1. On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“With On a Sunbeam, Walden has created a science-fiction universe that is about women, queer love, old buildings, and big trees. It may piss off science-fiction purists… The most endearing aspect of On a Sunbeam is the confidence the narrative has in the world it exists within. The fish-shaped spaceship becomes a silent character, its face seemingly straining as it flies. Walden doesn’t create fake scientific-sounding explanations for why the ship is shaped this way—it just is … Walden creates the intoxicating effect of a universe as mysterious as our real one.”
–Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (The Atlantic)
*
=2. The Caregiver by Samuel Park
2 Rave • 5 Positive
“It’s a beautiful testament to his extraordinary talents as a storyteller. In prose that rings clear and true, Park shepherds his characters through the streets of Copacabana to the posh hills of Bel Air. This is an elegy that reads, in some moments, like a thriller—and, in others, like a meditation on what it means to be alive … A ferocious page-turner with deep wells of compassion for the struggles of the living—and the sins of the dead.”
*
=2. Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III
2 Rave • 5 Positive
“Dubus evokes a dazzling palette of emotions as he skillfully unpacks the psychological tensions between remorse and guilt, fear and forgiveness, anger and love. Susan, Daniel, and Lois are fully realized and authentic characters who live with pain and heartache while struggling to fill the tremendous void created by the tragedy. Heartrending yet unsentimental, this powerful testament to the human spirit asks what it means to atone for the unforgivable and to empathize with the broken.”
–Bill Kelly (Booklist)
*
4. Virgil Wander by Leif Enger
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“A book like Virgil Wander, with so many characters and subplots, can make for a convoluted read. But Enger does a truly masterful job of synthesizing these various components into a compelling and easily digestible whole … Virgil Wander is a fast-paced, humorous and mystical novel about hope, friendship, love and the relationship between a town and its people.”
–Langston Collin Wilkins (BookPage)
Read Leif Enger’s essay “Why I Carry a Kite With Me Everywhere” here
*
5. A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult
3 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
“No Picoult story is complete without characters representing both sides of a polarizing issue, something she has done for decades. Her 2011 tome Sing You Home was criticized for turning her characters on the religious right into caricatures, but she has clearly taken the comments to heart. Those in the antiabortion faction in A Spark of Light are as three-dimensional as those on the other side … imbuing her characters—male and female, antiabortion and abortion rights advocates—with more shades of gray than a Pantone color wheel. Timely, balanced and certain to inspire debate, A Spark of Light is Picoult at her fearless best.”
–Karin Tanabe (The Washington Post)
Read an interview with Jodi Picoult here
**
1. Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
6 Rave • 2 Positive
“Ninth Street Women is supremely gratifying, generous and lush but also tough and precise—in other words, as complicated and capacious as the lives it depicts. The story of New York’s postwar art world has been told many times over, but by wresting the perspective from the boozy, macho brawlers who tended to fixate on themselves and one another, Gabriel has found a way to newly illuminate the milieu and upend its clichés … There’s so much material roiling in Ninth Street Women, from exalted art criticism to the seamiest, most delicious gossip, that it’s hard to convey even a sliver of its surprises.”
–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)
Read an excerpt from Ninth Street Women here
*
2. All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
3 Rave • 5 Positive
“Chung writes with an empathy that’s careful to consider the perspectives of everyone involved in her adoption story … The detail is useful for the reader to understand that Chung’s search will ultimately be successful, but the book is still paced like a mystery: the how and the when and the why of Chung’s reunion is what drives the tale … Chung’s writing is never overtly sentimental, but it’s crisp and clear and evocative … Chung manages to make every moment she spent second-guessing her decision to search feel newly relevant … Though the story is intensely personal, it’s never myopic and, ultimately, it’s universal.”
–Mariya Karimjee (NPR)
*
3. Behind the Throne by Adrian Tinniswood
4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Adrian Tinniswood’s handsomely produced Behind the Throne is full of such pleasing details, as it takes us on a fascinating snoop into the studies, kitchens and bedrooms of various monarchs from Elizabeth I to the present queen … Behind the Throne is a wonderfully entertaining account of life through five centuries of royal households, and a succession of families that are entirely unlike and yet uncannily similar to our own. Hence, surely, the enduring fascination.”
–Christopher Hart (The Times)
*
4. Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister
2 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Instead of a theory of male anger, we have a growing literature in essays and now books about female anger, a phenomenon in transition. Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, scrutinizes its causes, its repression, and its release in the last half-dozen years of feminist action, particularly in response to the treatment of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and in the remarkable power shift that women demanded in #MeToo.”
–Rebecca Solnit (The New Republic)
*
5. On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“…we can now add Hampton Sides’s On Desperate Ground [to the pantheon of literature on The Battle of Chosin Reservoir], which hits all the right notes in the novelistic way that histories are written today … Mr. Sides does an admirable job of balancing the book’s two storylines, explaining the upper-echelon politics that put the Marines in such a precarious position, and the on-the-ground planning, execution and sheer bravery that helped them escape. To Mr. Sides, the Marines’ Gen. Smith is the hero of the story, and rightly so. Smith had the better understanding of the conflict his men were thrust into, even as he was being thwarted at almost every turn by MacArthur and his staff.”
–Mark Yost (The Wall Street Journal)
