David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, and Leila Slimani’s Sex and Lies all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
10 Rave • 3 Positive
“The Only Good Indians is a great horror novel … a masterpiece … The core plot is deceptively simple … But nothing is simple here, including the nature of reality (and the reality of nature) … the story is told from the viewpoints of each of the four fully portrayed main characters … Voices change but the narrative flows naturally with no confusion. Supporting characters are just as well drawn … The portrayal of the monster, Elk Woman, is also stunning. Her basis may be traditional, but she is a strikingly original beast: terrifying and unforgiving, yet poignant. The book is, at times, visceral (literally), but it is as instinctive and essential as it is harsh. Despite the blood and bleakness, The Only Good Indians is ultimately also about hope and the promise of the future.”
–Paula Guran (Locus)
Read an interview with Stephen Graham Jones here
2. Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford
9 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… an ode to the fearsome bond between mothers and daughters, and to the way that potent connection twists and tightens over the span of a life—especially in the absence of fathers … cleverly connected stories … Ford’s pages ache with tenderness and love and no small amount of frustration—her characters are all trapped in different ways, by crappy jobs with too-small paychecks, by men who fail to do right or stay, by the debt of love they owe their mothers, their daughters … isn’t a mournful novel. Ford’s prose is so absorbing that you’re right there, helping Justine and Reney free a garbage bag full of goldfish or watching the sunset with them over Lake Tenkiller; their lives are difficult, yes, but full of joy, too. Now and then, Ford will turn up the volume in a sentence, sing a little…Ford’s writing is full of poetry. These stories stand up beautifully to rereading; they made me excited for what the writer will do next … The intricate web of love, memory and blood that binds the women in Crooked Hallelujah together feels as if it were born of careful attention, of listening.”
–Julie Buntin (The San Francisco Chronicle)
Read Kelli Jo Ford on the books that helped her find a way home here
3. Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
6 Rave • 6 Positive • 3 Mixed • 3 Pan
“Mitchell is expert at excavating the seams of loss, ambition and mere chance that lie under the edifice of fame … The reader is impelled from the first by a kind of rushing, gleeful energy … Mitchell is evidently enthralled by both the romance and the practicality of music … The novel’s prose is for the most part consciously easeful and frictionless: it is a supremely readable novel, if the quality of readability is taken to be one which is difficult to achieve and a relief to encounter. It is enlivened by an attentive eye for the particulars … At times, the frictionless quality of the prose extends to the story itself, so that it is possible to read for several pages at a time without quite feeling that events and characters have landed on the consciousness. The book is most alive and most compelling when Mitchell slips the surly bonds of the realist premise and lands in his own extraordinary imagined worlds … Mitchell does not castigate or punish Utopia Avenue for their yearning after lights and adulation: he is kinder and more wise. He proposes instead that nothing could be more natural, or in fact more commendable, than acting on the old and common longing to be heard above the crowd, even— perhaps particularly—at the cost of security and sanity.”
–Sarah Perry (The Guardian)
4. Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby
5 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Cosby quickly establishes Bug’s financial burdens and emotional dilemma in his new novel, Blacktop Wasteland, and never lets up on the gas. The result is a high-octane, white-knuckle thriller that will have readers whipping through the pages at breakneck speed … Cosby’s tightfisted prose fuels this story with heart-pumping (and often brutal) action that begs to be adapted for the big screen but somehow never loses its compassionate edge … a welcome return apperance … one hell of a ride.”
–G. Robert Frazier (BookPage)
5. Natural History by Carlos Fonseca, trans. by Megan McDowell
4 Rave
“Fonseca’s inventive, complex tale…reads like a literary onion, constantly revealing new narratives and layers of meaning … The various characters’ perspectives blur the line between memory and fantasy, and their charm will keep readers along for the very intricate ride. Fonseca’s innovative puzzle box of a novel packs a powerful punch.”
**
2. Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World by Leila Slimani
4 Rave • 5 Positive • 3 Mixed
“…Slimani returns to Morocco for an intimate non-fiction examination of that country’s sexual mores. In a series of revealing and often enraging interviews, she speaks to women from all walks of life about sex. Some of her interlocutors prefer to remain anonymous, while others live openly and in defiance of the strict policing of their private lives … The issue is not about morality but about politics, she insists. If we believe in individual liberty, the struggle against sexual oppression is of primary importance. As long as a woman’s body is still controlled by society, as long as her virtue is a public matter…she cannot be independent of the patriarchy. Slimani scorns the French intellectuals who accuse her of ‘opportunistic Islamophobia’ or of peddling Orientalist stereotypes. In this short, powerful book, superbly translated by Sophie Lewis, she has written a stirring call to arms for Moroccan women to experience what she has fought for herself: ‘the right to think for oneself,’ what she calls ‘the most monumental taboo of all.‘”
–Natasha Lehrer (TLS)
Read an excerpt from Sex and Lies here
2. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump
1 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Too Much and Never Enough is a deftly written account of cross-generational trauma, but it is also suffused by an almost desperate sadness—sadness in the stories it tells and sadness in the telling, too. Mary Trump brings to this account the insider perspective of a family member, the observational and analytical abilities of a clinical psychologist and the writing talent of a former graduate student in comparative literature. But she also brings the grudges of estrangement … Mary Trump does offer some embarrassing, even silly, stories about growing up Trump … More memorable than any such details are this book’s insights and declarations … She provides little specific evidence or context for [assertions of mental health problems]—a habit that recurs throughout the book, as the author makes definitive pronouncements about her uncle’s state of mind … Mary Trump’s most convincing moments are those when she draws out behavioral parallels between [her grandfather] Fred and Donald.”
–Carlos Lozada (The Washington Post)
3. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley
6 Rave
“Tsuneno belongs to a vanished world, but historian Stanley brings both her and the Japanese city of Edo back to life in this breathtaking work … Vividly recounted in letters are her struggles to find her way and make peace with her family. While she was there, Edo was transformed from the glamorous metropolis the village girl had dreamed of to a city besieged by stringent moral reforms. Even as the reforms lifted, underlying issues remained, and a short time after Tsuneno’s death, her city fell to an uprising, to be reborn as Tokyo. This is an eye-opening account of an extraordinary ordinary life.”
–Bridget Thoreson (Booklist)
4. The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“… jaunty, far-ranging … Despite the frontier setting, there is something eerily contemporary about Harvey’s portrait of a real estate huckster with monarchic ambitions, a creative relationship to debt and a genius for mass media … Harvey deploys small scraps of knowledge to great effect. His account of Strang’s rise and fall is littered with thumbnail histories of 19th-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper exchanges, the Illuminati and much else. This approach amounts to a sort of historical pointillism, bringing the manic, skittering mood of the era into focus. It is a style of history well suited to the antebellum decades, when American culture was most unabashedly itself—uprooted, credulous and bold with scattershot plans for civic and moral perfection … Rather than a probing biography of a single man, Harvey offers a vivid portrait of the time and place in which a character like Strang could thrive, an era when ‘reality was porous’ and an anxious population cast about for something exciting to believe in and someone confident to follow. Once it is written, the history of our current moment won’t be the story of any particular scoundrel. Confidence men are always among us. It takes extraordinary circumstances for one to become king.’
–Chris Jennings (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an excerpt from The King of Confidence here
5. Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
1 Rave • 5 Positive
“I did something I’d never done before while reading Big Friendship: I snapped pictures of entire pages and sent them to friends … I’m thrilled to report that their philosophy on friendship is as insightful, hilarious, and moving as I’d hoped … It’s impossible to read those snippets from their description without thinking of the people in your life who fit the bill, just as it’s impossible to read the book without seeing pieces of your own relationships reflected in those described … Big Friendship is written, strikingly, in one voice, a conversational one, and whenever they diverge into their own perspectives, the point of view shifts to ‘Aminatou’ or ‘Ann.’ That makes the reading experience itself a brand-new one, and powerful … More than anything, though, they’ve given friendship a complicated, wonderful love story that will sit with you.”
–Laura Marie Meyers (PopSugar)
Read Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman list of their favorite books about the friendships between adult women here
