Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything, Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend, and Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Behind the Door all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
(Random House)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Brings together Strout’s most indelible characters in a rich tapestry, intricately wrought yet effortlessly realized, both suspenseful and meditative … An achingly moving and exhilarating novel that brings people together across lines of age, gender, profession, political affiliation.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
2. The Woman Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle
(Viking)
6 Rave • 4 Positive
“I don’t want to hear from a man writing in the voice of a battered, alcoholic older woman (a well-worn template of female suffering). I just don’t … The good news for Doyle is that I read his new Paula Spencer novel, The Women Behind the Door, anyway. And that he’s excellent at capturing the kind of tension I’m describing and the fraught stories we tell about ourselves as a result … There’s much to admire here. And for Doyle fans, the novel will feel familiar: It is unflinching and dark, brutal in its economy, wry and mostly devastating.”
–Fiona Maazel (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
(Grove)
5 Rave • 4 Positive
“Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter…into transcendent beauty … Rather than pitting these seeming polarities against each other, Quatro skillfully mines the gray areas between them, the realms of ambiguity that are far more indicative of the human experience … Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple.”
–Melissa Broder (The New York Times Book Review)
**
=1. Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses by M. G. Sheftall
(Dutton)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“”[Sheftall] proves that first-person accounts are the most powerful tool to educate and reeducate the world about what happened … Sheftall’s voice is respectful, his perspective balanced, his access to a network of people willing to share their lives with him very deep … Sheftall does not spare readers from this human-made inferno. His chapters are short, the prose is tight, and the memories are in Technicolor … For those who want to understand what happened underneath the mushroom cloud—and shouldn’t we all?—Sheftall’s sweeping, sensitive and deeply researched book is required reading for our human hearts.”
–Karin Tanabe (The Washington Post)
=1. Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir by Mary L. Trump
(St. Martin’s Press)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Without the Trump name attached, this would still be a moving (if somewhat disjointed) look at a sad childhood. But Trump’s readers get it by now. In her family, cruelty was a feature not a bug.”
–Ilene Cooper (Booklist)
3. Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot
(Liveright)
3 Rave • 1 Positive
“Aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account. It’s also a surprising one. One might expect, given Boot’s trajectory, that this would be a full-throated defense of Reagan, the Last Good Republican. But it is not.”
–Daniel Immerwahr (The New Yorker)
