NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth, and Amy Bloom’s In Love all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
(Viking)
7 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The gulf between the world as it is and the world as it could be is as wide in Bulawayo’s novel as it is outside it. The actions depicted in the book are so familiar, the events so recognizable, the pain so acute, it’s easy to see how Glory began as a work of nonfiction. That the characters are animals — furred, feathered, scaled and all—is almost incidental … Glory repeats this story almost as it happened. In Bulawayo’s telling, however, Jidada’s deposed autocrat is an elderly stallion long known as Father of the Nation but now derided as Old Horse … An expected chain of absurdities follows. That is not a knock on Bulawayo’s storytelling gifts, which are prodigious … This is not a humorless book. The animals are gleeful insulters … Glory reads longer than its 400 pages. Bulawayo shifts among omniscient narration, first-person plural, oral history and even chapters written as Twitter threads … Any satire worth its weight in talking animals is really a warning—to the powers that be, the complicit and anyone who thinks nothing so terrible could ever happen to them … By almost any measure, Glory weighs a ton.”
–Jake Cline (The Washington Post)
2. Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons)
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Booth here
“Riveting … Fowler has never shirked from a challenge. In this novel, her task is how to contextualize someone whose flaws and fatal misguidedness forever skewed our history … The climax of the overarching national narrative hangs like a miasma over the novel. We all know the terrible ending. What elevates Booth is the granular texture of what’s beneath the bald facts: the how and the myriad whats and whys, the truths. And there is also Fowler’s trademark dark humor … If Fowler’s seventh novel occasionally sags from the depth of her prodigious research, Booth is still a massive achievement. In it, Fowler weaves history, family culture, and human cruelties into an insightful reckoning of a past that seems too much a prologue to our American present.”
–Jeffrey Ann Goudie (The Boston Globe)
3. Smile and Look Pretty by Amanda Pellegrino
(Park Row)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
Read Amanda Pellegrino on writing for TV versus writing a novel, here
“Smile and Look Pretty captures the tangle of anxiety-ridden thoughts that hang heavy over women during and after misogynistic faux pas. Pellegrino uses a show-don’t-tell style that trusts her audience to recognize and relate to the situations she describes. It even passes the Bechdel test, although more narrowly than expected. But you can’t affect change in the patriarchy without discussing its key players. This feminist novel possesses the nuance to acknowledge both the men who ally themselves with women, and the women who perpetuate misogyny and hierarchical hogwash. Smile and Look Pretty is an affirmation to those who can relate to Cate, Max, Olivia and Lauren, as well as a girl-power rallying cry. In a sea of media in which men are either saviors or villains, and women are their prize, this novel provides a life raft. Filled with wit, humor and snark, if you liked A Promising Young Woman, you’ll enjoy Smile and Look Pretty.”
–Donna Edwards (Associated Press)
**
1. Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson
(Dutton Books)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“In her deeply researched and painfully compelling book, Williamson makes the smart choice not to fulminate over the many, florid misdeeds of Jones and his lesser-known collaborators. Instead, she coolly assembles a great wall of evidence and observation, calmly documenting Jones’ myriad lies, and describing his gonzo shenanigans with an often amusing sobriety. Most effectively, she juxtaposes the sincerity of the bereaved parents with the red-faced, ranting Jones … If ever a story called for the careful, levelheaded exposition of traditional reportage it’s this one, set against a relentless chorus of yelling … One of the particular strengths of Sandy Hook is that it offers many in-depth accounts of and interviews with Sandy Hook hoaxers, a motley crew of misfits and crackpots … When Williamson finally landed an interview with Jones, it took place in a small room at Infowars HQ in Texas. She found him and his rants about the First Amendment shopworn and ‘tiresome,’ but her masterful description of the encounter is anything but.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
2. In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom
(Random House)
6 Rave
Listen to an interview with Amy Bloom here
“Amy Bloom and Brian Ameche were a handsome couple. I know this not because there’s a photograph of them in Bloom’s new memoir … I know this because I was so moved by Bloom’s bittersweet, truth-dealing book that I looked them up and read whatever I could find … I’m not sure why I hadn’t until now read Bloom’s fiction. Maybe her soft, generic titles…were a deterrent. The title of this memoir is similar … Not reading her: my loss. Bloom has one of those warm, wised-up, tolerantly misanthropic New York voices, in the manner of Laurie Colwin and Sloane Crosley and Allegra Goodman and Nora Ephron, and an ability to deepen her tone at will. I am not, as are these writers, Jewish. But when I read them I feel I’ve found my people … Bloom tells this story with grace and tact. Scenes of their trip to Zurich are shuffled with scenes from their courtship and marriage … There are a lot of tears in this memoir … Part of what makes this book moving is Bloom’s toughness. She’s a mama bear, in the right ways. She doesn’t go overboard in explaining her moral reasoning. She doesn’t have to. Her title is her explanation.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
3. The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953 by Jeffrey Frank
(Simon & Schuster)
2 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a book that, in its timing, acts almost as a blueprint for a liberal president to navigate a challenging world, focused through the prism of a man who was nobody’s real first choice for president and yet forged an envious record … Frank frames his subject in a different way from David McCullough’s completist, Pulitzer Prize–winning doorstopper. It is a humbler, more focused book, with Truman’s pre-presidential life relegated to an extended prologue. This is a character study of an introverted personality in a profession that rewards loud performance. It is an approach that fits his subject: Frank’s depiction of Truman is of a man perpetually outside his comfort zone, preferring bourbon and branch water in his home of Independence, Missouri, to martinis on the DC cocktail circuit … Frank spends a large amount of time on Truman’s family life, movingly depicting his marriage to Bess Truman, who loathed Washington and fiercely guarded her privacy … Frank portrays Truman so well that the book’s ending feels like an anticlimax … Frank has made a case for a man who, when given the responsibility of the entire country, was able to thread many needles, based on personal confidence, trust in the right people, and healthy relationships with family and friends.”
–Henry Dykstal (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
