Peter Orner’s The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, Caleb Gayle’s Black Moses, and Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter by Peter Orner
(Little Brown and Company)
5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter here
“What he has constructed is a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”
–Adam Langer (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian
(Little Brown and Company)
5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Though this is Adrian’s sixth book, it brims with the self-assured audacity behind nearly every great debut … An utterly compelling picaresque … The book’s many self-references, and references to those self-references, are what make the reading experience such fun … A finale full of surprises, including…one perfectly executed reversal of our expectations … For its wit and perspicacity, Seduction Theory can easily be cataloged in the company of Ann Beattie’s Walks With Men.”
–Hannah Pittard (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood
(Europa Editions)
5 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Darkly comic, searing … Greenwood’s graphic details are vivid and disturbing … Greenwood’s stinging, salient novel remains relevant (the more things change, the more they stay the same), excoriating those who make a business of war whether it’s public or personal … Provocative.”
–Robert Allen Papinchak (The Los Angeles Times)
**
1. Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State by Caleb Gayle
(Riverhead)
6 Rave
“Eloquent, if discursive … Gayle’s narrative braids his vigorous research with the work of scholars … Gayle tells an engrossing tale, revealing that the tensions remain the same.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)
2. Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream by David M. Lubin
(Grand Central Publishing)
1 Rave • 4 Positive
“Adept … Though the book has its shortcomings, he rightly sees the movie as a kind of passkey into the history of the first half-century of Hollywood itself, warts and all … Lubin is alert to the various ways that Sunset Boulevard doesn’t just observe Old Hollywood but serves as its mausoleum.”
–Mark Athitakis (The Los Angeles Times)
3. To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson
(Penguin Press)
3 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Vivid … Anderson’s pieces are a triumph of high-wire journalism—often taking him into hair-raising action—that also offer a capacious, resonant panorama of Afghan society … A captivating account of a military march of folly that ably dissects its many tragic delusions.”
