer

Rave The New York Times The Son spans 200 years, six generations and a great many eloquently evoked downfalls. It concentrates on one proudly purebred American family, though the delusion of that heritage will die by the end of this story … In some of the best sections of his vivid narrative, Mr. Meyer delineates the process of Eli’s assimilation...The most fascinating of many questions raised by The Son is how Eli, a dauntless little boy, grew from helplessness into absolute power … The reader learns in riveting detail about Eli’s Indian days. They are made that much more approachable by the book’s profanity, which sounds anachronistic but certainly adds colloquial flourish.

Emma Donoghue

Rave The New York Times If Room remained purely claustrophobic throughout, Ms. Donoghue and her reader might tire of Jack’s version of events, not to mention Jack’s bubbly cheer. So it’s fortunate that this novel has the dramatic turning point that it needs. Eventually the spell is broken: Jack and Ma are freed. They can leave Room behind, but they’ll have to make Outer Space their new home … Ms. Donoghue makes the gutsy and difficult choice to keep the book anchored somewhere inside Jack’s head. So anything that happens to his mother is filtered through his fear, love and curiosity about her. And when the book presents him with a cavalcade of new experiences, everything Jack sees must be measured against the strangely idyllic time that he spent inside Room.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Mixed The New York Times Though Americanah takes the shape of a long, star-crossed love story between Ifemelu and Obinze, it is most memorable for its fine-tuned, scathing observations about worldly Nigerians and the ways they create new identities out of pretension and aspiration … The first half of Americanah (the title refers to the newly Americanized Ifemelu) is tough-minded and clear. But Ms. Adichie disappointingly allows her story to slip to the level of a simple romance, leaving her readers to wonder, not very much, whether Ifemelu and Obinze will be reunited. The plot ultimately feels like an excuse for the venting of opinions — and the opinions carry far more conviction than the storytelling does.

Ben Fountain

Rave The New York Times Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience … There are such bravura scenes in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk that this book never seems narrow or small … Mr. Fountain describes the erotic fireworks of a Destiny’s Child performance mixed with the military fervor of an accompanying marching band...The stimulation of these extremely mixed signals simply explodes in Billy Lynn’s brain; the effect of this ‘porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope’ on readers will be just as devastating … The halftime of the title isn’t about the pause in the football game. It’s about this brief, stunning, life-changing pause in the way Billy Lynn, two-week American hero, goes to war.

Karen Russell

Rave The New York Times Ms. Russell is one in a million. The proof is in Swamplandia!, a novel about alligator wrestlers, a balding brown bear named Judy Garland, a Bird Man specializing in buzzard removal, a pair of dueling Florida theme parks, rampaging melaleuca trees, a Ouija board and the dead but still flirtatious Louis Thanksgiving. Sound appealing? No, it does not. Unless Ms. Russell had you at ‘alligator wrestlers’ — not likely — you may well recoil at every noxiously fanciful item on that list...But wait. Ms. Russell knows how to use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect … Fizzy as these ingredients may be, Swamplandia! also manages to be a suspenseful, deeply haunted book … For all its gorgeously eerie omens Swamplandia! stays rooted in the Bigtree family’s emotional reality.

Kathryn Stockett

Positive The New York Times The trouble on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms. Stockett’s real book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect … Expectations notwithstanding, it’s not the black maids who are done a disservice by this white writer; it’s the white folk … Though The Help might well have veered off into violent repression of these maids’ outspokenness, Ms. Stockett doesn’t take it there. She’s interested in the affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections.

Paula Hawkins

Positive The New York Times The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl...Ms. Hawkins’s story has three women to narrate it. But Rachel, the main one, hits a new high in unreliability … Ms. Hawkins keeps all these fibs, threats and innuendoes swirling through her book, to the point where they frighten and undermine each of her characters. None of them really know which of the others can be trusted or believed … One sign of this book’s ingenuity is the way key details are effortlessly omitted. And you’re not apt to miss them until the denouement, when it is pointed out that certain characters never appeared and supposed facts were never explained.

Gillian Flynn

Rave The New York Times It almost requires a game board to show how Nick and Amy move through this book … the game Ms. Flynn has in mind is a two-sided contest in which Nick and Amy tell conflicting stories … Like many a less clever unreliable narrator, Nick likes lies of omission. The reader has to figure this out very gradually, because Ms. Flynn is impressively cagey about which details she chooses to withhold … Gone Girl is Ms. Flynn’s dazzling breakthrough. It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they’re hard to part with — even if, as in Amy’s case, they are already departed.

Hilary Mantel

Positive The New York Times Ms. Mantel takes an extremely contemporary approach to Cromwell by appreciating his toughness, his keen political instincts, his financial acumen and his intimate knowledge of the workings of power. Almost unimaginable, in the midst of Henry’s impetuousness, Anne’s ambition and More’s self-righteous condescension, Cromwell emerges as the most sympathetic member of the wolf pack that populates Wolf Hall … Her book’s main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words … Deft and diabolical as they are, Ms. Mantel’s slyly malicious turns of phrase would count for little more than banter if they could not succinctly capture the important struggles that have set her characters to talking. But she is able to place Cromwell on plausibly familiar terms with royalty and on a fair moral footing with More, that paragon of self-sacrifice.

Jennifer Egan

Rave The New York Times Ms. Egan’s vision is mostly dystopian, but what makes it most memorable is the eccentricity. She imagines that the aftermath of 15 years of war have led to a baby boom. And technology has eagerly leapt to accommodate a new demographic group: gadget-loving children. Pity the poor rock stars who find themselves at the mercy of toddlers who have purchasing power. Ms. Egan slyly turns one Goon Squad recurring character into one of those stars.

Liane Moriarty

Positive The New York Times Ms. Moriarty keeps her books long and gossipy, primarily by stalling. She introduces several sets of major characters, cuts back and forth among them, and scatters the narrative with foreshadowing about the terrible, terrible night … Ms. Moriarty writes all this in an easy, girlfriendly style that only occasionally lands with a thud…a low-level bitchiness thrums throughout the narrative, becoming one of its indispensable pleasures. The witnesses’ descriptions of whatever happened are usually comically distorted, as in a game of telephone, so that everyone’s understanding of Trivia Night is at best half-wrong … The ferocity that Ms. Moriarty brings to scenes of masculine sadism really is shocking. A seemingly fluffy book suddenly touches base with vicious reality.

Anthony Doerr

Rave The New York Times The heroine is Marie-Laure LeBlanc, whose loving father, a talented locksmith, goes to extraordinary lengths to help her compensate for the loss of her eyesight...Mr. Doerr’s acutely sensory style captures the extreme perceptiveness Marie-Laure has developed by the time World War II begins. Much of the story unfolds during the war, although it jumps back and forth. The book opens in August 1944, two months after D-Day, with the sound of things falling from the sky and rattling against windows. Marie-Laure knows these are leaflets. She can smell the fresh ink … Werner’s experience at the school is only one of the many trials through which Mr. Doerr puts his characters in this surprisingly fresh and enveloping book...Mr. Doerr’s nuanced approach concentrates on the choices his characters make and on the souls that have been lost, both living and dead.

Dennis Lehane

Positive The New York Times Suffice it to say that this second part of Since We Fell is sharply different from the first. Instead, it’s packed with signs that Lehane sold this story to the movies, which he did, in 2015, and that he loves the Hitchcock classics that prey on mistrust. Suddenly, he begins delivering nonstop suspense only loosely rooted in Rachel’s story and its foundations ... Rachel works extremely well as the focus of the book. Lehane has always written wrenching female characters into his stories, and he has no trouble giving center stage to one ... Her options narrow as the book becomes more crime-centric and throws her into life-or-death situations rather than contemplative ones. But she’s as much of a pragmatist as anyone Lehane ever dreamed up.

Haruki Murakami

Mixed The New York Times Kafka on the Shore is as layered and convoluted as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is still the author's most drop-dead feat of pyrotechnics. But the new book is more ambitious in ways that render it more vague … The book's only conventional aspect is its uninspired cross-cutting format. This novel makes pendulum swings between the story of how Kafka runs away from home, and how good-hearted old Nakata, the cat whisperer, embarks on a peculiar quest. Kafka and Nakata are not acquainted, but their lives overlap in piquant, spooky ways … Kafka on the Shore specializes in overlapping metaphors and symbols that may or may not have any true connection...It's clear that they are powerful but less clear that they are deep.

Paula Hawkins

Pan The New York Times If The Girl on the Train seemed overplotted and confusing to some readers, it is a model of clarity next to this latest effort ... Her goal may be to build suspense, but all she achieves is confusion. Into the Water is jam-packed with minor characters and stories that go nowhere ... Hawkins does not so much introduce these characters as throw them at the reader in rapid succession. There’s no time to process who’s who, and not much detail about any of them.

Elizabeth Winder

Pan The New York Times Rarely has a book about Marilyn Monroe been more maddening than Elizabeth Winder’s Marilyn in Manhattan...Winder has sloppily crafted an answer to suit her own question ... Most of her anecdotes are either unattributed or ascribed to Kindle editions of recent books, with no page numbers given. Movie magazines from the 1950s are taken seriously ... The bulk of what’s here is a strangely culled, often repetitive set of anecdotes from only a few easily obtainable books that most Marilyn fans probably know about ... [all] hot air and specious detail.

JP Delaney

Mixed The New York Times The Girl Before generates a fast pace with frequent cuts between chapters labeled 'Then: Emma' and 'Now: Jane.' And it milks suspense from matching scenes in which Emma and Jane do exactly the same things with Edward, who consciously sets up these parallels. That’s the good news. The downside is the author’s clumsy trickery. No spoilers here, but the novel’s denouement is improbable enough to have flown in from outer space ... The author, clearly writing with commercial success in mind, has used as many other familiar genre ploys as the book can hold ... Edward is very rich in ways that allow the book to indulge in both shelter and merchandise porn ... The book has more trouble bringing its women to life. We know about their past problems, their secrets and their reactions to Edward. But they never really emerge as strong characters ... Mr. Delaney intersperses ethics questions on stand-alone pages throughout the book. A fairly tame sample: 'You have a choice between saving Michelangelo’s statue of David or a starving street child. Which do you choose?' The unnerving ghoulishness of these questions hovers over the book, and the single most ingenious touch is that we’re not provided either woman’s answers.

Jane Harper

Rave The New York Times [Harper] has jampacked her swift debut thriller with sneaky moves that the reader has to track with care ... Ms. Harper throws out so many teasing possibilities that it’s hard to believe this is her first novel ... The Dry is a breathless page-turner, driven by the many revelations Ms. Harper dreams up for Falk during his visit ... The dryness that gives the book its eerie title looms large in the novel’s finale, when certain kinds of weapons become even more terrible than those used to butcher the Hadlers. And a book with a secret on every page now has threats blooming everywhere, too. The Dry has caught the attention of Reese Witherspoon, who has a solid track record for spotting novels with strong movie potential. But Ms. Harper has made her own major mark long before any film version comes along.

Julia Baird

Positive The New York Times When Ms. Baird goes after those myths, her alternative versions are exhilarating ... This book shows how Victoria’s girlish naughtiness turned into a regal, willful, complex nature that other biographers have tended to simplify...Ms. Baird brings a strong feminist awareness to the ways in which Victoria’s letters, edited by two men, have been censored to excise the full range of her personality, and also to the subordinate role any wife was expected to assume when Victoria was a young bride ... If there’s one thing missing from the book, it’s Ms. Baird’s thoughts on why Victoria let herself become submissive to Albert for so long, but perhaps the answers to that are too obviously linked to the loss of a father so early in life.

Chris Smith & Jon Stewart

Mixed The New York Times ...this book seeks a serious understanding of everything about him, especially the thinking that shaped the show. But Mr. Smith lets hero worship and repetition slow the book’s momentum. And doses of snark from embittered ex-staffers sound like exactly what they are ... He omits transcript material that’s important to the show’s history...It would have been worth the extra space to remind readers what Mr. Stewart sounds like when he’s in a cold fury ... Mr. Smith carefully follows the show’s arc to the start of the war in Iraq and the video-clip milestone that had the show staging Bush vs. Bush debates comparing Gov. George W. Bush’s statements about Iraq with those of President George W. Bush.

Lee Child

Positive The New York Times ...while it’s surprising to find him as part of a group in this book, the changeup works. Unlike most Reacher books, which start at breathless velocity and then wind up having to work through huge, empty action scenes later, this one gets better as it goes along. Its complexity pays off with a better than usual MacGuffin and real teamwork against a global enemy ... the choices he’s made for Night School are smart ones.

Michael Connelly

Positive The New York Times Each of these books is as memorable for its locations as it is for narrative or even denouement, and The Wrong Side of Goodbye really takes Harry traveling. ... All of it is etched in indelible detail and with great care. The people of The Wrong Side of Goodbye may not be with you by the next time Harry comes around. But the settings will be etched into the Bosch road map of California life.

John Grisham

Positive The New York TImes ...the Grisham formula hasn’t gotten old. Or older. When he’s on his game, as he is with his latest, The Whistler, it really works ... Despite the bits of leaden language, Lacy does manage to come to life on the page. The Whistler also has a strong and frightening sense of place, painting part of the Panhandle as a lawless region where terrible things might happen, and do. And Mr. Grisham deserves credit for dependability: He is at heart an optimist who believes that wrongs can be ferreted out and righted. We could use a little of that these days.

Beth Macy

Positive The New York Times ...[an] expert work of nonfiction ... Its story has gaps that are impossible to fill, though that is part of what makes the book so lifelike ... Though Truevine can’t get into their heads, it does a fine job of describing what their circus companions were like and how lost the brothers must have felt once stranded back home in Virginia.

Paulette Jiles

Rave The New York Times Book Review Like [Ron] Rash, Ms. Jiles writes books that bring the natural world to life and are also agonizingly eventful ... They will learn to trust each other, though not in a hokey way; Ms. Jiles is much too good to let her book sink into sentimentality ... a narrow but exquisite book about the joys of freedom; the discovery of unexpected, proprietary love between two people who have never experienced anything like it; pure adventure in the wilds of an untamed Texas; and the reconciling of vastly different cultures. That’s a lot to pack into a short (213 pages), vigorous volume, but Ms. Jiles is capable of saying a lot in few words.

Tana French

Rave The New York Times ...a tour de force ... The Trespasser is brisk but not breathless. It would be a pity if Ms. French raced through such beautifully conceived and executed material ... [French] has become required reading for anyone who appreciates tough, unflinching intelligence and ingenious plotting.

Maria Semple

Positive The New York Times Today Will Be Different, can be outrageously funny. But it cuts closer to the bone than Bernadette did, and its main character’s problems feel more real. This time Ms. Semple delivers less satire and more soul ... Speed bumps notwithstanding, Ms. Semple is an immensely appealing writer, and there’s something universal in her heroine’s efforts to get a handle on a life spinning out of control ... And Ms. Semple’s descriptions of Seattle continue to be priceless.

Mike Love & James S. Hirsch

Mixed The New York Times ...[a] frequently bilious book ... Mr. Love’s book ranks high in gossip and readability, even if it’s stuffed with tedious chart positions for Beach Boys records ... bragging is something he knows a lot about. And you’ll find a lot of it in these pages ... more than a half-century’s worth of inside information about the Beach Boys, who were all the rage until they were ancient history, has undeniable appeal, especially from a new perspective.

Carl Hiaasen

Rave The New York Times Carl Hiaasen’s irresistible Razor Girl meets his usual sky-high standards for elegance, craziness and mike-drop humor. But this election-year novel is exceptionally timely, too ... [a] wonderfully overstocked book ... Finally, Mr. Hiaasen’s dialogue is too good to go unmentioned.

James Andres Miller

Pan The New York Times Right from the get-go, there are two enormous things wrong with it. The first is 'oral history': Sometimes this means a seamless narrative pieced together from the words of many speakers, but not here. In Powerhouse, it means a 700-page string of skips, jumps, tangents and otherwise dizzying non sequiturs. The second is that Mr. Miller is this book’s sole author, which means he’s missing his secret sauce ... by and large this book is so full of fawning that even the gossip is hard to find.

Jay McInerney

Positive The New York Times ...it’s never quite clear how detached [McInerney] is when he starts inhabiting Russell’s memory or recapitulating a pretentious young man’s hero-worshiping fatuousness ... revives the memory of Tom Wolfe’s social X-rays. (As with vintage Wolfe, when he’s writing about elite New Yorkers’ fetishes he knows whereof he speaks) ... Russell is both more comfortable with Corrine and more comfortable with this newer, more aggressive generation. He’s ready for a fourth installment. Dear Mr. McInerney, please write one.

Jeffrey Toobin

Positive The New York Times Mr. Toobin has used the same winning formula of delving deeply into an American crime story that had tremendous notoriety in its day and retelling it with new resonance ... The book’s legal pièce de résistance is how Mr. Bailey bungled Ms. Hearst’s defense in charges of robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, the first of several crimes for which she was accused.

Liane Moriarty

Pan The New York Times It has all the requisite trademarks of one of her hits (The Husband’s Secret, What Alice Forgot), a three-word title included. It probes some of the things she writes about best: fraught friendships, covert backbiting, stale marriages. And its format has become standard for her, with brief, maddening flashes of Whatever-It-Is that don’t gel until she’s ready to let them. All of it is formulaic by now. But it’s a shame to see her resort to the level of contrivance that this book requires. You’d have to be a very dedicated Moriarty fan to believe much of anything that happens post-crisis.

Alice Adams

Positive The New York Times Ms. Adams has managed to combine a hoary premise, a familiar plot, readable to iffy prose and pigeonhole-ready characters and spin their story into a heart tugger with seemingly honest appeal. This amazing feat doesn’t rival those of the Large Hadron Collider, which plays a cameo role in Invincible Summer. But it’s close ... Invincible Summer, which takes its title from an uncharacteristically upbeat Camus quotation, means to focus on bigger, less fluffy things: moving from a sheltered academic life to an unprotected one, facing increasingly consequential problems, making serious decisions and, inevitably, serious mistakes. It also takes some notice of the world around its self-involved foursome ... Ms. Adams captures the way that freedom begins to erode as each character defines himself or herself more clearly. As the lines that separate them are drawn, the friendships become more competitive and awkward ... Ms. Adams’s story develops an increasing power that can be created only incrementally. And by the novel’s end, regardless of whether you buy the plot’s string of remarkable coincidences, its message of friendship, love and loyalty hits home.

Stephen King

Rave The New York Times There is perfect symmetry to the way Stephen King aligns the opening of End of Watch, the smashing final installment of his trilogy, with that of its first installment ... when [King] writes here about pain, he does it with astounding honesty ... This is his best book since the vastly ambitious Under the Dome (2009), and it's part of a newly incisive, reality-based part of his career. At some point, the phantasmagorical became less central to him than the frightening prospects to be found in the real world. And he uses his ever-powerful intimacy with readers to convey the damage life can wreak.

Noah Hawley

Rave The New York Times This is one of the year’s best suspense novels, a mesmerizing, surprise-jammed mystery that works purely on its own, character-driven terms ... Mr. Hawley does a beautiful job of turning his book into an extended tease, with separate chapters about each passenger and revelations about why each could have been a target.

Steve Hamilton

Rave The New York Times Mr. Hamilton gives this book a superb set of road maps, one for the Chicago Nick knows so well, another for the inner workings of Nick’s mind. Because Nick is a first-time character faced with a terrible moral dilemma, his thoughts need to be grippingly complex, and they are ... Though he flirts with some obvious clichés here, Mr. Hamilton uses them to his advantage. After all, chases and club scenes and daughter-loving dads wouldn’t be so popular if they didn’t work. And The Second Life of Nick Mason kicks off this new phase of Mr. Hamilton’s career at full gallop. It’s a tight, gripping book about a man hellbent on reinventing himself against long odds. By a writer who knows whereof he speaks.

Joe Hill

Mixed The New York Times The Fireman is big. It creates an alluringly weird world. It has a highly developed code of honor, not to mention an ever-surprising lineup of surreal tricks its characters can pull. And it thrives on fear, but has hope at heart... if Mr. Hill’s overarching plot has its problems, he remains a terrifically ingratiating writer when it comes to ambience and spirit.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Pan The New York Times The title of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition says everything about it, because it says nothing...from the book’s outset, it’s clear that Mr. Philbrick did not approach this project with a clear thesis. He approached it with a mandate, a methodology, a book contract and a couple of big names to connect. At least that’s how Valiant Ambition reads.

Hanya Yanagihara

Mixed The New York Times \"[A Little Life is] a big, emotional, trauma-packed read with a voluptuous prose style that wavers between the exquisite and the overdone ... Ms. Yanagihara’s prose is always ripe with modifiers, as when the book conjures rats that go \'squeaking plumply underfoot\'; is it possible for rats to squeak skinnily? A lot of this 720-page book is devoted to torrentially long and powerful descriptions, and without question, they pack a lot of power. But her mixing of metaphors makes for a mess ... A Little Life eventually develops a relentless downhill trajectory. It might have had even more impact with fewer wild beasts prowling through fewer pages. But Ms. Yanagihara is still capable of introducing great shock value into her story to override its predictability.\

Richard Russo

Positive The New York Times Consider Everybody’s Fool a delightful return to form...It’s fitting that this book’s eye-catching cover depicts a dog with a lot of personality — and some signage discreetly hiding its nether parts. That dog represents a real character who’s just as rascally and perverse as the book’s humans. The dog is just better at expressing himself. Mr. Russo’s people prefer to sideswipe, wisecrack, sneak, scheme and talk to figments of their imaginations. It’s a joy to spend time with any of them, two-legged or four.

Jennifer Haigh

Rave The New York Times Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford and Richard Russo. They are part of the stellar literary lineup of her admirers. With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league.

John Grisham

Mixed The New York Times Rogue Lawyer is one of [Grisham's] better recent books, partly because of the format: It’s broken up into short episodes that interlock only as the plot reaches its final stages ... Rogue Lawyer ushers in Rudd as a potential series star for Mr. Grisham. The man has a son he loves but barely knows; an ex-wife who left him for another woman; a shockingly good way of assailing important targets, like badly written laws; and a few wild-guy qualities that are balanced by his love of golf. Roguewise, he’s right up there with Robin Hood.

L.S. Hilton

Pan The New York Times It’s hard to find much escapist fun in a book about a woman whose main attributes are deadly sins. Greed, lust, envy, pride and wrath — she’s got five of them covered, and perhaps even a little gluttony, if you count all the times Ms. Hilton lovingly describes the delicacies that slide down her heroine’s gullet. This is meant to make Judith a creature of insatiable appetites, which is meant to be alluring, especially since she keeps herself so saleably slim...But the hot stuff grows repetitive very quickly. And it begins to feel obligatory. Excitable as Judith is, she has a limited imagination, and she vents it at regularly timed intervals. By the time Maestra reaches its suspenseful conclusion — three little words, 'to be continued' — she seems to be running out of positions. With two books to go.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Positive The New York Times The Nest doesn’t need much in the way of set dressing. It just has the author’s excellent antennas for describing the New York area and that evergreen fuel for food fights: an inheritance meant to be divided among adult children. Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney lived in New York for many years before relocating to Los Angeles. Her familiarity with both cities animates The Nest, about the four dysfunctional (what did you expect?) Plumb siblings and their fiscal expectations.

Kaitlyn Greenidge

Rave The New York Times Ms. Greenidge has charted an ambitious course for a book that begins so mock-innocently. And she lets the suspicion and outrage mount as the Freemans’ true situation unfolds. This author is also a historian, and she makes the 1929' on Toneybee plaque tell another, equally gripping story that strongly parallels the Freemans’ 1990 experience. A question that hovers over this book is whether the Freemans will learn from past horrors or become so dysfunctional that they merely relive them.

Sarah Bakewell

Rave The New York Times At the Existentialist Café is a bracingly fresh look at once-antiquated ideas and the milieu in which they flourished. Ms. Bakewell’s approach is enticing and unusual: She is not an omniscient author acting as critic, biographer or tour guide. As someone who came back to this material by rereading it later in life, she has made her responses part of the story.

Jean Stein

Pan The New York Times Despite its provenance, West of Eden is strangely unfocused, especially when compared with Ms. Stein’s indelible Edie ... [it] includes only a terse set of biographical notes, which is an extreme annoyance; it needed the full biographies, genealogical charts and abundant illustrations that were so necessary to Edie.”

Carly Simon

Pan The New York Times This book’s style recalls that of her songs: a little precious, a little redundant, a little too much.

Paul Goldberg

Positive The New York Times Mr. Goldberg has written a book that revolves about Stalin’s final blow against the country’s remaining Jews. There is evidence for this, but The Yid is a novel, not a heavily researched historical document. More important, Mr. Goldberg comes up with a team of Yiddish-speaking jokester-superheroes who are at the heart of his story, and who make it their mission to avenge countless acts of anti-Semitism, both real and anticipated.

Mary Louise Parker

Rave The New York Times The book is written in a smart, beguiling voice that is inextricably entwined with qualities that Ms. Parker radiates as an actress. There’s as much flintiness as reckless charm. Flirtation and mischief are big parts of her arsenal. So is the honest soul-searching that gives this slight-looking book much more heft than might be expected.

Paul Kalanithi

Rave The New York Times Part of this book’s tremendous impact comes from the obvious fact that its author was such a brilliant polymath. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him — passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die — so well. None of it is maudlin. Nothing is exaggerated.

Michael Connelly

Mixed The New York Times The best Connelly books take on terrific momentum in their final chapters, but The Crossing isn’t at that level.

Lauren Groff

Mixed The New York Times \"Whenever Fates and Furies has a dark undercurrent to trumpet, it announces its insights before readers can make their own discoveries. In this much more manipulative and even conventional book, the shock value of the main characters’ secrets wipes out too much of the sublime subtlety and originality that distinguish Ms. Groff at her best. Ms. Groff’s prose can be gorgeous, especially with the erotic heat she brings to it here. It can also be florid and odd...But she’s still a writer whose books (which also include the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds) are too exotic and unusual to be missed, and whose brief career has been one of immense promise.\

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

November 21, 2024