1. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
4 Rave • 10 Positive
“Oyeyemi’s sentences are like grabbing onto the tail of a vibrant, living creature without knowing what you’ll find at the other end. It’s absolutely exhilarating … Everything is alive, unpredictable, sometimes whimsical and other times sinister, and often very bizarre … this remarkable, surprising novel cannot be summed up so easily … Gingerbread is often funny … But like Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum before her, Oyeyemi’s work is more than just fairy-tale whimsy and clever humor … I looked up the meaning of Perdita’s name and laughed to myself. It is Latin for lost. That is how I felt at times in Oyeyemi’s world. A little lost … Gingerbread is jarring, funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding. It requires the reader to be quick-footed and alert … This is a wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel that requires some effort and attention from its reader. And that is just one of its many pleasures.”
–Eowyn Ivey (The New York Times Book Review)
Read Helen Oyeyemi on her favorite books and TV shows here
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2. The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag
3 Rave • 6 Positive
“What’s better than an ornate period piece with style to spare? One that includes a murder mystery. Oh, and boy is it a riveting mystery … One of the great feats of The Wolf and the Watchman is the painstaking description of this decadent world and the many careful political details which are embroidered along the page … Unlike other books which may be set in the past, but where the characters act like modern people, everyone in The Wolf and the Watchman feels like they belong in this era of wigs and spies, chamber pots and dung caking the streets … A bit of Patrick Süskind’s The Perfume and a bit of Sherlock Holmes, this wolf has some bite to it.”
–Silvia Moreno-Garcia (NPR)
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3. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
4 Rave • 4 Positive
“Like a poignant song with lyrics that speak to your soul, Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid will transport you to another place and time … Each character is compelling but Daisy Jones is the star … In this era with so much content and stimuli, where we’re on the internet while watching TV, what’s great about this book is it draws you in, drowns out the noise and you’re just focusing on Daisy, Billy and their story … Daisy Jones & The Six really [cements Jenkins Reid’s] status as an author with a gift for storytelling who is worth following.”
–Alicia Rancilio (Associated Press)
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=4. The Altruists by Andrew Ridker
3 Rave • 5 Positive
“Ridker meticulously peels away the scabs that have grown over the wounds of the surviving Alters, laying bare, with compassion and piercing wit, the long-simmering antagonisms that haunt both father and children. At the same time, he gently hints at a way forward for this decidedly imperfect, but oddly appealing, family. A painfully honest, but tender, examination of how love goes awry in the places it should flourish.”
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=4. Little Faith by Nickolas Butler
3 Rave • 5 Positive
“… tender and perceptive … An open-minded inquiry into the nature of religious belief, in both its zealous and low-key forms, becomes central to the story. Yet better still is Mr. Butler’s sensitive exploration into the condition of being old, which demands a radical change in the way one loves … Little Faith is his best so far, unafraid of sentiment yet free of the kitsch that colored his earlier depictions of the region.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
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1. L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon by Lucasta Miller
4 Rave • 4 Positive
“Ms. Miller gives us a thorough view of Letitia’s character as relentless flatterer, flirt and self-promoter, but also as a desperate woman, both raised-up and ruined by her relationship with a powerful but truly awful man … [These details only touch on] the details of Letitia Landon’s life as patched together and filled out by Ms. Miller, who has ably dispersed a mighty welter of deception, obfuscation and evasion … Miller quotes and analyzes [Landon’s work] with revelatory insight … In this infinitely rich literary biography, Ms. Miller treats the life and the work dialectically, each informing and shaping the other…”
–Katherine A. Powers (The Wall Street Journal)
Read Lucasta Miller’s “On the Obsessions of the Literary Biographer” here
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2. Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson
6 Rave • 1 Mixed
“… vibrant … Jackson recognizes there is too much for one conventional form, and his various storytelling methods imbue the book with an unpredictable dexterity. It is sharp and unshrinking in depictions of his life, his relatives (blood kin and otherwise), and his Pacific Northwest hometown, which serves as both inescapable character and villain … One device Jackson uses to great effect are what he calls ‘survivor files,’ interviews with men in his family detailing their experiences with gangs, infidelity, and incarceration … Jackson’s virtuosic wail of a book reminds us that for a black person in America, it can never be that easy.”
–Renée Graham (The Boston Globe)
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3. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin
3 Rave • 5 Positive
“… profoundly insightful and deeply sobering … The End of the Myth is challenging intellectual and cultural history … But Grandin’s gift for clear and engaging writing makes The End of the Myth as accessible and enthralling a read … Much of the history Grandin incorporates into this new book is utterly captivating in his hands, and often revelatory. What’s perhaps most remarkable about The End of the Myth is the cohesion Grandin achieves in convincingly connecting the disparate strands of history he collects in the book. This makes the gravity of his conclusions on our current predicament all the more unsettling.”
–Steve Nathans-Kelly (The New York Journal of Books)
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4. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz
4 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Kotlowitz writes with masterful economy and concreteness, and from his meticulous narrative springs a rich spectrum of emotions like light reflecting off high-rise window … Kotlowitz’s hard-hitting and powerfully clarifying dispatches bring into the light people who love their families and friends and who work hard to take care of others, yet who are undermined, betrayed, and brutalized by violence, racism, poverty, and an unconscionable lack of understanding, caring, resources, and social and political will.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
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5. That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour by Sunita Puri
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“To say that the practice of palliative care comes to vivid life in Sunita Puri’s pages may seem like a bad choice of words. But her memoir about tending to seriously, often incurably, sick people pulls off that feat … Visceral and lyrical … In a high-tech world, [Puri’s] specialty is not cures, but questions—about pain, about fraught prospects, about what ‘miracle’ might really mean. Her tool is language, verbal and physical. Wielding carefully measured words, can she guide but not presume to dictate? Heeding the body’s signals, not just beeping monitors, can she distinguish between a fixable malady and impending death? Puri the doctor knows that masterful control isn’t the point. For Puri the writer, her prose proves that it is.”
–Ann Hulbert (The Atlantic)
