Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Take What You Need by Idra Novey
(Viking)
6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Idra Novey here
“Take What You Need is Ms. Novey’s first novel set in the United States, and her most autobiographical. It is also her most moving … Fast-paced and tightly structured … Take What You Need is a heart-rending book, but it’s also a beautiful celebration of ‘the glorious pleasure of erecting something new,’ be it a work of art or a human connection.”
–Heller McAlpin (The Wall Street Journal)
2. The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie
(Penguin)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an essay by Elizabeth McKenzie here
“I’m in love with a grieving misfit driving around with a donkey-shaped piñata in an old van held together by duct tape. Her name is Penny Rush. She’s the hapless heroine of Elizabeth McKenzie’s new novel, and she’s something of a piñata herself … The great miracle of McKenzie’s writing, like Kevin Wilson’s, is how she manages to transform misery into gentle humor. After all, The Dog of the North isn’t social satire or cringe-comedy. McKenzie displays no interest in mocking her hapless characters. Instead, she swaddles their sorrows in zaniness … A hum of erratic absurdity runs beneath these pages like a loose wire behind the walls, continually shorting out and making the lights flicker. The irresistible sound of The Dog of the North is Penny’s voice, composed of mingled strains of good cheer and naked lament … It’s all darkly hilarious … But anyone reading this novel will be happy to endure the bewilderment with her.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
(Dial Press)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an interview with Ann Napolitano here
“Piercingly tender … Ann Napolitano catalogues the multitudes of love and hurt that families contain, and lays bare their powers to both damage and heal. If that description echoes the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose work Napolitano quotes in her epigraph, it also reflects her own expansive literary spirit—a bracing yet restorative sensibility that managed to render cathartic…seemingly unbearable pain .. Hello Beautiful will make you weep buckets because you come to care so deeply about the characters and their fates … Aching precision … Napolitano’s voice is her own. Like her deeply felt characters, she compels us to contemplate the complex tapestry of family love that can, despite grief and loss, still knit us together. She helps us see ourselves—and each other—whole.”
–Diane Cole (The Washington Post)
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1. We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“[Asgarian’s] bracing gut punch of a book, We Were Once a Family, is a provocative mix of immersive narrative journalism, rigorous social policy analysis and proud advocacy. It pulls back the focus from the horrific crash to investigate, thoroughly and intimately, why these six children were sent out of Texas in the first place … Asgarian begins with a powerfully rendered narrative of how the second set of three children the Harts adopted—Ciera, Devonte and Jeremiah—were caught up in the wheels of a Texas family court … The children are killed with more than 100 pages left in the book. It is here that Asgarian fully steps into the narrative, developing deep personal ties with the children’s birth parents, their partners, their other children and their caseworkers, getting to understand the depths of their impossible life situations and the institutional neglect … The most affecting story is of Dontay Davis, the brother left behind, first institutionalized and later incarcerated.”
–Robert Kolker (The Washington Post)
2. A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
(Knopf)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from A Stranger in Your Own City here
“Offers not simply an account of Iraq’s troubles but a powerful and beautifully written portrait of the soul and psychology of a nation reeling from one cataclysm to the next … Mr. Abdul-Ahad delicately evokes the fears and hopes of a nation eager to be rid of Saddam but fearful of the consequences … Early in the book, images of violence are visceral and shocking … There is a challenge and a steely optimism there, one that would have rattled my confidence back in 2007, but that gives me hope in 2023.”
–Phil Klay (The Wall Street Journal)
3. The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession by Alexandra Robbins
(Dutton)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“Anyone contemplating going into teaching might be dissuaded after reading Alexandra Robbins’s latest work, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession. That is not a disparagement of her book but rather a testament to its scope, accuracy and unflinching honesty. Never before have I read any work that so clearly depicts the current realities of teaching in America’s public schools, a subject I have followed closely as a recently retired teacher with 22 years of experience … It isn’t that Robbins fails to shine a light on the considerable joys and rewards of working with young people … Brutal detail … Almost every page of my review copy of The Teachers is marked with my comments and exclamation points as I encountered situations and circumstances remarkably similar to those I experienced myself. This is an important book that will come as no surprise to the nation’s teachers.”
–Melanie McCabe (The Washington Post)
