About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Weike Wang
Rave The Los Angeles Times Rueful and tender ... Wang is an exquisite practitioner of deadpan, and her dialogue is full of laugh-aloud zingers. But she also uses humorous insights to pierce the outer shell and plunge into themes of loneliness and despair ... Throughout Wang’s three works of fiction, one discerns the same singular wit and interrogation of mores about gender, ethnicity and income disparity. But here she is at her most poignant and penetrating.
Richard Price
Rave The Los Angeles Times Gritty and compassionate ... Price has clearly inherited their storytelling chops, then fine-tuned those skills by persuading police to let him ride shotgun as research. He has an ear for streetwise dialogue and an eye for description. He can size up people with a phrase ... Not a cynical novel.
Lili Anolik
Positive The Los Angeles Times Dazzling and provocative ... Babitz refuses to leave the stage. Didion may be the more esteemed figure, but she’s not the one who captures our imaginations in Anolik’s telling ... In this character study, Didion is more of an afterthought.
John Edgar Wideman
Rave The Los Angeles Times A searing rumination ... Defies categorization. It’s neither a novel nor a memoir nor an essay collection, though elements of all those forms are present ... Wideman is not a straightforward writer. In the midst of exchanges with Sheppard and Protten, he will suddenly grow introspective, as if jotting down journal entries ... This author revels in the shattering and the reconfiguring of language, in tinkering with the English lexicon, bending it to his authorial will. He’s not going gently into any good night.
Betsy Lerner
Rave The Boston Globe Enthralling ... This is Lerner’s fourth book, and her first work of fiction. It’s exquisitely written, featuring pitch-perfect wit, crackling dialogue, and deep insight into the excruciating pain of being in a perpetual awkward phase ... Drama, disappointment, and despair thread throughout this bittersweet saga, but empathy, humor, and the narrator’s sharp yet loving powers of observation make it a joy to read. It must also be noted that in an era when so much contemporary fiction is dystopic, Lerner’s debut recalls simpler times, though minus sentimentality or nostalgia.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The Los Angeles Times Enthralling ... Erdrich is at her best — as she is here — when she draws on her deep connection with the Great Plains and its Indigenous people ... In The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich’s enthralling ode and elegy to the people of North Dakota’s Red River Valley, climate change, Big Ag and economic hard times have ravaged the landscape in and around the small town of Tabor during the late aughts. Many of its inhabitants are descendants of the Ojibwe, Dakota and Métis tribes, whose acreage was lost to them in a series of cession treaties over the centuries; they now scramble to make a living, toiling for others on land that was once theirs ... This backdrop could make for a mournful tale of intergenerational trauma and displacement, but Erdrich has other plans for her characters, whom she imbues with the grit and optimism to rise above their challenging circumstances ... There is an amiable, inviting quality to all of Erdrich’s 19 novels that in part explains how it is possible to be hugely entertained while learning why farmers require increasingly powerful pesticides or what our collective sweet tooth is costing the planet. That accessibility, though, in no way diminishes Erdrich’s unparalleled ability to conjure a scene or a character, or to portray the natural world with awe.
Rachel Kushner
Rave The Boston Globe Dazzling ... Kushner fashions a gripping and muscular narrative that is by turns lyrical, suspenseful, and slyly funny ... Kushner has tapped into something primal, pure, and unforgettable.
Helen Phillips
Rave The Los Angeles Times Eerie and electric ... Phillips’ skills as a stylist and keen observer of human nature keep us feverishly turning pages. And her unexpected humor lightens the mood ... Oddly beautiful ... Phillips has given us a lot to chew on, but there is also something comforting embedded in this cautionary tale: an homage to our adaptability, our capacity to love and our willingness, however reluctantly, to embrace the new.
Sarah Manguso
Rave The Los Angeles Times Seethes with rage ... With a surgeon’s precision, Manguso painstakingly autopsies a couple’s unfolding — and increasingly toxic — relationship, chronicling each and every symptom of its pathology. If that sounds like a formula for an unsettling novel, you wouldn’t be wrong ... In recent years, it has become commonplace for writers to portray marriage — and motherhood, too — as a cross between joy and horror. There’s much horror here, minus the joy, except that Manguso is a masterful sentence writer and a brutally honest surveyor of the disadvantages women endure.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Rave The Los Angeles Times Raucous and ravishing ... Suggests that this author’s talents are boundless ... I’m not going to say whether the first line of the book is prophetic, but it almost doesn’t matter. Brodesser-Akner has written a humane, brazen, gorgeous novel whose words dance exuberantly on the page.
Liz Moore
Rave The Boston Globe Intricate and intriguing...cunning ... Hugely satisfying ... Surviving these woods, it seems, will entail unearthing deeply buried family secrets. Moore cleverly guides us through that tangle of trails, to a thrilling and unexpected conclusion.
Griffin Dunne
Rave The Washington Post Here he uses his authorial gifts — a filmmaker’s eye, photographic memory and way with a quip — to great effect, exploring how the seemingly charmed lives of the Dunnes unraveled ... Griffin skillfully deploys humor to soften life’s blows.
Claire Messud
Rave The Boston Globe Remarkable ... Epic ... Though the novel is both sweeping and intimate, spanning seven decades and six continents, from World War II through the aughts, Messud’s piercing interiority keeps the focus tight, gaining the reader access to her characters’ innermost thoughts. Her attention to detail, memory, and foreshadowing suggest the influence of Tolstoy and Proust, but what’s most evident as we turn the novel’s 400-plus pages is the sense that we are engaging with work that is extraordinarily personal to the author ... Messud gifts us with her family’s journey.
Amor Towles
Rave The Los Angeles Times Superb ... This may be Towles’ best book yet. Each tale is as satisfying as a master chef’s main course, filled with drama, wit, erudition and, most of all, heart ... These stories make clear that, at heart, he is a humanist with deep compassion for even the faultiest among us.
Lucy Sante
Positive The Los Angeles Times Arresting ... At times accompanying Sante on the many U-turns and dead ends she leads the reader into can be exhausting: Just as you think she’s finding resolution, there is another caveat.
Vanessa Chan
Rave The Washington Post Searing ... Less interested in probing the geopolitical and moral questions arising from colonialism than in humanizing the effects of oppression on a few individuals ... With authenticity and passion, Chan succeeds in imparting their pain and will to survive, through singular characters whose flaws and contradictions are as fascinating as their strengths.
Jean Kwok
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Intriguing ... While the author’s latest suffers from an abundance of tropes, clichés and stereotypes, it builds momentum and texture in its final chapters. We root for Jasmine and Rebecca as they face impossible choices and emerge stronger for all the battles they’ve fought, always resisting becoming \'leftover\' women.
Beatriz Williams
Rave The New York Times Book Review There are few more skilled practitioners of the craft of summer fiction than Beatriz Williams. Her latest is both a spy thriller and a Romeo and Juliet tale of would-be lovers torn apart by fate and circumstance ... Enriched by fascinating historical details and an espionage theme ... Williams has crafted a layered narrative celebrating a heroine who embodies verve, pluck and courage. Ultimately The Beach at Summerly is an ode to a season and a feeling. If our summers past represent a paradise lost, as selves that once were, or might have been, then in Williams’s pages we may briefly recapture the delicious freedom we used to feel when the days became longer and warmer, and we were young and in love.
Molly Prentiss
Rave The New York Times Book Review Though sprinkled with references to poetry and the vagaries of capitalism, this [first] portion of the novel feels as if it may be headed into rom-com territory...But Prentiss has something less predictable in mind. We soon embark on a quest narrative where Emily’s desire for the maternal love she never felt, even with a devoted adoptive mother, is bottomless ... Old Flame is that rare novel whose author—as well as her protagonist—gains wisdom and authority as the story unfolds, never failing to remind us that while loss and grief are inescapable, joy and fulfillment are possible.
Hanna Halperin
Rave The New York Times Book Review Aching and tender ... Halperin’s radiant second novel walks the fine line between the longing for couplehood and the torture of codependency ... Halperin writes from a millennial point of view, probing themes of social anxiety and intense trepidation about the future. But Halperin’s take on love sets her apart: As misguided as Leah’s feelings for Charlie may seem, they are pure and hopeful — about as untainted by cynicism as it is possible to be.
Ann Patchett
Rave Oprah Daily Radiant ... It’s a playful, if at times melancholy, collection of essays that confide in the reader; like Patchett herself, they are the opposite of pompous ... This is far from a light book. At every turn, Patchett is cognizant that life is fleeting ... Patchett’s stalwartness, though, always allows room for tenderness ... Stoic, kindhearted, fierce, funny, brainy, Patchett’s essays honor what matters most \'in this precarious and precious life\'.
Maggie Shipstead
Rave Oprah Daily ... sumptuous ... The novel has a radical streak ... [Shipstead] expertly moves from narrator to narrator and even into the 21st century ... The most exhilarating sections of the novel, though, occur when Marian is aloft, circumnavigating the globe over the North and South Poles, attempting to fulfill her lifelong goal of achieving what no pilot has before. She and her lone navigator fly that plane as if fleeing the world itself. They are exuberant, reckless, unstoppable—and always on the edge of mortal fear. But that fear fuels them, and makes them feel more awake than ever before ... What Maggie Shipstead has done with this book is deliver a series of ahas, of sweet, provocative points of contemplation that make the reader feel as alive as Marian did in that plane.
Barack Obama
Rave O The Oprah Magazine ... remarkable for its precision and thoroughness, as well as for its honesty, humor and thoughtful perspective. President Obama’s skill as a writer, and his generosity in sharing his doubts and disappointments as well as his accomplishments and convictions, make the memoir a must-read for all those who wonder why character matters and what true patriotism looks like. And for political junkies, there are nuggets on each and every page.
Jess Walter
Rave O: The Oprah Magazine ... expansive, beguiling ... In Flynn, Walter has found a sublime heroine: outspoken, brave, and beautiful, too. She takes on Spokane’s brutal and corrupt establishment with the kind of bravura that makes us yearn for her to time-travel to our era ... Walter does a masterful job of using historical events and characters to draw parallels with what we face today, but the greatest triumph of The Cold Millions is how it mines literary realism but remains optimistic even in the face of tragedy. It’s a thrilling yarn that simultaneously underscores the cost of progress and celebrates the American spirit.
Margaret Atwood
Positive The Oprah Magazine Will Aunt Lydia continue to go along in order to get along? That’s among the novel’s key questions—one that will keep you glued until the very end ... what’s fascinating about [the other narrators] is how each represents a different thread in the fabric of Gilead’s history, threads they must pull at to unspool the systematic damage that’s been done over the course of a generation. Is there hope for freedom? Is a post-Gilead society possible? If there is, the book seems to be saying, maybe there’s hope for us too, now.
Helen Phillips
Positive The Oprah Magazine The novel is both an ode to motherhood and a nightmarish rendering of its \'pleasures\' and pains ... Phillips structures her astonishing fifth book in edge-of-your-seat mini-chapters that infuse domesticity with a horror-movie level of foreboding, reminding us that the maternal instinct is indeed a primal one.
Angela Flournoy
Rave O: The Oprah Magazine What is most exciting about Angela Flournoy’s debut novel, The Turner House, is that while history is everywhere in it—haunting its characters, embedded in the walls of the titular house and in the crumbling streets of Detroit-the book tingles with immediacy. Flournoy has written an epic that feels deeply personal ... In the end, it is Flournoy's finely tuned empathy that infuses her characters with a radiant humanity.
Molly Prentiss
Rave O: The Oprah Magazine [Prentiss's] sensual linguistic flourishes exquisitely evoke the passions we can feel for people and places we've known or are discovering ... There are riveting plots and subplots. A mother is separated from her child. A brother abandons his sister. An artist is rendered unable to paint. A city sells its soul. Still, the book's magnificence remains in its shadings, descriptive and emotional. Toward the end, you'll find yourself turning the pages slowly, sorry to realize you're almost finished.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Positive O: The Oprah Magazine This linguistic autobiography feels urgent and raw. Through it, Lahiri appears to forge a new sense of belonging. Using discomfort to shatter her own status quo, she produces a startlingly different voice—still Lahiri's, but stripped down to its essence.
Laura Secor
Rave O: The Orpah Magazine Children of Paradise takes a historian's view of Iran, a nation that has long perplexed—even scared—Americans. But Secor is also an entrancing storyteller. In her hands, clerics, scholars, and others who helped Iran morph into a republic where mosque and state are inseparable are like larger-than-life characters from an epic novel, with thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx playing supporting roles.
Austin Reed
Rave O: The Oprah Magazine There are many reasons this book is remarkable, not least that while Reed is brutalized regularly, he remains triumphantly defiant. Though the only formal education he received was while in the House of Refuge, he writes with a novelist's sense of nuance and adventure—or misadventure. The memoir anticipates that the American penitentiary system would become a kind of successor to slavery's shackles.