Carys Davies’ Clear, Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse, and Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Clear by Carys Davies
(Scribner)
8 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Carys Davies here
“The storytelling is sophisticated and playful, swooping back across decades to Mary’s childhood and John’s vocation, and among different points of view … Deeply interested in language and particularly in words for the natural world … Clear contemplates fictional resuscitations, opening itself, and its readers, to the ghosts of lost ideas through John’s dawning understanding and love of Ivar’s words. The novel is bold and inevitably not flawless—the ending gestures toward an unconvincing resolution—but if you like wild writing and high-stakes thinking in small, polished form, you’ll like this.”
–Sarah Moss (The New York Times Book Review)
2. I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
(Grove)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“Stunning, almost pitch-perfect, with a harrowing tale and beguiling characters … with all its tragedy and darkness, this novel is not depressing; it feels buoyant … A rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread—for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Star Tribune)
3. The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
(Algonquin)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“A book about the power of narratives and the way they shape us. Engaging and written in a playful, crystal-clear prose, this novel explores friendship, love, sisterhood, living between cultures, and how people can be haunted by the things they don’t finish … A playful novel … Besides being entertaining and tackling some important subjects like misogyny, migration, infidelity, and injustice with humor and grace, The Cemetery of Untold Stories accomplishes one more thing that deserves attention: a deep self-awareness that permeates every page.”
–Gabio Iglesias (The Boston Globe)
**
1. All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld
(Metropolitan Books)
3 Rave • 1 Positive
“Bracing, original and intellectually poised … It is part of her scintillating achievement, in this book of appetite, to make one vow never again to use the phrase ‘less is more’ under any circumstances.”
–Kate Kellaway (The Guardian)
2. Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories by Elijah Wald
(Hachette)
3 Rave
“Wald…is one of the most illuminating music writers working today … Wald is truly virtuosic in the way he disentangles key lines and phrases and traces them across different sources, demonstrating how these works accumulated and discarded meanings as they moved across time and place … enriches our sense of how the world used to sound.”
–Steve Waksman (The Boston Globe)
3. We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet
(W. W. Norton & Company)
2 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
“In a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty, Millet reflects on our dangerous muddlement and pins hope on the growing impact of one digital advance.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
