Lily King’s Heart the Lover, Mariana Enriquez’s Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Color all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Heart the Lover by Lily King
(Grove)
8 Rave • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Lily King here
“For its first half…a wry, witty, exquisitely evocative campus tale, a fevered fiction of a youthful love triangle, and a reflection,…on the growth and development of a writer. By the end, it stands as one of the most emotionally devastating and soulfully wise novels I have ever read … Literary without pretension, emotional without maudlin sentimentality. It must be said, however, that King skirts perilously close to the latter in Part 3, and it is a tribute to the power of her moral vision, the precision of her prose, and her animating empathy that the novel avoids bathos and pulls off these wild swerves convincingly … Heartrending, swoonily romantic, rigorously clear-sighted.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
2. Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa
(Little Brown and Company)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Pick a Color here
“A feat of economy, unspooling Ning’s emotional journey amid the cage of her salon … Punches above its weight. Thammavongsa’s minimalism conveys a range of tones and psychological nuances as she grapples with the stubborn prejudices of class … Wily and caustic, the book condemns petty Western narcissisms yet allows for bursts of radiance.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Washington Post)
3. What a Time to Be Alive by Jade Chang
(Ecco)
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“The novel is propulsive because [of] Lola … She is psychologically complex, straddling both beautiful sincerity and utter vapidity … [Chang’s] prose is infectiously funny, and her ability to satirize rich people paying silly amounts of money to be led to their souls has only sharpened.”
–Valorie Castellanos Clark (The Los Angeles Times)
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1. Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enriquez
(Hogarth)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
Listen to an interview with Mariana Enriquez here
“Part travelogue, part memoir…part history, myth and legend. Even readers who lack her taste for the macabre will be enticed by Enriquez’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject … Seen through Enriquez’s eyes in this highly original book, these sites are more than just monuments to the dead; they tell us how people lived in the past, as well as how they live now.”
–Lucy Scholes (The Financial Times)
2. The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora by Elena Sheppard
(St. Martin’s Press)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“A compelling meditation … Beautifully crafted … This is Sheppard at the height of her powers, weaving Cuban history, myth, and literature through the fabric of her family’s narrative of exile. Her prose, coupled with the vignette structure of the memoir, reads like an excavation of memory … Exquisite.”
–Lael Flores (The Southern Review of Books)
3. Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) by Eleanor Johnson
(Atria Books)
1 Rave • 3 Positive
“This commentary on the horror genre’s ability to shape and echo the political landscape is riveting, enlightening, and occasionally scream-inducing in its reminders of the not-so-long past. Readers should expect to be entertained while finding new respect for the genre, though the author does not sugarcoat the abuses of the male directors behind the projects.”
–Jaclyn Fulwood (Shelf Awareness)
