Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives, Stefan Merrill Block’s Homeschooled, and Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
(Summit Books)
9 Rave • 4 Positive
Read a conversation with Ben Markovits and Jonathan Lethem here
“Wry, poignant … For middle-aged, passive-aggressive men playing out the clock in dismal marriages, reading The Rest of Our Lives may feel like performing open-heart surgery on themselves. But anyone willing to consider the thicket of fears, affections and recriminations that grows through the cracks of a long relationship will find in these pages an almost unbearable tenderness … Not a heavily plotted novel, but it accrues an irresistible momentum of sympathy … Devastating.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
2. Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo
(Grove/Black Cat)
8 Rave • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Call Me Ishmaelle here
“A triumph … There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites—and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types. Guo’s recasting of Ishmaelle is no exception.”
–Leanne Ogasawara (The Los Angeles Times)
3. Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea
(Simon & Schuster)
3 Rave
“The narrative is enjoyable and gripping in a combination not often found in prestigious prize winners, and it takes a page or two to understand why this big fat historical blockbuster won the Prix Goncourt. But even in translation – and this is a fluid example of the craft—its poetry and its nuance, its passion and philosophical depth, its grasp of moral ambiguity, its clever interweaving of history and fiction, and its superlative characterisation rise quickly to the surface … Masterly.”
–Christobel Kent (The Guardian)
**
=1. Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block
(Hanover Square Press)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“Absorbing … His memoir is less an indictment of home schooling in general than a vivid portrait of the way the practice failed one child in particular. Block makes brief note of the regulatory vacuum that allowed his predicament, but for the most part he writes with the phenomenological precision and narrative verve of a novelist … It is fitting that Homeschooled is narrated in the present tense. Evidently, Block’s childhood memories are still possessed of a sharp immediacy. The past is never really over for someone subjected to such scarring humiliations during his formative years.”
–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)
=1. The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera
(Pegasus Books)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt The Spy in the Archive here
“More than most Cold War thrillers, this true story offers genuine suspense—and genuine insight into Mitrokhin’s complex motivations … His experience with the material lends weight to a thoroughly engrossing tale.”
–Andrew Nagorski (The Wall Street Journal)
3. American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate by Eric Lichtblau
(Little Brown and Company)
2 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from American Reich here
“Ambitious, deeply reported … The portrait of Woodward verges on cliché, which speaks more to the simple-mindedness of neo-Nazis than to any fault of Lichtblau’s writing … An admirably vivid job … Queasily of the moment, and evokes our present reality with frightening detail. One can only hope that someday its subject is relegated to the past.”
–Elon Green (The New York Times Book Review)
