Rachel Khong’s Real Americans, Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, and Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Real Americans by Rachel Khong
(Knopf)
4 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Real Americans here
“Enigmatic … Disorienting as this narrative shape-shifting can be, Khong’s straddling of multiple literary genres insidiously mirrors her focus on hybrid racial and cultural identity … Khong manages these twisting threads with masterful deftness … [An] irresistible puzzle of a novel.”
–Aimee Lou (The Los Angeles Times)
2. The Mother Act Heidi Reimer
(Dutton)
1 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The novel’s structure, fittingly, is portioned out in six acts like a play, alternating between both women’s perspectives over several decades. That approach can be a bit jarring at first, galloping through time and shifting perspectives in every chapter. But its complexity sneaked up on me, as the portraits of these two women start to deepen and ramify … Reimer writes well about the inherent resentment between mothers and daughters, which is only heightened when one of those people is making money off content inspired by the other.”
–Molly Jong-Fast (The New York Times Book Review)
3. The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
(Hanover Square Press)
1 Rave • 3 Positive
“Lu’s prose is unromantic and unadorned, giving the chapters an ascetic, almost nightmarish quality where the protagonist retreads the same topics … The funeral crier’s observations are matter-of-fact and naïve, profound in their blankness. This may strike some readers as wry and self-deprecating, and the cultural dissonance as purposefully drawn out. But those more familiar with the dogma of rural China may recognize the smallness of thought, life, ambition and self-image as tragic, not humorous.”
–Connie Wang (The New York Times Book Review)
*
1. The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby
(Pantheon)
2 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Karen Valby here
“If it were just a quest for cultural redress, the result might have been a dusty scroll of the Swans’ ballet bona fides. It’s by getting personal that it leaps high … All of this is absorbing. Yet it’s the odd details that shine brightest … Precisely because there’s so much meaning and humanity in this kind of minutiae, it has been methodically clipped from stories of Black women’s lives.”
–Danyel Smith (The New York Times Book Review)
2. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson
(Crown)
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“A concentrated focus … Perhaps no other historian has ever rendered the struggle for Sumter in such authoritative detail as Larson does here … Even in his portrayals of the White elite, Larson makes puzzling choices. Very early in the book, he devotes more than 30 pages to the prewar life of a loathsome planter turned senator, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, seeming to set him up as one of the narrative’s major characters. But then Hammond largely disappears … The portrait of Anderson is Larson at his best.”
–Adam Goodheart (The Washington Post)
3. The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos by Angela Garcia
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“In this astute and harrowing chronicle, anthropologist Garcia takes the reader into a world few have ever heard of … Given ongoing arguments over immigration, drug use, and legalization, Garcia’s outstanding book adds compassion and insight to this important social and political discussion.”
–Raúl Niño (Booklist)
