About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
John Banville
Rave Shelf Awareness Enriched by Banford\'s attention to detail, the narrative grows more compelling in its telling by these and other characters, each suffering more or less alone even when they are married, partnered, or set next to immediate family ... Through these intricacies and its murky sense of foreboding, this inexorable novel will continue to advance Banville\'s considerable reputation.
Rumaan Alam
Rave Shelf Awareness Offers a slow-burning, insidiously creepy study of money and culture in his quietly distressing novel ... Provides a deceptively silky backdrop for the kinds of thrillingly uncomfortable questions at which Alam excels
Adèle Rosenfeld, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman
Rave Shelf Awareness A strange, haunting story ... A curious, thought-provoking, intensely mind-bending exploration of the loss of a sense and the potential richness as well as struggle of life with an invisible disability. Imaginative and spellbinding, Jellyfish Have No Ears is unforgettable.
Catherine Chidgey
Rave Shelf Awareness Chidgey offers a singular combination of compassion, desperation, dark humor, and slow-building terror ... Told in the voice of a magpie, with humor and wisdom, this unflinching portrait of nature picks at the thin veil between the elemental violence and drama of both human and animal worlds.
Jesse Katz
Rave Shelf Awareness With admirable clarity and compassion, Katz unravels a complex narrative that has no easy answers ... Thorough ... The result is relentless, multi-faceted, and incisive.
Margalit Fox
Positive Shelf Awareness Fox successfully tells this story by letting colorful characters stand out ... With copious notes and research, Fox offers a tale as madcap and thrilling as it is illustrative of American history and culture. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum is riveting for fans of both history and entertaining storytelling.
Morgan Talty
Rave Shelf Awareness \"Fire Exit is concerned with bodies, with visceral needs not only for food and shelter but for truth. Talty\'s tersely poetic, descriptive prose grounds this story in the physical. This first novel grapples with family issues and hard choices about love and responsibility; blood, culture, and belonging. It is an utterly absorbing story, always firmly rooted in the corporeal; tough, honest, but not bitter.\
Rowan Beaird
Rave Shelf Awareness Lushly imagined, compassionate ... The Divorcées is tender and compassionate, wise and incisive, and gorgeously rendered, even in heart-rending moments. Lois\'s journey of growth and exploration forms a masterful and unforgettable debut.
Tana French
Rave Shelf Awareness Delivers the mystery, atmosphere, and feeling her fans have come to expect ... Perhaps her finest work—and leaves readers thirsty for more of Cal\'s story.
Chantha Nguon with Kim Green
Rave Shelf Awareness Heart-wrenching, inspiring, harrowing, and mouthwatering ... Nguon\'s titular noodles contribute enormous metaphorical meaning ... A rare gem of a story, gorgeously written, humble and stirring, and packed with tempting recipes.
Katia Lief
Positive Shelf Awareness Twists and turns, its escalating dangers alternating with fresh reveals, as momentum builds to a breaking point. Joni is compulsive, troubled, but sympathetic; Val is less central but exerts a force of her own. Characters develop quickly from disagreeable but benign to chilling and dangerous; some readers will find this atmospheric novel engaging and disturbing enough to lose sleep. A literary psychological thriller, cultural study, and heartbreaking story of friendship and loss, Joni\'s unforgettable story involves layers of lies and the dangers of self-sublimation. Lief chills, entertains, and challenges.
Lea Carpenter
Rave Shelf Awareness A spy story, a romance, a coming-of-age record, and a tale of lost innocence told in an elegiac tone, with something for every reader to get lost in ... An espionage thriller in its richly wrought and detailed plot; but its spotlight falls centrally on the narrator herself, whose yearning for a role to play earns her a bigger one than she could have imagined. The dreamy tone of this sparkling, riveting story sets up a memorable counterpoint to its intrigue.
Alexis Soloski
Rave Shelf Awareness Riveting ... Frightening, delicious, engrossing, and unforgettable.
Max Marshall
Rave Shelf Awareness Finishes without moral lessons or final conclusions, instead aiming clearly to report events that will disturb most readers. Combining excellent journalism and deftly paced storytelling, this chilling tale lifts a veil on a decadent and troubling lifestyle.
Isle McElroy
Rave Shelf Awareness A mind-bending journey ... Sly, clever, funny, provocative, and compelling. It offers a world and a story to get lost in.
Daniel Magariel
Positive Shelf Awareness \"Magariel\'s prose is as quietly lovely and evocative as his subjects are bleak...His settings showcase realistic detail, and both beauty and damage: fecund coastlines and wetlands, the harsh sea, an old family home, and garishly decorated working-class bars ... Stark and tragic, Walk the Darkness Down offers a harrowing view of individual and familial suffering--with empathy and, ultimately, with hope.\
Brando Skyhorse
Rave Shelf Awareness Chilling ... Skyhorse seeds his text with plenty of Spanish-language dialogue, especially with Iris\'s parents and sister; non-Spanish-speaking readers will easily use context clues. In addition to this lovely linguistic texture, Skyhorse imbues his all-too-lifelike novel with fine details ... Terrifying with its proximity to reality ... In addition to being an engrossing, discomfiting tale, this will make an excellent book club selection and fuel for tough conversations.
Karl Geary
Rave Shelf Awareness \"...a sensitive, scarred coming-of-age story ... Juno Loves Legs is tender and heartbreaking. Young friendship takes on all the world\'s challenges--love, art, family, the simple and overwhelming task of survival--with tragic, poignant results. Readers will find Juno\'s bravado and Legs\'s persistent sweetness unforgettable.\
Molly Prentiss
Rave Shelf Awareness Prentiss offers a sensitive story, gorgeously detailed and painfully realistic, about the lives and ordeals of women and artists, and what it means to seek and shape connection in the modern world. Filled with both snark and wisdom, this novel is a gift of love and forgiveness
Dizz Tate
Positive Shelf Awareness \"Brutes offers stark and unlovely characterizations, but with moments of striking beauty. The girls (and their mothers) are grasping, even desperate, but capable of compassion. Tate\'s Florida is steamy and thickly rank, with blinding sunlight and shadowy depths, not least in the lake that many residents believe houses a monster--maybe the monster that took Sammy, although the human monsters in this community are plenty sinister. This is a dark coming-of-age tale and meditation on childhood and the cusp of adolescence: authentic, often grim, but with glimmers of hope.\
Maria Dong
Rave Shelf Awareness Masterfully harrowing ... A completely absorbing novel, both a terrifying whodunit thriller and a heart-wrenching drama about mental health, family, loneliness and moral relativism ... This exceptional debut novel showcases relentless momentum, horrors, compassion and an unforgettable protagonist: not to be missed.
Katherine Corcoran
Positive Shelf Awareness Into a mess of stories and theories, and still under threat of surveillance and violence years later, steps Corcoran, with archival research and hundreds of interviews with a dizzying cast of characters (helpfully listed in the front of the book) from the media, politics, organized crime, and Martínez\'s family and friends. She brings a journalist\'s careful accounting of where truth meets speculation, where the author has chosen between versions of the same story, where corroboration has been impossible. In the Mouth of the Wolf offers the results of this research, numerous unconfirmed theories and the personal story of a journalist chasing an elusive truth. By its finish, Corcoran has become alarmed by the state of the free press in the United States as well as in Mexico, and concludes that Martínez\'s unsolved murder--and so many like it--have chilling effects not only on the freedom of the press but on society itself, all over the world. This compelling, carefully researched investigation is a sobering clarion call. --
Ainslie Hogarth
Positive Shelf Awareness ... a grim, disturbing novel of family drama and mental illness, yet a bizarrely funny glimpse into one woman\'s mind ... Hogarth rocks readers via Abby\'s turmoil, her swings from devotion to fury, self-loathing to self-aggrandizement. Motherthing keeps readers as unstable as its narrator, struggling to manage the traumas and the waves of emotion ... The result of these roiling thoughts and images is a darkly comic, kaleidoscopic novel of unhealthy fixations, love, murder, the gifts and wounds that family can inflict and one woman\'s fight to save herself.
Bobby Finger
Rave Shelf Awareness ... unforgettable ... hits the rare and satisfying double note of harrowing and delightful ... Mary Alice Roth is a compelling, although decidedly prickly, protagonist; secondary characters only sweeten this heart-wrenching, warm-and-fuzzy small-town drama ... By the novel\'s second half, everyone is more nuanced than they originally seemed, and the fictional Billington feels as multifaceted and significant as any real hometown. Finger is expert at the careful disclosure of one secret after another, and his characters capture hearts and imaginations. His novel beautifully profiles the iconic small town, both holding it accountable and celebrating its quiet humanity ... The messiness, pain and grace of these relationships are candidly portrayed in a story that will inspire laughter and tears, making this debut a memorable achievement indeed.
Virginia Hartman
Positive Shelf Awareness As the enigma around Boyd\'s suspicious death gets more complex, the plotting can feel a little unwieldy...But the subversion of Loni\'s expectations is frequently refreshing; a few secondary characters offer intriguing perspectives, and the novel\'s framing details of Florida marshland, ornithology, museum work and fine art are expertly and beautifully drawn...The Marsh Queen is unwavering in its lush, finely detailed, appreciative portrayal of a distinctive natural setting, and ends on a redemptive, even inspirational note.
Emma Seckel
Positive Shelf Awareness ... part ghost story, part elegy to war and traditional lifestyles, dreamlike even in its horrors. Seckel weaves historical fiction with mystery and fantastic elements and threads of romance in this tale of love, grief, attachment to place and resistance to change. Her island setting is both otherworldly and firmly rooted, and her prose style is lushly evocative. This imaginative novel is memorable and wild indeed.
Sidik Fofana
Rave Shelf Awareness ... electric ... Fofana shows an ear for pacing and for evocative, frequently musical language. He expertly handles the structure of each story and of the collection as a whole, whose easy readability advances serious themes, including the challenges of poverty in its many iterations, gentrification, humor and hope and anguish ... This quickly shifting narrative introduces vibrant, appealing characters in brief but three-dimensional sketches, and paints a larger picture of existential efforts and persistence. Fofana\'s is a striking voice, and his protagonists will linger in readers\' imaginations.
Max Cutler
Positive Shelf Awareness Ten chapters cover 10 cults chosen for their impacts on the world\'s imagination, beginning (naturally) with Charles Manson and his \'family\'...Cutler\'s focus is both narrative, detailing the story of the leader\'s upbringing and the cult\'s rise and fall, and also probing: Cults is interested in motivations and, to the extent possible, diagnoses...Cults are labeled in the table of contents by the root cause Cutler has identified for each leader\'s actions...Manipulative, self-aggrandizing, compelling and lacking in empathy, these characters (in every sense) are by turns laughable, inexplicably strange and chillingly, brutally cruel...Not for the faint of heart but absolutely for the true-crime junkie, Cults is packed with details and unafraid to posit theories to explain these superlatively weird and scary stories.
Alexis Schaitkin
Positive Shelf Awareness ... Schaitkin creates a chilling, mesmeric world ... the village at its heart and the options of a larger world will stick with readers long after the final page ... unsettling, thought-provoking and lushly detailed, a memorable inquiry about attachments to place and to family, and what happens when a person has to choose between her family and herself.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a complex novel of great imagination, outside of time but very much concerned with it ... lovely, weird prose ... Yuknavitch\'s writing style is recognizable to readers familiar with her lyricism, coined words, love of the downtrodden, and water as an emphatic theme. Thrust is many things: a speculative history of the United States, a recognition of forgotten classes, a fluid song about the power of love, a celebration of the power of language and storytelling. It is an intricate novel in its interconnections, plotlines twisting away and back together again, but readers\' attention will be well rewarded by profound, thought-provoking and deeply beautiful observations about humanity in an ever-changing world.
Aaron Foley
Rave Shelf Awareness With Boys Come First, Aaron Foley offers a delightful novel about romantic and career ambitions, friendship and the particular charms of and challenges faced by gay Black millennial men in Detroit...Boys Come First is rich in flavor and detail, benefiting from Remy\'s comprehensive knowledge of Motor City neighborhoods, Troy\'s hyperlocal concerns for his school and Dom\'s perspective as he returns from afar...The changing demographics of contemporary Detroit, by class but most pointedly by race, are front and center...Foley\'s novel shows range, with its fun, silly and pathos-filled handling of the love-and-sex storylines, serious commentary on social issues and an endearing representation of sincere (if troubled) friendships...Unforgettable characters, madcap fun and mishaps converge in this sweet and, finally, aspirational story.
Tom Perrotta
Rave Shelf Awareness Perrotta serves up his signature black comedy and shrewd wit in an expertly paced novel of great cleverness and charm ... One of Perrotta\'s talents is obviously forming character. Tracy is delightfully complex; Principal Weede has secrets of his own, and a touching vulnerability as well as some less admirable qualities. Kyle is not well liked, but his attempts to compensate offer comic opportunities. The aging star quarterback nominated for the Hall of Fame, Vito Falcone, is now a recovering alcoholic working on making amends, his process by turns pitiful and hilarious. And the high school\'s much-loved, longtime front desk lady, Diane, is perhaps the novel\'s most rewarding surprise ... These points of view paint Green Meadow--and Tracy--in different lights, and allow Perrotta\'s comedic zings to shine ... many things: of-the-moment cultural criticism, a darkly comic drama of human relationships in suburbia, a moving sendup and a novel of racing momentum. By its end, Tracy is headed either for the triumph she\'s been seeking since she was a high school student, or a meltdown the likes of which Green Meadow has never seen--or maybe both ... Perrotta\'s classic combination of insight, humor and empathy is perhaps perfected in Tracy Flick Can\'t Win. This novel has something for both the reader with a gimlet eye on the real world and the reader seeking an escape from it.
Tracy Dawson
Positive Shelf Awareness In a pithy, one-liner-laden style, [Dawson] brings these remarkable and little-known histories to light with comedic flair ... peppered with punchy jokes in an informal, conversational tone that suits Dawson\'s background in television ... The result is an easy-to-read, eye-opening look at female bravery amid the sexism and misogyny throughout history; it is funny and rousing and proud.
Jane Green
Positive Shelf Awareness Captivating ... Green dazzles readers with the brilliant adventures of Claire ... This dreamy narrative emphasizes life lessons and revels in the glitter and dazzle of 1960s free love and sex in more or less equal measure. Sister Stardust gathers momentum and achieves the kind of propulsive prose that brings immediacy to its joys and sorrows. Female friendships, the arts and the sensory joys of Morocco combine for a sparkling coming-of-age story of simple adventure and profound experiences.
Natalie Haynes
Rave Shelf Awareness Haynes\'s authorial voice is remarkable: expressive, nuanced, impassioned. Her tone is absolutely accessible, even conversational, and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. Haynes (also a stand-up comic) is as well versed in the modern world and its concerns as in the ancients ... Haynes\'s assessments of the visual arts (from ancient pottery through Renaissance paintings to modern television and movies) offer another dimension in this meticulous study. The classics are as relevant, subversive and entertaining as ever in this brilliant piece of work. Clever, moving, expert, Pandora\'s Jar is a gem, equally for the serious fan or scholar of Greek myth, for the feminist or for the reader simply absorbed by fine storytelling across time and geography.
Joel Agee
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a dreamy, haunting immersion in the mind of a child in a gravely serious adult world ... This is a quietly profound study of boyhood, in some ways almost humdrum ... Through the eyes of this curious, philosophical, sensitive child, the whole world is fresh and new, colorful, beautiful and dangerous ... In the hands of such a skilled and nuanced writer, this material glistens and tilts with both beauty and menace. Pira is captivating, and The Stone World is completely absorbing. Readers should clear their calendars until the final page has been turned, and then leave time for the contemplation this novel deserves.
Kyle Lucia Wu
Rave Shelf Awareness [A] wrenching evocation of yearning in a slim, artful package ... Readers will be engrossed by Willa\'s troubled desire to please and her pervasive unease, as she seeks and then deflects the slightest attempt at connection. As she begins to meld into the Adriens\' household, she reconsiders her own childhood and family homes in a series of flashbacks. The subtle racism she encounters is but one thread of Willa\'s distress ... With an eye for just the right detail, Wu offers an understated protagonist, self-defeating but still searching. Win Me Something is a nuanced story of longing, of the paired desires to belong and to strike one\'s own path. Willa is a quiet heroine, but unforgettable.
Amy Leach
Rave Shelf Awareness Leach takes her readers on a playful, rigorous, mind-bending romp through human nature, the natural world, spirituality and more. Her perfectly singular voice sings the most surprising notes in an imaginative blend of silliness and seriousness ... Leach employs a huge range of rhetorical devices while retaining a sense of whimsy and plain fun. Her genius perhaps shows best in her selection of the singular, startlingly unexpected detail. Adept as she is at wordplay, Leach\'s writing goes much deeper than that, wondering and speculating at larger questions ... These and other essays range widely in subject matter but accrue to a meaningful whole. Leach is smart, effervescent, earnest and funny. Her voice is perfectly unmistakable, her themes expansive; her prose glitters. The Everybody Ensemble is a revelation.
María Amparo Escandón
Rave Shelf Awareness [A] lovely, compelling and occasionally brutal novel ... The novel is defined by time, however: Escandón chronicles events from January through December of 2016. Her story is a feat of both plot and character. Each member of the extended Alvarado clan is intriguing and flawed but deserving of empathy; even when they make questionable decisions, they are both convincing and entertaining ... This is a story of people, place and connection. Absorbing, moving, comic and tragic, L.A. Weather will capture readers and never let them go.
Sara Nisha Adams
Rave Shelf Awareness [A] sweet, pleasing debut ... The Reading List is a tender novel about human connection and community and the healing power of reading, about the support and compassion that all people need at one time or another. This book is a soothing salve.
Allison Larkin
Rave Shelf Awareness ... propulsive ... intimate, urgent and direct; April\'s first-person voice is magnetic, compelling ... This is a novel of great empathy, about connections and coming of age, built families and self-acceptance. It contains heartbreak and redemption, and a plucky, irresistible protagonist. For any reader who\'s ever wished they could go, or wished they could stay.
Nick McDonell
Rave Shelf Awareness ... witty and compelling ... This story contains both whimsy and life-or-death consequences, charmingly related with humor and sagacity by a narrator ... Steven Tabbutt\'s deceptively simple illustrations reinforce the storybook impression and advance character development, as when the bear classically addresses a human skull during an existential crisis. While frequently playful, this narrative is not all fun and games: the dog might have PTSD, the baboon has disturbingly dictatorial tendencies and the stakes couldn\'t be higher. McDonell\'s clever, lively prose and snappy pacing propels readers onward ... has the feel of a fable, both a romp with sweetly goofy animal characters and a serious and clear-eyed story about the real world and its dangers ... Thought-provoking, captivating, funny, instructive: this is a book for readers who have ever yearned for a little extrahuman wisdom and cheer.
Adam Thompson
Positive Shelf Awareness ... a striking collection of hard-edged, penetrating stories ... Every story features Aboriginal characters, generally in the central role; the various experiences and complexities of this identity (which the author shares) form the heart of the stories\' combined impact ... Some stories lead with forceful blows, others sneak in to nag at the back of the reader\'s mind ... The lives and attitudes of these characters vary, offering a revealing set of perspectives on the contemporary landscape ... contains as well dark humor and even slim strands of hope. Thompson\'s prose style appears blunt at first glance but shows nuance. His 16 stories are unyielding in terms of their values, yet somehow deft, even delicate in their storytelling and various voices. The overall effect is understated: simple, unglamorous lives and events crescendo toward a thought-provoking and memorable whole. Even (or especially) in its quietest moments, this is a haunting debut collection by a skilled writer.
Emily Austin
Positive Shelf Awareness ... spellbinding and unforgettable ... Gilda\'s anxiety and social ineptitude could hardly be overstated, and she bumbles through life with such painful clumsiness that her story should be hard to read. But somehow, Austin\'s remarkable narrative is engaging and snappily paced even when its first-person narrator is lying in a dry, empty bathtub without the will to move. Gilda\'s voice is frequently extremely funny, with gut-laugh punchlines made more effective because they are so surprising ... disarmingly sweet even in its grimness. Gilda is a singularly memorable character.
Pedro Mairal tr. Jennifer Croft
Positive Shelf Awareness Lucas is not an entirely likable narrator. He is self-pitying, a bit sleazy in his adulterous aspirations and at best a mediocre husband and father. He resents his wife for her ability to support him financially, and his young son for disrupting his work. But readers will be drawn in by the mysterious Guerra and the pathetic and darkly comic narrative of Lucas\'s unlucky day ... The translation from Spanish to English by Jennifer Croft handles such moods and idiosyncrasies perfectly ... Readers may not be precisely rooting for Lucas to get what he wants, but they will certainly be eager to find out what happens next.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg
Rave Shelf Awareness The chronology is disjointed, jumping back and forth, shifting timelines as well as locations, which can be disorienting for the reader, but that effect feels true to the narrator\'s experience: Kentucky exerts a strong pull even in Minnesota, and pains felt by generations past are ever present ... As narrator, Rodenberg is intelligent and insightful. As character, she is resourceful, scrappy, defiant, brave and exposed. Her memoir is heart-rending and hard-won ... a work of nuance that complicates received narratives in all the best ways.
Lina Meruane, tr. Megan McDowell
Positive Shelf Awareness Lina Meruane\'s Nervous System is a novel both fanciful and visceral, pairing the study of the cosmos with medical mysteries and wounds on earth ... Megan McDowell\'s translation from the Spanish establishes an eerie tone, both emotional and detached ... Nervous System is filled with anguish and unease, but also starlight.
Alexandra Andrews
Positive Shelf Awareness ... cunningly plotted ... a wickedly fun study in deception, secrets, striving and longing. Andrews\'s stylish, intricate debut novel showcases deft prose and expert use of tone and atmosphere ... What means might one justify to grasp the life she really wants and (she\'s tempted to believe) deserves? These memorable pages hold one possible answer.
María José Ferrada, tr. Elizabeth Bryer
Rave Shelf Awareness Elizabeth Bryer\'s whimsical translation from the Spanish feels appropriate to M\'s exceptional perspective. Ferrada\'s playful, poignant novel...is fanciful, sweet and moving ... This is a beautifully translated, thought-provoking novel of profound themes and childlike wonder.
Vendela Vida
Positive Shelf Awareness ... a dreamy, tricky tale of girlhood, secrets and the shifting sands of truth ... captivating ... an enchanting, literary novel, realistic but a little unreal. Vida gives a tender, incisive portrayal of adolescence. The girls\' cruelties are visceral and impermanent, the stressors of Sea Cliff somehow both superficial and profound ... Vida\'s readers will be changed, too, by this cleverly woven story about honesty, betrayal, charm and illusion, about what matters in youth and what matters always.
Cynan Jones
Rave Shelf Awareness Jones beautifully reprises his distinctive voice and poignant themes ... This novella-length meditation excels in its thoughtful considerations, quietly lyrical language and memorable lines and characters ... Many of these characters remain nameless, so that even in their specificity they stand in for a larger human experience, and the effect is that this thirsty world is a little blurred ... a sobering consideration of a possible near future, and a moving work of fiction. Jones is easy to appreciate also for his writing ... The marksman guarding the water train, where the novel both begins and ends, drives home questions about what to value and protect, and when to let go. This is a quiet masterpiece of language, imagination and grim possibility.
Stephen Spotswood
Positive Shelf Awareness ... sparkles with the wit and personality of this bold, unconventional heroine ... In Will\'s delightful first-person telling, peppered with vernacular asides, the two women initially clash in a violent midnight action sequence worthy of the kind of pulp novel Will so loves ... This mystery plot has all the twists and surprises a fan of the genre could ask for, but it is Will\'s distinctive, captivating voice and background--from difficult childhood to the circus to lady detective--that is Spotswood\'s real triumph ... Ms. Pentecost\'s expertise and no-nonsense attitude are appealing and entertaining, but gutsy Will, with her snappy, slangy narrative style, ultimately wins readers\' hearts and carries the day.
Rumaan Alam
Rave Shelf Awareness \"Leave the World Behind is pitch-perfect in atmosphere, easy to read and deceptive in the high polish of its setting. Alam has crafted a deeply bewitching and disquieting masterpiece ... [a] captivating, thought-provoking novel.\
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Illustrated by Fumi Nakamura
Rave Shelf Awareness Nezhukumatathil stuns with her nonfiction debut ... These essays explore the natural world and the human experience, finding parallels, meaning and beauty in the intersections ... The red-spotted newt and dragon fruit that title their respective essays receive Nezhukumatathil\'s attentive study and yes, wonder, but the author\'s own experience is always a second thread. She brings a poet\'s ear for language and an eye for commonality and metaphor, both reverent of the natural world and specific in her personal story ... offers a series of brief naturalist lessons, but is perhaps at its best in drawing connections ... Wisdom, wonder and beauty make this slim collection one to treasure.
Peace Adzo Medie
Rave Shelf Awareness ... arresting ... Medie gives Afi a voice that winningly combines insecurity, wisdom and dignity. Fashion and food contribute to a cultural backdrop ... The dramas of Afi\'s marriage and various family conflicts offer an entertaining plot rich with humor, but it is the story of the strong woman in a challenging and changing world that will capture readers\' hearts. His Only Wife is a memorable novel of personal growth and choosing one\'s own destiny.
Margot Livesey
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a stunning novel of tenderness, interconnectedness, cause and effect ... a coming-of-age story, a mystery, a sharp-eyed examination of individual lives and relationships. Despite the violent crime related to its title and the insecurities that arise for various characters along the way, this brilliant novel offers a sense of beauty and safety in its quiet ruminations.
Isabel Wilkerson
Rave Shelf Awareness [A] singular and vital perspective on American society ... Wilkerson\'s understanding of caste proposes a nuanced take on the Trump election: many working-class white voters did not in fact vote against their interests, but rather prioritized one interest—upholding the caste system—over others ... Caste is a thorough, brilliant, incisive investigation of the often invisible workings of American society. Original, authoritative and exquisitely written, its significance cannot be overstated ... meticulously researched and beautifully crafted.
Natasha Trethewey
Rave Shelf Awareness Natasha Trethewey, two-term United States Poet Laureate, forges a serious, poignant work of remembrance ... While Trethewey does pursue forensic exploration (transcripts of recorded phone calls between Gwen and Joel, as well as a visit to a psychic), this memoir is more introspection than true-crime investigation. And it is gracefully and gorgeously rendered, as befits a poet of Trethewey\'s stature ... Trethewey declines to offer a neat conclusion, but she succeeds in making meaning from pain. Memorial Drive is loving and elegiac, disturbing and incisive.
Nancy Wayson Dinan
Rave Shelf Awareness ... fabulous and engrossing, both faithful to the real-world details of central Texas and wildly imaginative, peopled with treasure hunters, prehistoric beasts, distracted professors and one improbable young woman facing a momentous decision. Dinan\'s storytelling flows as forcefully as a flash flood in this spellbinding first novel in which a handsome young man, refreshingly, awaits rescue by a powerful woman.
Dola de Jong, Trans. by Kristen Gehrman
Positive Shelf Awareness This updated translation from the Dutch by Kristen Gehrman retains what is fresh, understated and moving in the original ... The tone of The Tree and the Vine is often backward-looking and elegiac, told at a distance of years. But the immediate events of the women\'s lives feel frantic: Erica rushes about, Bea panics. What is most important almost always goes unsaid ... The prose can occasionally feel a bit stilted, or involve a bit more telling than showing; but in fact what is shown, often, is not actions or expressions but Bea\'s own deep feeling and anguish. The result is a love story on the brink of war in which the love never quite steps out in the open and the war remains off-stage. A sense of looming, momentous events pervades this slim novel ... By turns emotional and restrained, this powerful story indeed offers valuable perspective on the human experience.
Mark Doty
Positive Shelf Awareness Doty, like Whitman, is gifted with words, a lover of beauty and of men, a New Yorker ... What Is the Grass is a close reading of Whitman\'s great work, but also of American poetry, same-sex love, the exuberance of the physical body, myriad cultural shifts and Doty\'s own life ... As is his habit, Doty\'s mind on the page wanders widely ... Readers should be prepared to dig out a copy of Leaves of Grass...upon reading this book, which makes an indispensable companion and guide.
Megan Campisi
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a fully fleshed work of speculative fiction, abundant with the fine details of Elizabethan life and, of course, food. May is a damaged and sympathetic heroine, at once intelligent and innocent. This is an opulently imagined debut, horrific and weirdly beautiful, filled with earnest feeling as well as cruelty. Set aside time to read this engrossing novel in one go.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave Shelf Awareness \"These stories are shocking, stark, pulsing; their power lies in their realism, even when the tone turns dreamy and approaches magical realism. Yuknavitch\'s clear voice, with its unflinching demand that her readers recognize pain as well as beauty, is as precise and distinctive as ever ... she writes about the bright points in a dark world, and while the stories in Verge indeed lean decidedly toward the dark, those memorable points of light define them ... Disturbing and essential, these stories emphasize the forgotten, the pushed aside, the marginalized. Yuknavitch\'s storytelling is urgent, raw and inspired, and if Verge is a love letter to those on the edge, it is equally important for all of us.\
E. J. Koh
Rave Shelf Awareness [Koh\'s] final lines are as heartbreakingly beautiful as the entire book deserves. The Magical Language of Others is a masterpiece, a love letter to mothers and daughters everywhere.
Jeannie Vanasco
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a thoughtful, conflicted, harrowing examination of what Mark did--with his words alongside her own ... aware of itself, frequently commenting on process and prospective readership. This kind of self-regard is difficult to pull off, but it is clearly Vanasco\'s natural style, and she wields it expertly ... Vanasco is very alert to the times, feeling prompted by #MeToo, Trump\'s presidency and her creative writing students\' disclosures of sexual assaults. She is very alert, in general--it seems a personality trait--and one of the most intriguing artistic qualities of this book is its vigilant self-awareness ... Clearly this is an important and timely book. Even in a world that can seem brimming with stories similar to Vanasco\'s, hers stands out ... This narrator is tough, vulnerable and meticulous; the resulting memoir is heartfelt, painful and essential.
Caitlin Doughty
Rave Shelf Awareness ... delightful ... aimed at younger readers but absolutely for adults as well ... Doughty\'s answers are as delightful and distinctive as the questions. She blends humor with respect for the dead ... Her investigations of ritual, custom, law and science are thorough, and she doesn\'t shy from naming the parts of Grandma\'s body that might leak after she is gone ... Dianné Ruz\'s accompanying images keep the same tone of playful but plainspoken discussion ... This informative, forthright, comical guide to bodies after death is just the antidote--and surprisingly great fun as well.
Jennifer Croft
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a startling memoir, stylistically as well as in its content and in the unusual mind it reveals ... Disjointed, sometimes heavy with foreshadowing, lush with a love for words and language, the dual narrative of Amy and Zoe\'s intertwined lives and shared pain seems the right artistic choice for this twisting dual story ... astonishing in its emotional reach, its evocation of a child\'s discovery and a young adult\'s suffering and all the wonder of words. What is translatable is perfectly communicated here.
Michael Crummey
Rave Shelf Awareness ... a novel of innocence and hardship and what is intrinsically human ... A gifted writer, Crummey shows imagination and compassion for his young protagonists, and a care for the oddities of language specific to time and place ... deeply pained and enchanting, full of small joys and victories as well as the pressing multitude of aches and challenges that mere living offers to two babes alone in this fierce environment. This searing novel will keep readers engrossed in its harsh world long after its hopeful conclusion.
Attica Locke
Rave Shelf Awareness Heaven, My Home is a rich, complex puzzle, with layers of characters ... Locke\'s absorbing prose, in a third person very close to Darren, keeps the reader well abreast of all the crisscrossing loyalties and betrayals intrinsic to these East Texas woods ... There is a warmth and intimacy to the portrayal of Darren\'s many internal struggles. This is a protagonist to love and sympathize with, although he is far from perfect ... Both a fascinating, smartly plotted mystery and a pertinent picture of the contemporary United States, Heaven, My Home is refreshing, dour and thrilling all at once. Readers will be anxious for more of Ranger Darren Mathews.
Ji-min Lee, Trans. by Chi-Young Kim
Positive Shelf Awareness ... bleak but whimsical and, yes, hopeful ... Chi-Young Kim\'s translation is both spare and emotionally evocative, suiting a narrator who is simultaneously desolate and childishly yearning ... Born of a curiosity about human relationships in unusual times, The Starlet and the Spy asks the questions: What if we met across a divide? What if a despairing young Korean woman reached into Marilyn Monroe\'s makeup bag for a lipstick, or a way out? In a decidedly optimistic turn, Lee leaves her ending open, and her reader free to wonder what might be next for Alice.
Rachel Monroe
Rave Shelf Awareness Each story receives intelligent context ... Savage Appetites is a chilling, compelling examination of the darkness in us all. This is obviously a book for true-crime fans, as well as anyone interested in human nature ... A powerful, well-researched inquiry into why we find violent crime so fascinating, viewed though the stories of detective, victim, defender and killer.
Jess Row
Positive Shelf Awareness This intelligent collection is often deeply engaged in realms of philosophy and literary theory; it approaches an academic writing style. Its subject matter may be discomfiting for white readers and writers, and readers less familiar with Wittgenstein, Derrida or Edward T. Hall\'s theory of proxemics will likely find this book challenging. There is something for every reader, however, in the message that fiction not only reflects but acts upon real life, and that each of us is obliged to act for justice, in reading and writing as in life
Cristina Alger
Positive Shelf Awareness Fans of murder mysteries packed with action and plot twists will be satisfied by this edge-of-the-seat adventure ... is a little weak on certain details--the way a deadbolt works, the difference between prostitution and pandering charges, how a field agent might tell a suspect was dead. But its plot drives with such momentum that these details may be overlooked. With violent action and split-second turns, this is not a book to put down easily: plan accordingly. Alger\'s thriller is emphatically plot-driven, but her characters hold their own ... Nell is a quintessential damaged cop, even if she is FBI...Her personality serves as backbone to the electric plot of Girls Like Us, and the reader trusts that she will follow through to the truth, no matter how much it hurts.
Margaret Renkl
Rave Shelf Awareness ...a quiet but stunning collection of essays merging the natural landscapes of Alabama and Tennessee ... Renkl\'s voice sounds very close to the reader\'s ear: intimate, confiding, candid and alert ... the essays are brief—often just two or three pages—and can stand alone, but accrue to form a truly lovely larger picture ... A book of subtlety and sadness, yes, but also a tough, persistent joy in the present and the future ... Late Migrations is itself that gorgeous, thought-provoking gift.
Dorian Lynskey
Rave Shelf Awareness This wide-ranging and thorough study requires a careful and patient reader. Even one familiar with both Orwell\'s work and early communist and socialist histories will need to read closely. Lynskey offers his own appendix: a chapter-by-chapter précis of 1984, which is recommended for everyone. The requisite attention will be well rewarded, as The Ministry of Truth is not only enthralling and research-rich, but often laugh-out-loud funny ... Lynskey\'s voice is impassioned and self-aware, and he has an eye for the absurd (as any student of Orwell should) ... The Ministry of Truth is a necessary guide.
Naomi Wolf
Rave Shelf Awareness This book harnesses the electric power of Walt Whitman\'s Leaves of Grass, the righteous energy of first-wave feminism and the terror of criminalized identities, in a style accessible to general readers. As the fight for LGBTQ rights continues, this book is as relevant as it is compelling ... Wolf\'s style is easy to read, and her research is authoritative: this book is in part adapted from more academic work on the subject, and some of the most captivating scenes involve primary sources in the archives. Outrages is not only an important history with lessons for the present, but also an engagingly told story. The instructive life of Symonds is for any reader who cares about history, civil rights or the power of poetry.
Jonathan Gornall
Rave Shelf Awareness Gornall\'s tone is drily funny and always self-deprecating when it comes to the project at hand. His research, however, is as serious as his journalistic background would suggest. The writer\'s love for style is evident ... The result is a deeply moving intersection of the personal—Gornall\'s absolute devotion to his daughter—with the practical. This is not quite a how-to manual, but readers with aspirations to fashion their own clinker-built boat would have a headstart upon reading. By the end, this self-described \'soft-handed, deskbound modern man with few tools, limited practical abilities, and an ignominious record of DIY disaster\' has achieved something truly remarkable, and possibly moved his reader to tears. If the boat is a gift to Phoebe, this book is another ... a charming, heartfelt love letter to both boat and child.
Mark Boyle
Positive Shelf Awareness The Way Home is a thoughtful study, often wise but always questioning and seeking. With frequent references to Edward Abbey, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robert Macfarlane, Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau and others, Boyle places himself in a grand tradition of intellectual naturalists and thinkers ... Boyle has a sense of humor as well as a deep sensitivity to the needs of people as well as the planet and its ecosystems ... His writing style is pensive and unhurried ... The result is a deeply appealing examination of nearly all aspects of modern human life, by a thorough, careful, concerned narrator.
Rachel Louise Snyder
Rave Shelf Awareness ...the product of copious, immersive research, an investigation into a universal and insidious violence and what can be done about it ... No Visible Bruises sounds like an appallingly dark read, and it\'s true that the content is deeply disturbing. But by focusing on case studies--individuals\' stories--Snyder returns humanity to the horrifying larger issue ... told with such compassion and curiosity, they turn out remarkably accessible ... an impressive body of knowledge about domestic violence in the United States.
Ed. by Michele Filgate
Rave Shelf Awareness ...[an] astonishing anthology ... These collected essays are variously rich, tender, angry, despairing and clinical. The result, greater than the sum of parts, is part paean and part denunciation, intelligent, heartfelt and wise. What My Mother and I Don\'t Talk About is a shrewd, glinting collection of beauty and pain: a gift for mothers and their children.
Suzannah Lessard
Positive Shelf Awareness Lessard is at her best when handling the ways place and people interact (Disney\'s attempt to build a history theme park just south of Washington, D.C.), and on shakier ground when handling larger issues (market forces versus governmental powers). One of her finest chapters considers a mall in King of Prussia, Pa., and the tensions and challenges facing shopping malls across the country ... Lessard can speak from a place of economic comfort that may grate some readers, but the value of her decades of research is undeniable. The Absent Hand is often dense, as Lessard draws upon centuries of human history to make her arguments. In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew ... This broad social-historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader.
Belle Boggs
Rave Shelf Awareness Each [character] is perfectly developed and flawed just enough to be lovable, if hapless. The book hums along with fitting momentum, so that when the storm hits, the reader is entirely invested in this well-meaning but ill-fated crew. Redemption is a risky ambition, especially with inspirational writing, but Boggs pulls it off with The Gulf\'s denouement. This is a novel of keen comedy, insight and empathy.
Hugh Ryan
Rave Shelf Awareness When Brooklyn Was Queer achieves everything one could want in a history: meticulous research, easy-reading narrative, fascinating small events within significant larger ones, and personal interest ... Painstaking research and attention to detail highlight the richness and mystery of stories that have been largely hidden until now. Ryan is careful to point out the challenges of this kind of research ... Ryan is sensitive to the intersecting limitations faced by women and people of color ... a compelling, essential read.
Chloe Aridjis
Positive Shelf Awareness A dreamy, wandering tale of teenage ennui and searching, and the pull of the sea ... Aridjis\'s prose is well suited to this kind of story: her sentences are luminescent and imagistic, expressing Luisa\'s tendency to fancy...The plot of Sea Monsters is somewhat quiet, Luisa spending much of her time inside her own head, but Aridjis\'s style makes this an absolute pleasure even when nothing is happening.
Pamela D Toler
Positive Shelf Awareness Toler reveals a history many readers will meet with surprise as well as fascination ... With such copious content, Toler has been careful to keep her book a manageable length: at just over 200 pages, Women Warriors is an easy entry to an expansive topic ... entertaining and informative history.
Kim Adrian
Rave Shelf Awareness Adrian\'s story is often horrifying. Both of her parents were violent; her mother\'s emotional and verbal abuse is ongoing and perhaps more shocking still. The older woman\'s circumstances, bouts of homelessness and hospitalization, and the younger woman\'s inability to extricate herself from the cycle of abuse, can be difficult to read ... The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is a feat on many levels. Adrian tells a harrowing story, surprisingly redeemed by her own sweet family, but in many ways also continuing. She gives it meaning without having answers to all the questions she still asks herself. Her work as glossator is astonishing and inventive. Her glossary is strangely gripping, with a momentum pulling the reader in and through. The result is whimsical, even darkly funny at times, brimming with compassion, terribly sad and deeply loving. Memoir readers should not miss this singular offering.
Scholastique Mukasonga, Trans. by Jordan Stump
Rave Shelf Awareness \"The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga... is a loving tribute to a strong mother and a striking work of memoir ... Extraordinarily, this story is at times horrifying in its content and at other times playful; lyric in its style and tender in its handling of the central character. While the reader\'s knowledge of the genocide to come hangs over the narrative, the everyday events often retain a quotidian feeling ... As a literary work, this establishes a rare balance. Jordan Stump\'s translation from the French beautifully conveys this sense of both tragedy and day-to-day joy ... This is an adoring, gorgeously rendered memorial to a mother and testimony to a people.\
Sarah St Vincent
Rave Shelf Awareness \"This novel of suspense has many strengths. Kathleen offers depths of emotional truth and texture. Other characters are portrayed at a certain remove, according to the narrator\'s personality, but they open up by turns as she experiences them ... The setting in rural Pennsylvania mountains is harshly beautiful and handsomely evoked. And, warning: this is a book to keep one up late into the night, its considerable momentum pulling the reader toward its finale. Ways to Hide in Winter is an impressive, compelling first novel, with characters that will be missed after its conclusion.\
May-Lee Chai
Positive Shelf Awareness As the world becomes increasingly global, this material proves ever-relevant. Chai\'s prose is often unadorned, but occasionally startlingly lovely ... Even unnamed characters prove memorable long after their brief appearances ... These evocative stories are variously funny, surprising, gloomy and heartening, ultimately about a universal human experience, of immigration and beyond.
Sayaka Murata, Trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Positive Shelf Awareness ...a compelling novel about conformity in society, and the baffling rules applied in work and life. Murata\'s protagonist is likable, if a bit baffling herself. Ginny Tapley Takemori\'s translation feels just right for the slightly off-kilter reality of this thought-provoking story ... This brief, brisk novel is an engrossing adventure into an unusual mind. Is it a subversive, satiric criticism of societal norms? Is it a surrealist take on extreme workplace culture? Or simply the perspective of a woman wired a little bit differently? Murata holds the reader rapt, wondering what Keiko will do next.
Elizabeth Rush
Positive Shelf Awareness ...science, poetry and personal witness, concerned with human and more-than-human communities ... Appealingly, Rush puts her research and writing to work alongside the perspectives of coastal residents: interwoven chapters are told in other voices ... Rising is in some ways a difficult read. Its subjects are sobering and saddening ... Rising has more to offer: pulsing, gleaming prose and a stubborn search for, if not hope, then peace in the face of disaster.
Cutter Wood
Positive Shelf Awareness Wood's debut, is a memoir of post-college ennui; an investigation into a likely murder; an exploration of the light and dark sides of human connection; and an imaginative account of what might have happened to Sabine. Wood blurs genre boundaries, eventually offering a hybrid form that best suits his mind's wanderings ... Wood deserves credit for a narrative voice that prizes honesty over flattery, or self-flattery. His book is essentially an examination, not only of Sabine and of her murderer's emotions and motivations, but of the narrator himself, of universal human flaws ... a memorable, thought-provoking work of true crime and imagination.