Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, Nona Fernández’s Voyager, and Jac Jemc’s Empty Theatre all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
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1. I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
(Viking)
9 Rave • 3 Positive
Listen to an interview with Rebecca Makkai here
“A very different but equally great accomplishment [as The Great Believers] … It is at once a campus novel, a piercing reflection on the appeal and ethics of the true crime genre, and a story of Me Too reckoning. It is also the most irresistible literary page-turner I have read in years … Makkai’s most distinctive literary feature is her blend of intelligence, whimsy, and wisdom, an endearing yet bracing mix that characterizes her Twitter feed as it does her fiction … Makkai’s writing is textured and precise. She gets all the ‘90s details…deliciously right. Her encyclopedic knowledge of true crime informs the novel at every turn … None of this feels heavy-handed or merely modish. Rather, Makkai tackles thorny questions about the media, the law, gender, race, and class via these emblematic examples … That Makkai’s ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological deliberations find form in an exquisitely suspenseful and enormously entertaining story makes her work a beguiling reflection of the conundrum it so beautifully anatomizes.”
–Pricilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
2. Scorched Grace: A Sister Holiday Mystery by Margot Douaihy
(Gillian Flynn Book)
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Scorched Earth here
“What do you get when you mix a poetic writer with the mystery genre? More metaphors than you can shake a stick at. Laugh out loud metaphors. Stunningly beautiful metaphors. All interlaced within an exciting mystery that is as different as it is classic in feel … The twisty plot, gorgeous language, and the renegade nun as a main character bring this novel into its own category. One often thinks of the amateur sleuth as belonging in cozy mysteries. This is not that. Scorched Grace is a novel both exciting and profound. The crisp pacing keeps things moving briskly forward while the writing takes you deep. I can’t ask for more than that.”
–Anne Laughlin (LAMBDA Literary)
3. Empty Theatre by Jac Jemc
(MCD)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“Riveting and effervescent … Empty Theatre, its titular metaphor speaking to the isolation behind the pomp, is called a novel, reads like a fairy tale, but is at its heart a biography … Modern and mythic, Empty Theatre captures the outrageous taste of an era while measuring the steep costs of our dream worlds.”
–Katy Simpson Smith (The New York Times Book Review)
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1. Tell Me Good Things: On Love, Death, and Marriage by James Runcie
(Bloomsbury)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“An unusually honest account of the jumbled-up feelings of sadness and madness that grief produces … Runcie describes his book as a ‘love letter’, and one danger of grief memoirs is that love ends up replacing the deceased person with a saint or a Stepford wife … Here, Runcie generously fulfils the promise of his title, which he explains was one of his wife’s favourite expressions when greeting friends… because his memoir is full of good things: stories that reveal Imrie’s sharp intelligence, her bold fashion sense, her glee at pricking the bubble of pretension … Runcie is also touchingly honest in recognizing that his wife wasn’t perfect… while still marveling at her ability to find good things even at the end of her life.”
–Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (The Times)
2. Voyager by Nona Fernández, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
(Graywolf)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Voyager here
“The image of these two space probes roaming across the galaxy provides a glimpse of the flight path of this ambitious, often dazzling memoir … The author’s oscillation between the personal and the political, the familial and the national, is achieved through a kind of cosmic interdisciplinarity. Astronomy; astrology; astrophysics; neuroscience—each of these is incorporated into a dizzying but sublime poetics that holds Voyager together.”
–Josh Weeks (Financial Times)
3. Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman
(Harper)
3 Rave • 1 Positive
“Regardless of your interest in Hollywood and awards season, this rich, deeply reported history has plenty to teach … Even when he seems like he’s gone too far, such as titling the chapter on Black Oscar winners ‘Tokens,’ Schulman’s incisive reporting backs up his hypothesis … This Oscars history mixes all the expected glitz and glamour with enough industry intrigue to power an award-winning drama.”
