Fiction
1. See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
(7 Rave, 1 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Her eerie voice makes for intense, dizzying reading, conveying the corrupt atmosphere of the house, the suffocating sense of wrongness every character seems to feel under the skin … Schmidt inhabits each of her narrators with great skill, channeling their anxieties, their viciousness, with what comes across as (frighteningly) intuitive ease. Everything about Schmidt’s novel is hauntingly, beautifully off. It’s a creepy and penetrating work.”
–Steph Cha (USA Today)
*
2.Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
(6 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“I can think of no other novel that so expertly illuminates that empty, middle-aged feeling when even marital bitterness and filial pride fails us … This is Perrotta at his best: Where other writers would turn to satire, or outrage, or a deep dive attempt to shock-and-awe the reader, Perrotta empathizes.”
–Brock Clarke (The Boston Globe)
*
3. Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips
(5 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Fierce Kingdom explores how entwined violence is in the ordinary, and how for the young, it can be a safe abstraction, or cruelly real … Because we make fun of helicopter parents for the lengths they go to to keep perfectly safe children even safer, we can can forget that, for children, safety is a kind of love — and that makes Fierce Kingdom a terrifying book, but more importantly, a beautiful one.”
–Lizzie Skurnick (NPR)
*
4. Madame Zero by Sarah Hall
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Her stories create worlds—whether vast dystopias or a family’s living room—that feel real but never overly polished. In Madame Zero’s nine brief stories, Hall covers a staggering amount of ground, crafting compelling narratives that are expansive despite their brevity. Sensual and chilling by turns, this collection is electric.”
–Bridey Heing (Paste)
*
5. When the English Fall by David Williams
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…a quiet, brilliant little novel begging for a Netflix adaptation … I never realized I wanted a postapocalyptic Amish novel, but the premise is so perfect I can’t believe that it’s never been done before — or that someone did it so well on the first try … It’s a gorgeous, moving book that’s creepier than you might expect.”
–Adam Morgan (The Minneapolis Star)
**
Non Fiction
1.Sons and Soldiers by Bruce Henderson
(4 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Henderson meticulously crafts a riveting non-fiction account … Henderson’s research and interviews with scores of veterans gives us a richly detailed story that puts readers alongside the Ritchie Boys in some of the darkest moments of history … Sons and Soldiers is a spellbinding account of extraordinary men at war.”
–George Petras (USA Today)
*
2. The Songs We Know Best by Karin Roffman
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“…by far the most thorough and reliable account of a formative period in the biography of one of our greatest and most mysterious writers … The Songs We Know Bestlets us see, clearer than ever before, how the poet’s mind works, and how it developed.”
–Evan Kindley (The New Republic)
*
3. Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“…[a] magisterial biography … perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president … To his study of this deeply controversial man, Boles brings an ample supply of what has been so lamentably missing in the discussion over the past half-century: a calm insistence on separating truth (so far as we can know it) from rumor and invective.”
–Jonathan Yardley (The Washington Post)
*
4. Be Like the Fox by Erica Benner
(2 Rave, 4 Positive)
“…[an] erudite and engaging life of Machiavelli … Be Like the Fox is not detached, archival history but a remarkable work of imaginative engagement backed by scholarly learning. Benner brings Machiavelli alive by weaving his words and those of his contemporaries into the narrative as a playwright might.”
–Edmund Fawcett (The New York Times Book Review)
*
5. Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle
(3 Rave, 2 Mixed)
“It’s a credit to the book’s critical sophistication that both ends of the identity politics spectrum will feel aggrieved by Nagle’s assessment of their tactics and their politics … The book is breathtaking and concise. It is a slim volume and a must-read.”
–Catherine Liu (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
**
