Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands, Roddy Doyle’s Love, Antony Dapiran’s City on Fire, and Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
4 Rave • 14 Positive • 5 Mixed
“Moshfegh gives the old canard about the association between artistic genius and madness an additional twist to arrive at the notion that inventing complex stories about the intersecting lives of entirely imaginary people is itself a species of madness. In Death in Her Hands, the plots devised by novelists uncomfortably resemble the conspiracy delusions of a paranoiac … Vesta lacks the deliciously shameless antisocial tendencies of Eileen and of the main character of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who prefers sleeping huge chunks of her life away to dealing with just about anyone—or, at least, Vesta lacks the courage to embrace and celebrate such tendencies. This prevents Death in Her Hands from attaining the perverse grandeur of those two novels. It feels like an interlude, a chamber piece, one of Shirley Jackson’s more claustrophobic short stories stretching its cramped, goblin limbs into novel-length. The minor, idiosyncratic key it strikes does not make it any less enjoyable, and may even make it more so. A bolder, more universal vision of how isolation can drive you nuts would, right now, cut a little too close to the bone.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
Read an interview with Ottessa Moshfegh here
2. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
5 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Don’t misunderstand this magical flourish; though often discomfitingly dreamlike, the book is a critique of damnably real power … Despite the book’s surreal pitch, it’s capable of eliciting real feeling … Why do some live for decades and others perish in their youth? Why are some born to inherit a throne, others destined to inhabit a shack? Miri’s novel is too fleet and elusive to offer an explanation, or maybe it’s just clever enough to understand there’s no real answer … Though locked into the specific geography of one Tokyo park, the novel telescopes from the 17th century to the modern day. This will mean more to the reader with some grasp of that country’s history, but nevertheless the novel yields to those of us less versed in those particulars. Tokyo Ueno Station eloquently indicts the myth of Japan as an awesome power of cultural and economic might … Though set in Japan, Tokyo Ueno Station is a novel of the world we all share—not what we expect from a ghost story but frightening all the same.”
–Rumaan Alam (The Washington Post)
3. The Mist by Ragnar Jónasson
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“Jónasson turns the tension up to a nearly unendurable degrees the novel unfolds. His complete—and complex—narrative design isn’t revealed until late in the book, when the story’s multiple threads coalesce in a surprising conclusion. With this no-frills thriller, he continues to map Iceland’s outlying regions and to develop Hulda’s character, adding a new chapter to her story that followers of the series will savor. Masterfully plotted and paced, The Mist is atmospheric, haunting and not for the faint of heart.”
–Julie Hale (BookPage)
4. Love by Roddy Doyle
2 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… this story, with its beer-inspired and home-brewed philosophy, its funny and painful moments, is about love, and not just the love of beer (as the cover art suggests). It’s about love and the remembrance of love between friends, lovers, and family … Doyle’s narrative style is fast-paced and deceptively easy to read … But Love is surprisingly weighty. Doyle has put the story in Davy’s mouth as dialogue, interrupted by a few short bits of narration, that goes down as smoothly as gulps of beer. But Joycean dialogue set off with a single em-dash can be confusing, and it’s sometimes hard to identify dialogue as it flows into narration … it’s easy to imagine Doyle adapting Love, this brilliant two-character story, as a movie with Davy and Joe crawling the pubs and dueling with conflicting memories as their stories flash back to the pubs and women from their past.”
–Joseph Peschel (The Boston Globe)
Read an excerpt from Love here
5. What’s Left of Me is Yours by Stephanie Scott
1 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Scott deftly exposes how life-limiting even the most well-intentioned lies can be, especially for women in a society that remains as patriarchal as Japan’s … For the outsider, What’s Left of Me Is Yours is an extraordinary window onto a culture … The novel’s documentary feel is further enhanced by the way Scott punctuates her narrative with ‘official’ documents—an autopsy report, an incident report, a crime-scene report and witness statements. This clinical effect is offset by the sensual sweep of Rina’s budding romance with Kaitaro, the ‘wakaresaseya’ who falls in love in spite of himself … Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion. Yet Scott’s subject remains vast: the idea that the law itself does not protect the innocent, and ‘that what matters most is knowledge—of ourselves and others.'”
–Tobias Grey (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong by Antony Dapiran
5 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… combines relentless on-the-ground reporting with a deep understanding of the city’s political, economic and social undercurrents … Dapiran’s authoritative account weaves together vital context about the systemic problems facing Hong Kong … The author uses flashbacks to link key moments of the protest movement with significant events and themes in Hong Kong’s recent history from the 2014 Umbrella Movement and demonstrations in 2003 against a proposed anti-subversion law. Dapiran’s style is energetic and vivid, transporting the reader to the middle of a riot police baton charge or a panicked, tear-gassed crowd, capturing the broad community support and new-found solidarity of the movement in a city that had a reputation for being cold and distant. (The smattering of typos throughout the book is one of the few giveaways of how quickly the book was produced) … Some of the book’s most illuminating chapters explore how local and international companies addressed the age-old tension between profit and principle presented by the protests.”
–Sue-Lin Wong (The Financial Times)
2. The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“… fascinating … Part of the book’s deliciousness is Konnikova’s journey from ‘novicedom,’ starting out in online poker cafes in Hoboken, N.J., and making it all the way to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas … What elevates Konnikova’s journey above a Plimpton-esque stunt is the way she constantly peppers The Biggest Bluff with compelling studies and quotes … Konnikova is like your smart friend who instantly contextualizes everything by sharing the latest data and sharpest insight, whom you come to quote too often to other friends and family … a feminist story without being a feminist tract. It’s an underdog tale in which the rise of the underdog has an air of inevitability and sweet revenge. It’s a nonfiction Bildungsroman minus the navel-gazing. Konnikova keeps the lines so clean and even, so steady and unshowy that she might be the Charlie Watts of prose: While the backbeat never ceases and the narrative propels along, it’s her curiosity that proliferates. In fact, one of the biggest bluffs of The Biggest Bluff may be that Konnikova hasn’t written a book about her success with cards and chips exactly, but bet the house on the power of her mind to synthesize big philosophical ideas and psychological insights at a time when we, too, find ourselves questioning our fortunes, hoping to master our fates and playing much bigger odds than ever before.”
–Michael Paterniti (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
2 Rave • 4 Positive
“… impressive … Du Mez more than adequately substantiates her thesis that evangelical Trump support represents ‘the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad’ … Du Mez leads us with apparent ease, as only a seasoned historian can, from the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday, through the early Cold War mainstreaming of Christian nationalism and the subsequent white evangelical backlash against the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protesters, into the rise of the Christian Right as a powerful voting bloc that crystallized in the 1980 election, and finally on to the present. While I occasionally found myself wanting more primary source illustrations of a particular point, for the most part, Du Mez holds her abstract narrative and concrete examples in expert balance, keeping the reader engaged through her lively, colorful prose … Du Mez’s theological position is established subtly in a book that cannot be called polemical, even if it indulges in the occasional delicious bit of academic snark … It is impossible to do justice to the richness of Jesus and John Wayne in a short review … a book that America needs now. I hope it will be widely read.”
–Chrissy Stoop (The Boston Globe)
4. Empty: A Memoir by Susan Burton
2 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Her book is fueled by just the kind of emotion that makes me uncomfortable, the kind we might call unprocessed. She isn’t the cool dispassionate narrator we are used to seeing. But her anger, in the end, clarifies and intensifies our view of her dilemma; it becomes an illuminating force. Burton ate because she was angry at herself; she’s angry at herself because she ate; it’s a circle of rage and shame that any addict can understand … Her fury, then, is like a flashing light in a cave, or a portal. The force of it makes us not just appreciate but actually feel the force that drove her to commit her actions in the first place. The result is a book that wields a fearsome intimacy. Her anger takes us with her, back to that place of self-hatred and compulsion—back to the kitchen counter, scooping granola by the handful into her open mouth.”
–Claire Dederer (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Thank You For Voting: The Maddening, Enlightening, Inspiring Truth about Voting in America by Erin Geiger Smith
4 Positive
“Smith posits that the only voting problem we have in America is that not enough people do it. It’s an important topic, as her research shows that each generation votes at rates lower than the one before it … In an election year, this book will have wide appeal. As the author says, ‘Figuring out the best way to achieve the largest turnout should have nothing to do with one side or the other and everything to do with supporting democracy. This book is non-partisan, but it is staunchly pro-voting.'”
–Jennifer Adams (Booklist)
Read an excerpt from Thank You For Voting here
