Joseph O’Connor’s Shadowplay, Emily Temple’s The Lightness, Max Brooks’ Devolution, and Paul Preston’s A People Betrayed all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor
8 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a vibrantly imaginative narrative of passion, intrigue and literary ambition set in the garish heyday of a theater presided over by a tyrannical Irving and an exquisitely vulgar Ellen Terry, Britain’s answer to Sarah Bernhardt … opens in Dublin in the winter of 1876, with O’Connor painting that ravishing city with a soft lyricism that Stoker himself might have envied … Artfully splicing truth with fantasy, O’Connor has a glorious time turning a ramshackle and haunted London playhouse into a primary source for Stoker’s Gothic imaginings … Throughout this vivid re-creation of one of the most fascinating and neglected episodes in the enticingly murky history of the Gothic novel, the storyteller keeps his reader deliciously in the dark.”
–Miranda Seymour (The New York Times Book Review)
2. The Lightness by Emily Temple
5 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan
“It’s a teen thriller in the vein of the ’90s horror movie The Craft, only instead of a Los Angeles high school this one is set at what Olivia calls ‘Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls.’ But it’s also a beautiful meditation on meditation, with readings of sacred texts and light Buddhist history, populated with girls who refuse to act the way they’re expected to; who have too much passion, too many feelings and nowhere to put them; who are on the cusp of adulthood, ‘waking up to the true nature of things,’ fragile as they are smart and naïve as they are reckless … This book—frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout—also transcends expectations at its end.”
–Sarah Gerard (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an excerpt from The Lightness here
3. Miss Iceland by Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir
3 Rave • 5 Positive
“[S]he does a brilliant job of conveying, sentence by sentence and word by word, the exotic nature of Icelandic life, its harshness, its connection to the land and to history, and its amusing qualities … Olafsdottir’s novel is not autobiographical—most of it takes place in 1963, when Olafsdottir, born in 1958, was five. But she must have been a very observant child, because the distinctive nature of every scene and every character takes hold of the reader immediately … The sexism and homophobia Olafsdottir portrays were not unusual for the time, but she surrounds it so precisely with details about life in Iceland that it seems to glow with renewed fervor.”
–Jane Smiley (The Washington Post)
4. Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-Nan
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“Best-selling Korean author Ha and award-winning Canadian translator Hong are two-for-two at spectacular pairing, repeating the successful partnership of Ha’s collection, Flowers of Mold (2019), with another sensational, 11-story collaboration … Despite a significant body count, Ha’s provocative narratives never devolve into the maudlin, showcasing instead sly moments of macabre fascination and startling dark comedy.”
–Terry Hong (Booklist)
5. Devolution by Max Brooks
4 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
“.. a terrifyingly realistic survival encounter … The escalating alarm of naive people preparing to face a curiously intelligent terror from the woods is related straightforwardly even as the beasts come howling in through the front door. The footnoted text and references to historical incidents of catastrophic failure, some fairly recent, give insight into weaknesses humanity blithely ignores every day. The story is told in such a compelling manner that horror fans will want to believe and, perhaps, take the warning to heart.”
–Lucy Lockley (Booklist)
**
1. The Brothers York: A Royal Tragedy by Thomas Penn
3 Rave • 5 Positive
“… rip-roaring … Penn has interwoven the multiple strands of this story with great aplomb, ignoring the dead-ends of conspiracy theory in favour of sensible, balanced judgements … This does not feel like a 650-page book. Pacy, engrossing and evocative in its details (of feasts and jousts as well as battles and diplomatic skulduggery), it engages the reader’s emotions as well as intellect. For the plight of noblewomen of the time—commodified as either diplomatic bait or marriageable value, forced to witness the beheadings of husbands and sons, inveigled, threatened or even tortured out of their inheritances —it is impossible not to feel a kind of desolation.”
–Chris Given-Wilson (TLS)
Read an excerpt from The Brothers York here
2. A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain by Paul Preston
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“A People Betrayed is a magisterial study of its turbulent past, seen through the optic of those apparently ineradicable twins: corruption and political incompetence … The history recounted in A People Betrayed is a long one, but it races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes—especially for the Franco period and after, involving politicians, bankers, policemen and the royal family. Preston’s narrative combines his gift for cogent, summarising clarity and for telling detail—that the traffic in monopolies included one for rat extermination will stick in many readers’ minds … Preston has written an admirable book—a lively, comprehensive history of modern Spain, but also, at barely one remove, a compelling essay on contemporary corruption, which is especially worthy of attention today, as we confront an emergency that underlines what states are really for.”
–Helen Graham (The Guardian)
3. Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World by Robert M. Gates
2 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“This work is not a political treatise, and remains accessible throughout as the author defines 15 components as tools that administrations have used to define power … This important work dives deep into the past three decades of American foreign policy to provide a realistic picture of how key policy decisions were crafted. Highly recommended for those wanting an examination of America’s role within the global community.”
–Jacob Sherman (Library Journal)
4. The S.S. Officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi by Daniel Lee
1 Rave • 3 Positive
“… a fascinating true-life detective story, as the author engagingly chronicles his searches in archives and interviews with elderly survivors … Lee succeeds in documenting the life of a Nazi civil servant who, like many in his generation, showed little interest in Hitler before he took power or objection to him afterward. An illuminating biography and more evidence for the ‘banality of evil.’”
5. Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy
1 Rave • 2 Positive
“.. briskly paced and quietly bold … One of Purdy’s strengths is his ease in exposition. He can even be charmingly teacherlike at times … In covering the business side of cell-cultured meat, Purdy could have written a hagiographic account of Tetrick and Just; refreshingly, he chose not to. This could have been another Steve Jobs-type story no one needs, where a visionary has a great idea that will change the world and then, after the world gets changed—wait for it—said visionary gets really rich too. Then, as Americans, we’re left undecided as to whether we admire the accomplishment or the wealth more. Instead, Purdy’s book reads more realistically, like the teasing out of a tangled dance among entrenched meat producers, a few ambitious start-ups, early pioneers, regulatory complications and consumer skepticism … It’s the lack of heroes that, in part, makes this such an interesting story and topic … in the depiction of Tetrick, Purdy is careful to allow him to tell his story, as well as capture others’ stories of him, some of which are unflattering. Meat, however, stays front and center in this story. It keeps you hungry.”
–Nicholas Cannariato (NPR)
