Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book, Sonora Jha’s The Laughter, and Fiona McFarlane’s The Sun Walks Down all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
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1. The Laughter by Sonora Jha
(HarperVia)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Laughter here
“A no-holds-barred comic achievement that lambastes the power structures keeping men like Oliver skulking the halls of academe … Jha renders Oliver’s bumbling narcissism with impressive skill: Clearly writing across experience, she captures the clueless voice of a supremely privileged man to intense comic effect … Every scene is infused with the anxieties of a democracy on the brink of collapse and an education system facing a crisis of conscience. To say The Laughter is just a campus novel is to vastly undersell it; it’s also the story of America’s changing cultural landscape and the major political and philosophical shifts needed to uplift and protect the marginalized.”
–Rafael Frumkin (The New York Times Book Review)
2. The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
(FSG)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Sun Walks Down here
“Engrossing … She has taken this stark historical canvas and populated it with unforgettably rendered characters and places. McFarlane’s version gives voice not only to men, both white and black, but also to a compelling array of women and girls, each with her own accomplishments, desires, and disappointments … McFarlane, deploying a divine perspective that slips, deftly fluid, into the minds of many of her characters, takes the long hunt for Denny as the novel’s frame, within which she conjures the complexities, idiosyncrasies, ambitions, struggles, and passions of a family and a community.”
–Claire Messud (Harper’s)
3. Hourglass by Keiran Goddard
(Europa Editions)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“Keiran Goddard has written something like the universal love story … No pain is unique, and all pain is unique. This is the paradox that powers Hourglass. I have rarely read a book that captures so succinctly the way that all lovers must (at least a little bit) believe they are the only people to ever feel this feeling, and the way that that is (at least a little bit) true … The world of Goddard’s novel exists vividly on the page and yet to the narrator he is the only real person in it … Hourglass sits somewhere between prose and poetry.”
–Ella Risbridger (The Guardian)
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1. The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg
(Penguin Press)
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Her new book is not for the faint-hearted. Even a reader well informed on the climate and biodiversity crises will find themselves more painfully aware of the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking for decades, and from which we still show so little sign of awakening … Her book is an admirable and monumental effort to inform such conversations with good evidence … Some of these essays are a little heavy on graphs, statistics and technical terms for general readers. But they are copiously interpolated by Thunberg’s lively commentaries, engaging and polemical, if often repetitious. They are proof, if further proof were needed, that she is a truly exceptional figure … One can only hope that this book, by making these crises so powerfully manifest, will inspire us to think much harder and more creatively about how to do so, by any means necessary.”
–Paddy Woodworth (The Irish Times)
2. Wanting: Women Writing About Desire, ed. by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters
(Catapult)
4 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“There’s an inherent pleasure in reading about desire. It is, after all, what gives narrative literature its stakes, keeping us hooked as we root our protagonists on. To proceed through Wanting is to be swept up, again and again, into moments of urgency, which makes it the only literary essay collection I’ve encountered that I could accurately describe as a page-turner. But beyond this delight, what sets Wanting apart is how uniformly artful these essays are: insightful and poetic, thought-provoking and stirring. They do what all great essays do, which is to push beyond surfaces and make space for complication.”
–Nicole Graev Lipson (The Chicago Review of Books)
3. The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms That Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf
(Scribner)
1 Rave • 6 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Darkness Manifesto here
“Labeling his book a manifesto, a word that suggests fiery polemics, does Mr. Eklöf no favors. He’s a much quieter author than that, taking his readers by the hand for a snapshot survey of light pollution around the world, then offering a modest program of reform … Mr. Eklöf is really more of a rhapsodist than a scold, tempering peril with possibility … Given the stakes outlined in The Darkness Manifesto, one wonders why it’s so long on diagnosis but short on prescriptions. Mr. Eklöf’s ‘manifesto’ for change, tucked at the back of the book, is only two pages.”
–Danny Heitman (The Wall Street Journal)
