1. The Midnight Line by Lee Child
(5 Rave, 3 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“…a timely, affecting, suspenseful and morally complex thriller. In fact, it’s one of the best thrillers I’ve read this year … This time Child confronts the opioid epidemic, and he does so with keenness, understanding and a burning anger over the scourge’s causes — poverty, hopelessness, war — and the haplessness of the U.S. criminal justice system’s response, or lack thereof.”
-Richard Lipez (The Washington Post)
*
2. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…[a] spare, stylish debut … Hunter’s mordant, undeceived narrator alludes to checkpoints, stampedes, and shortages but the peril is largely impressionistic, obscured by the ordinary life miraculously unfolding in front of her eyes: first smile, first tooth, first step … But the real strength of this wonderfully earthy novel is in its sharpened lens on motherhood’s apocalyptic-feeling joys and terrors, and how they can form an all-encompassing world.”
–Megan O’Grady (Vogue)
Read an essay by Megan Hunter here
*
2. Deep Freeze by John Sandford
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Sandford…details the investigation into the circumstances of Gina’s death with both empathy and intelligence. And above all, he infuses the proceedings with the sense of humor that has become a hallmark of the Virgil Flowers series … Deep Freeze is a wacky but heartfelt look at murder and mayhem in the Minnesota cold. For all its wry bluntness, it’s a gracious novel that doesn’t condescend to any of the characters it depicts, no matter how hard-up, self-sabotaging, or unlucky.”
–Doreen Sheridan (Criminal Element)
*
4. Hiddensee by Gregory Maguire
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Maguire’s characteristic tone is dark and enchanting in his newest fairy tale revision. Into this origin story of the mysterious gift-giving Godfather in The Nutcracker he has woven many traditional Germanic tales and a few Hellenistic myths, as well, to create a powerful story of hope and redemption sure to delight his fans.”
–Cortney Ophoff (Booklist)
*
5. Heather, the Totality by Matthew Weiner
(3 Rave, 6 Positive, 3 Pan)
“Weiner knows how to tell a story, and how to twist its tail until it cries out in pain … Heather, the Totality is horribly coercive; it is also an oblique diagnosis of the sickness at the heart of contemporary America, a nation bloated on liberal middle-class complacency and seething with the rage and paranoia of its neglected ones. Here is Trump-land in all its madness and its pathos. As Tony Soprano would say: whaddaya gonna do?”
–John Banville (The Guardian)
**
1. The Chicago Curse: Story of a Curse by Rich Cohen
(6 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Cohen is not only good but quick …Cohen describes things has to appeal to fan and non-fan alike, and is a great way for the latter to get up to speed … In brief: Rich Cohen has written the best book about the Chicago Cubs ever.”
–Neil Steinberg (The Chicago Sun Times)
*
2. Endurance by Scott Kelly
(3 Rave, 5 Positive)
“…a small classic of exploration literature as well as space literature …brings life in space alive — the wonder and awe of it, and also the jagged edges, the rough parts of living in confined quarters in an alien element, far from everything familiar and beloved …with its honest, gritty descriptions of an unimaginable life, a year off Earth, is as close as most readers will come to making that voyage themselves.”
–Nilanjana Roy (The Financial Times)
*
3. Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife by Pamela Bannos
(3 Rave, 4 Positive)
“The achievement of Bannos’s intelligent, irritable self-reflexive study is in its restraint. She unseats the ghost and restores to us the woman — but in her own words and images, and without psychologizing. It’s a portrait as direct as any of Maier’s, and what a distinct pleasure it is to meet her gaze again.”
–Parul Sehgal (The New York Times)
*
4. The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris
(4 Rave, 2 Positive)
“…her biography of Lister restores this neglected champion of evidence-based medicine to a central place in the history of medicine …a formidable achievement — a rousing tale told with brio, featuring a real-life hero worthy of the ages and jolts of Victorian horror to rival the most lurid moments of Wilkie Collins.”
–John J. Ross (The Wall Street Journal)
*
5. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Although it runs to more than 900 pages of dense text, it is the most gripping of reads, packed with epoch-shaking events and human tragedy … This is, as close as it is possible to imagine, the definitive biography of Stalin … The portrait that emerges is of a phenomenally hard-working, ruthless, ideologically driven and coldly calculating tyrant.”
–John Thornhill (The Financial Times)
***
