MixedThe Wall Street JournalIt is, in any case, a rather arduous journey—for the reader too. Ms. Stone can’t seem to do a good deed without heralding it as such, then pretends to play it down. There is much self-consciously spiritual talk about taking journeys and paths, trusting in the here and now, finding a way \'to succeed better\' ...The book is most compelling and assured as a portrait of the actress as a young striver ... Celebrity memoirs tend to run along predictable lines—a combination of score-settling, record-correcting, name-dropping, dirt-dishing and secret-telling. The Beauty of Living Twice follows this template up to a point ... Even when Ms. Stone is talking about another star, somehow it all ends up being about her ... To be fair, Ms. Stone has been an active social activist, has stood up for herself, demanded her due. You want to like her and for a page or two you do, because she is very good at being off-handedly charming and, really, she does have a fine sense of the ridiculous. But then she goes and tells you how hard she has worked, how much money she has raised, how much of value she has done, what a swell friend she is ... Granted, too, this is Ms. Stone’s book. She can say what she wants. But for all she tries to process what has befallen her, to speak from the heart, it often sounds like a performance, and the script tends toward grandiose incoherence.
Sue Miller
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMs. Miller has shown herself to be an expert and thoroughly nonjudgmental chronicler of domesticity, its joys and discontents. She pokes under the surface of marriages, lays bare secrets and dissatisfactions, exposes the desire to find an alternative life—or a different self ... The depiction of the McFarlanes’ home life—small detail by small detail—is the most resonant, most rewarding element of Monogamy ... Nothing else in the novel quite measures up—there’s too much telling, not enough showing—until the final pages. The subject and themes feel a bit too familiar, and Annie never feels fully realized as a character. That she’s a photographer—a competent one but by no means a great one—seems, if not quite incidental to the story, not as integrated as it should be. Graham, though certainly less sympathetic—particularly when viewed through the #MeToo lens—is a far more interesting creation (though it’s a safe bet that readers could do with far fewer mentions of his penis) ... It doesn’t help matters that “Monogamy” frequently veers off in puzzling directions. A sign heralding the performance of a celebrated cellist who was Annie’s childhood best friend sets off such a flight of recollections it seems certain that the musician is going to put in an appearance in the story. There’s no such payoff. Disquisitions on Sarah’s romance, on Frieda’s uneasy relationship with her French daughter-in-law, and on Lucas’s failure to bond with his infant daughter feel similarly aimless. A deus ex machina intervention involving a neighbor is just flat-out dopey ... Ms. Miller knows her milieu, and there are some piercingly affecting moments here, but readers who wish for more may feel a bit cheated by Monogamy.
Anne Tyler
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMs. Tyler is especially good at making us feel for these loony lost souls, making us ache at all their blown opportunities for intimacy and connection even as—especially as—they’re shoved, however unwillingly, to a moment of reckoning ... doesn’t quite satisfy. While it shares the concern of Ms. Tyler’s best work, the story feels forced and hurried despite being lifted by Ms. Tyler’s customary and welcome style without a style ... Ms. Tyler has a gift for atomizing eccentric behavior ... the characters are either little more than the sum of their idiosyncrasies or mere foils for Micah ... Those who’d like to know how Micah came to be the way he is, why he avoids intimacy and embraces the traffic God, won’t get much help from Ms. Tyler, who now and then intrudes on the story as a rather baffled, rather exasperated commentator ... Alas, the ripped-from-the-pages-of-a-soap-opera-script plot is as thinly conceived as the characters ... It’s all a bit pat. The saving grace of Redhead by the Side of the Road is Ms. Tyler’s empathy, the empathy she has for her characters and the very high value she places on empathy.
Thomas Lynch
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... moving ... lyrical, sometimes astringent ... Mr. Lynch writes with grace and moral clarity about the quandaries and perplexities of life, and life’s end ... rambles here and there (the tale of the loathed feline comes to mind). It suffers, too, from repetitiveness. The last days and last rites of a beloved cousin are remembered in two different essays in almost identical phrasing and detail. Never mind. Mr Lynch’s richly flavored stories—about that cousin or about other assorted family members, like Grandma Lynch, the Catholic convert, observing Lent for the first time—don’t pall.
Kate Bolick, Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, and Jenny Zhang
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThese three essays zig and zag, often folding in on themselves. One can sympathize with the task set before Ms. Bolick and Ms. Machado: Meg and Beth, the least dynamic of the sisters, offer little scope for analysis. Ms. Bolick’s \'solution\' is to quote Virginia Woolf and tell an extended not-quite-relevant story about an unpleasant boss and an undependable male friend. Ms. Machado’s workaround, meanwhile, is to change the subject to Jo as frequently as possible. Ms. Zhang, who has the official Jo assignment, careers between postmodern chin-wagging and tut-tut judging of 19th-century mores through a 21st-century prism ... The essay that anchors this slim book, Jane Smiley’s fresh, sharp take on the much-maligned Amy, is a tonic—and a revelation.
Claire Lombardo
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... an assured first novel ... The fun—well, that’s in the reading of the novel, which nicely blends comedy with pathos and the sharp- with the soft-edged ... the strength of the book is in its unsentimental limning of the past, of dinner-table conversations, pillow talk, sisterly intrigues and alliances, of creaking floors and sheltering trees, of petty resentments and small rapprochements ... The Most Fun We Ever Had is long—really, a bit too long. The plot lines and complications are many—perhaps a bit too many. The cast is large (see above). But Ms. Lombardo manages to keep all the balls in the air.
Lyndsay Faye
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"The Paragon Hotel is set a century ago, but its themes of social and cultural upheaval feel sufficiently fresh that you might think twice about calling Lyndsay Faye’s sixth novel historical fiction. But calling it terrific—not for a minute should you hesitate to do that ... While compelling, the two narratives in Hotel aren’t particularly complementary, and there are moments of dislocation and a need to re-orient as the action switches back and forth between coasts and plotlines, not to mention splendidly named characters ... The great strength of “The Paragon Hotel” is Ms. Faye’s voice—a blend of film noir and screwball comedy ... The jauntiness of the prose doesn’t hide the fact that Ms. Faye has serious business on her mind. At bottom, The Paragon Hotel is about identity and about family—those we’re born into and those we create.\
Sally Rooney
RaveThe Wall Street Journal\"... [compared with Rooney\'s first novel, Normal Peopleequally witty and sure-footed second novel ... \"... [compared with Rooney\'s first novel, Normal People is] equally witty and sure-footed second novel ... what starts off as wry and bright turns into a complex, sometimes bleak, coming-of-age story ... Normal People manages to feel utterly up-to-date and a throwback to a more distant time ... Ms. Rooney gets it all. She understands messy emotions—another way of saying that she understands the particular, peculiar shape of love and longing. Readers may have a difficult time remembering the last time they felt so invested in a novel’s characters.\
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalA musical that opened on Broadway in late 1891 featured a song about a notorious stretch of Manhattan where, as the lyrics went, \'I had one of the devil’s own nights. . . . The Bowery! The Bowery! / They say such things and they do strange things.\' The ditty took America by storm, according to Devil’s Mile, an intermittently engaging cultural history of the Bowery by Alice Sparberg Alexiou, the author of a previous book about the Flatiron building. Fans snapped up the sheet music and danced to the song in dives and drawing rooms.
Allison Pearson
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalShe’s baaaaack. That would be Kate Reddy ... wearier and, frankly, not much wiser ... Kate is closing in on 50 and has a whole new set of problems: a hostile, sexting 16-year-old daughter ... a jobless husband ... And then there is menopause, which in How Hard Can It Be? is less a condition than a character. Ms. Pearson spares not one eldritch detail, not one single hot flash. The reader gets the point quickly. The reader gets cross. Nonetheless, Ms. Pearson writes with great wit and verve. And the sections of the novel that deal with the care of an increasingly demented in-law are genuinely moving.
Elisabeth Cohen
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalSilicon Valley big cheese Shelley Stone, the hilariously single-minded protagonist of The Glitch...a mostly terrific satire ... has many a core principle. These include scheduling sex only when she and her husband are changing out of their clothes anyway. Because, really, where’s the pleasure in pleasure? ... The Glitch develops a glitch of its own toward the end. The previously sure-handed Ms. Cohen loses her grip on the narrative and, by sending Shelley on the road to redemption, loses faith in the appeal of an unlikable heroine.
Judy Blundell
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe summer chronicled in The High Season is hell and, come to think of it, high water ... Ms. Blundell knows the territory ... Her account of Ruthie’s coming to grips with a career, a daughter and a community in flux is as touching as it is convincing. And watching her re-connect with a mensch from her past is a pleasure. Yes, it’s high time for a moratorium on chapters composed entirely of texts or emails, a device that seems designed to let middle-aged authors prove that they’re hip to the ways of the young’uns, but it’s a small matter. No bummer, for sure.
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalSo expertly does first-time novelist Lillian Li conjure the Beijing Duck House...that readers of Number One Chinese Restaurant can almost taste its signature dish and feel the heat of its woks ... Number One Chinese Restaurant, by turns darkly funny and heartbreaking, is sometimes over-plotted, but Ms. Li brings her characters to vivid life.
Paula McLain
PanThe Wall Street Journal\"Love and Ruin, a stew of biography and speculation, portrays him as a chauvinist and a bully of the first order. To know him was to love him. To know him better was to get over it. The novel’s prose is studded with cut-rate Hemingway terseness and labored similes ... It is clear that Ms. McLain wants to give Gellhorn her due...Love and Ruin roars to life at such moments, but even the high points are marred by what reads like the self-conscious musings of a schoolgirl’s diary.\
Joanna Scutts
MixedThe Wall Street Journal...[an] eye-opening if often frustrating attempt to rescue Hillis from obscurity and to make the case for her as a proto-feminist ... Ms. Scutts, a postdoctoral fellow in women’s history at the New York Historical Society, is an assiduous researcher and makes some astute observations ... Far too frequently, though, the very, very wordy Ms. Scutts skitters off on tangents whose connection to the subject at hand is remote at best ... Rather more vexingly, The Extra Woman tells more than it shows.
Jeremy McCarter and Lin-Manuel Miranda
PanThe Wall Street JournalA high point of the book is the back-and-forth between Mr. Miranda and Ron Chernow, whose biography of Hamilton was the inspiration for the show ... Hamilton is wonderful. Hamilton: The Revolution is not. Rather, it’s a self-promoting, inside-baseball bore that is best enjoyed by perfervid fans of the show ... The Hamilton libretto, which is marbled through the book’s text, makes up for a lot, and Mr. Miranda’s witty and illuminating annotations are a lovely bonus.
