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Recent Reviews
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Rave The New York Times Book Review Given the unavoidable success of her debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, I will spare curious readers the suspense and answer a more cynical question: Is this book as good? It’s better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel ... All those well-timed twists, neat callbacks and tidy scenes are a mitzvah for this satisfying, touching novel. The talented Taffy Brodesser-Akner over here.
Tracy O'Neill
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Autobiography without an inciting incident or outlandish background can be a tricky sell. Yet even as O’Neill struggles to justify her sudden obsession, she writes with convincing and passionate introspection ... The caper-forward passages are interspersed with bouts of self-reflection and stewing ... Meanwhile, a smattering of fundamental narrative questions go unanswered, which can lead to a corrosion of the page-turning process ... Still, Woman of Interest contains shining moments.
Jill Lepore
Positive The New York Times Book Review Both shorter and less focused in scope than her 2020 book of American history, These Truths. But with 46 essays on subjects ranging from political theory to disruptive innovation, it’s still a doorstop ... Lepore’s wealth of knowledge is rarely applied to a niche subject (most readers are familiar with the Affordable Care Act); her modus operandi is to tackle common conundrums for a few unassuming paragraphs before stepping on the gas with several centuries’ worth of precedent ... It’s her inclinations toward misfits and old narratives we have taken for granted that make The Deadline glow ... They’ve sent a personal essayist to review an academic essayist’s work, so I can’t help but remark upon the moments when Lepore makes an effort to weave in her personal stories and winds up sounding like a tourist over-pronouncing the word croissant ... One can still taste the sediment of that self-consciousness at the bottom of each glass. Regardless, the book emerges as a riveting survey of America.
Tom Rachman
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The novel is filled with enough twists to make O. Henry blush ... Questions keep the first half of the book humming. Rachman also provides an immersive sense of place ... The disparate plot threads do come together, some meaningfully, some clumsily. When the novel works, one feels the pulse of Dora’s humanity beneath her bitterness as she ties up loose ends. But Rachman has overestimated the reader’s investment in Dora herself. It’s not that she’s unlikable (she is, but who cares?); it’s that he has so completely ceded the floor to those in her orbit ... To delve so deeply and move on is a skill — to be sure, there are many delights in this book — but to intentionally not telegraph which plots are worth retaining means this novel is missing the emotional core of Rachman’s previous work, and there’s an all-you-can-eat Rashomon buffet in its place.
Kevin Wilson
Mixed The New York Times Book Review A buoyant tribute to small-town life, a book about creativity and creation in a world before \'send\' buttons ... Wilson adeptly evokes what it was like to be a creative kid in the 1990s ... Wilson shines when detailing the domino effect and the dissemination of images before social media ... Now Is Not the Time to Panic reads like a movie. By which I don’t mean \'cinematic,\' I mean like a movie. Strings of dialogue, more predictable than verisimilar, are linked with episodes of brief action ... Here is a charming story with enough pockets of pathos to keep the novel from feeling weightless. The only issue is that it seems to want more for itself. A lot more. And it becomes increasingly vocal about asking for it ... The grand themes (art, friendship, memory) sit like Vaseline on the surface of a pool, with repetition too often standing in for insight ... Implausible ... The novel becomes dominated by the author’s valiant attempts to make a case for adult Frankie’s conundrum, for her poster-adjacent compulsions. But our heroine did not commit an act of political terrorism ... If you focus on...the more sentimental aspects of Now Is Not the Time to Panic, if you take it as a spirited PG-13 tale of summer mischief, you’ll enjoy yourself. But this is not [a] high-stakes or interior evocation of storytelling, friendship and ambition.
Dana Spiotta
Mixed The New York Review of Books Spiotta is unsurprisingly great on the brute facts of middle age ... Much of Wayward has the glow, if not the urgency or sex appeal, of Spiotta’s previous work ... Even a writer with Spiotta’s prodigious gifts can’t quite engender rapturous admiration for the crossroads of New York State ... But Syracuse winds up being an ideal receptacle for Sam’s ultimate passion, her love of landmark preservation. She gets high off a respectful gut renovation, and her new house is described with radiant precision ... a hugely entertaining tear on the subject of feminist activism ... Even here, Spiotta avoids easy opportunities for ridicule. This is a testament both to her skill and to her fluent knowledge of a character who would like to remove herself from all the histrionics but knows she’s not immune to their source ... Unlike Spiotta’s other work, which feels so smooth in its satire, Wayward starts to read like a checklist of modern plagues ... It’s not just the proper nouns that come flying at the reader, it’s the incidents. The coincidences ... Meanwhile, she happens to be the sole witness to a police shooting, a plot thread that feels thin and a bit hasty ... Strung together, the many \'contemporary issues\' that Spiotta describes give the sensation that Wayward is a novel about aging that would prefer to be a novel about an age. They can seem a contortion, an attempt to counterbalance the less-than-cool premise of \'suburban woman having a breakdown\' ... It’s credible enough for her to throw various motives at the wall and see what sticks, but this starts to feel as if Spiotta weren’t sure of the answers herself ... It’s a guessing game that threatens to undercut one of the most valuable tenets of this otherwise affecting novel, which is that being a woman in America is enough to make you run for the hills.
Kate Russo
Positive The New York Times Book Review We find ourselves in the first wave of pre-pandemic fiction. Here come the narratives full of indoor scenes, maskless interactions and group coughing fits. Kate Russo’s breezy debut, Super Host, is one such novel, written long before the words \'super\' and \'host\' had everyday epidemiological associations ... At its best, it’s reminiscent of the early-aughts romps done to great commercial effect by Nick Hornby and Plum Sykes, and even of the tidy plotting executed by the author’s father, Richard Russo ... The downside of populating a story this way is that Super Host does not get everything it wants. It does not get to be a laugh-out-loud book or a real exploration of loneliness. But it is brimming with Russo’s pure affection for her creation ... Despite the cracks in the walls, Super Host is a pleasant stay, a reminder that you never know what goes on behind closed doors, even when they’re your own.
Leslie Jamison
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... composed almost entirely of previously published pieces, an occupational hazard that can make the reader feel as if she’s wandered into a party to which she wasn’t invited ... Jamison’s journalistic battle between sentiment and detachment rages on, sometimes resulting in texture, sometimes in tedium ... Without question, Jamison has impeccable taste in her own ideas, selecting fringe subjects and following them to the end of the road ... If the first section is the most fully realized, the second is the most thematically rickety ... Let no one accuse Jamison of living an unexamined life, but inertia can dull her points ... It’s just strange that someone who has focused so much of her writing on the body — hers, other people’s — can come off as a bit bloodless, neither screaming nor burning, her descriptions vying to out-flat one another ... Reviews of essay collections invariably note the \'strongest\' pieces, but Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a reminder that strength is not a catchall. If we decide strength is about structure and elucidation, then most of these essays are heavyweight boxers. If, however, strength is about persuasion, transformation or the evocation of emotion, it’s in short supply here. We are all Percival Lowell, our lives subject to the imprint of our own gaze. Stare too long at the gaze itself and it becomes hard to see what you’re looking at.
Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... marvelously weird and fablelike ... Tokarczuk is a vocal feminist writer and it’s no accident that the more Duszejko’s sanity is called into question, the more relatable her plight becomes ... Authors with Tokarczuk’s vending machine of phrasing and gimlet eye for human behavior (her tone is reminiscent of Rachel Cusk, with an added penchant for comedy) are rarely also masters of pacing and suspense. But even as Tokarczuk sticks landing after landing, her asides are never desultory or a liability. They are more like little cuts — quick, exacting and purposefully belated in their bleeding. If Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, was built for ambience, Lloyd-Jones’s translation of Drive Your Plow was built for speed ... Only the extended passages on astrology threaten to derail the reader. Lyrical as they are, they could be airlifted out of the novel without causing any structural damage. Tokarczuk successfully aligns these pages with the book’s broader themes, but one can feel that argument being made. Like an insurance policy against skimming ... This book is not a mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy tale about life and death that’s been trying to spill its secrets. Secrets that, if you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you knew in your bones all along.
Nathaniel Rich
Rave Vanity Fair 'Is an ax-man at large in New Orleans?' So asks a 1918 Times-Picayune article in Nathaniel Rich’s sprawling but speedy third novel, King Zeno. Set against the backdrop of the birth of jazz and the Spanish flu, King Zeno tells the story of an army veteran, a jazz cornetist, and a Mafia widow, whose trajectories are twisted by a musically motivated ax murderer. It’s a rich, contemporary canonization of the Crescent City at the turn of the century.
Jessi Klein
Positive The New York Times Book Review You’ll Grow Out of It comes along to remind us just what an artful confessional essay can do ... These pieces often have a let-me-level-with-you directness reminiscent of [Nora] Ephron without being too imitative ... The jokiness, digressions, confessions and punctuation in lieu of words (!!!) are counterbalanced by thoughtful insights and genuine emotion ... This is a book about accepting one’s flaws, and it’s not without a few of them. The deeper the topic — heartbreak, marriage, career struggles — the more monotonous the telling...The other issue is that too many essays end on a note of pat summary.