Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Nicole Chung’s A Living Remedy, and Susanna Hoffs’ This Bird Has Flown all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
(Grove)
8 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an essay by Isabella Hammad here
“Powerful … Hammad is a pretty flawless writer who, despite her harrowing and often intellectually complex subject matter, produces easily readable, human, generous work. Young adults and mature intellectual readers alike will get behind Sonia’s struggles with relationships, work, family and self-image, which are instantly recognisable and perfectly parsed. The excitement of travel to new places and the heady buzz of forming sudden, intense relationships with new friends strangely makes this novel of war and trauma work quite well as an upmarket beach read … Hammad gives us many pages laid out like a play script, not only when the actors are speaking their parts but when they are talking among themselves. It’s only lightly experimental, and neither gets in the way of nor particularly adds to the story … Hammad’s prose and skill at creating characters is so natural and complete that, unlike most novels with this heft, you barely feel as though you’re reading.”
–Melissa Katsoulis (The Times)
2. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
(Random House)
4 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld here
“Has a lot going for it, starting with truth in advertising … The story’s romance is appropriately spring-loaded with improbability. What really energizes the story, though, is its setting in America’s most venerable comedy factory: Saturday Night Live … In Sittenfeld’s quick-paced prose, the work becomes terrifically exciting and reminds us how rarely we get to see what people actually do at the office … What makes all this particularly delightful is that the woman narrating Romantic Comedy is hyper-aware of the conventions of romantic comedy, and she knows full well that real life is no fairy tale.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs
(Little Brown and Company)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“A total knockout … Hoffs hits the familiar beats of romantic comedy with such panache and gusto, every note feels fresh. Preposterous plot twists are child’s play in the impulsive hands of Jane, whose fertile, febrile curiosity and pixie exuberance propel her into decisions ranging from the questionable to the catastrophic … There is not a spare, bare sentence to be found. Instead, the pages are packed with wit and sly allusion and dialogue that strikes the ear just so, with song references that tended to skim pleasantly over my head, though I got the gist … I had a literary quibble or two at the beginning, but by the time I’d torn through to the gratifying end — sucked into Jane’s world by force of storytelling, to say nothing of the pitch-perfect delivery of contemporary British idiom — I’d forgotten what they were. The odd cliché here, an extraneous adverb there. Who cares, when you’re having this much fun? This Bird Has Flown is the smart, ferocious rock-chick redemption romance you didn’t know you needed. My husband is devouring it now.”
–Beatriz Williams (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung
(Ecco)
5 Rave • 5 Positive
Read an interview with Nicole Chung here
“In her clear, concise prose, Chung makes the personal political, tackling everything from America’s crushingly unjust health care system to the country’s gauzy assumptions about adoption, a practice that is itself rooted in economic inequality. Her observations are particularly timely at a moment when life expectancy in the United States is falling … Chung writes with aching and transcendent longing — for a past she never had; for her flawed home state; and for a more compassionate future … With this work, Chung offers a luminous addition to the literature of loss.”
–Gabrielle Glaser (The New York Times Book Review)
2. A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd
(Pegasus)
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“Terrific … Boyd’s research is impeccable … Boyd’s prose is clear, confident and measured, connecting national events to Oberstdorf as often as possible, a device that never feels forced—only human. She consistently uses the word ‘murder’ to describe the actions of the Nazis. They didn’t kill, or exterminate—they murdered. The stark word carries a little more power each time she writes it.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Star Tribune)
3. A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
(Viking)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from A Fever in the Heartland here
“With a probing vibrancy, Egan…unfurls this powerful tale of a psychopathic zealot who came dangerously close to reshaping America in his warped image. This riveting exposé of a sordid chapter in U.S. history has frightening parallels to present conflicts.”
–Carol Haggas (Booklist)
