This thread holds reviews for advanced reader copies received by publishers. Thank you to the publishers for the chance to review these books! These reviews will also be included in my monthly round-ups and excellent reads will be featured in future posts.
Janice Hallett is one of the smartest mystery authors writing today. All of her books are told through a variety of secondary sources that leave the reader guessing what and who should be trusted. Hallett sticks with this unconventional structure in The Examiner, which tells the story of a small British graduate arts program gone awry using texts, message boards, and coursework. I’m continually blown away by Hallett’s creativity and ability to use seemingly benign source material, like final essays, as legitimate, suspenseful clues in a mystery. The use of sources removed from traditional narration also ensures that the reader is always unsure of what to believe because it is never clear if Hallett has presented all of the relevant information or not (spoiler, she does not). I still think that Hallett’s best book to date is The Appeal, but the fact that I’ve read three of her four books in this year alone confirms that I’m game for whatever unique mystery she writes.
Advertised as a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad (which I didn’t know until reading the summary of the book just now), Henry Henry is the story of Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, the Duke of Lancaster. As the eldest of six, Hal is aware of his long ancestral history and the traditional expectations for its continuation. This weighs heavily on Hal, who, as a young gay man in 2014, knows that adoption is not viewed as a proper means of succession. On top of this, Hal is grieving the death of his mother, struggles with nascent alcohol and drug addictions, and is experiencing continued abuse that began in childhood. If that wasn’t enough, he is also forging a romantic relationship with a fellow future Duke, also named Henry; of which both of their fathers heartily disapprove. The book is a weighty downer made worse by the fact that I was never really able to root for Hal, who is so guarded and cynical that his actions feel borderline absurd. I also made the mistake of reading the author’s blurb on the back flap and discovering that Bratton is American, which dampened my favorite parts of the story — the haughty descriptions of aristocratic British society.
Oye is structured as a one-sided phone conversation between Luciana, a senior in high school, and her older sister Mari, a sophomore in college. Over the course of the year Luciana calls Mari to vent, complain, and share updates about their grandmother, Abue, a fiercely stubborn woman who has recently been diagnosed with caner. After Abue’s diagnosis, she reluctantly moves into Luciana’s bedroom and regales her with long-lost family secrets from her life in Colombia, which Luciana dutifully relays to Mari despite frustration over Mari’s absence. Every conversation with Mari seems to begin with Luciana’s disdain that Mari has chosen to stay away rather than be near at the end of Abue’s life, and because the reader is never given Mari’s side of the conversation, the dramatic angst emanating from Luciana can become tiring. I appreciated that Mongollon was trying to be unique in the way she wrote the story, but the amount of spoken “OMGs” and “LOLs” verged on unbelievable. If you’re going to read this book, I recommend listening to the audio because the narrator puts on a performance.
Company is a first-class multigenerational family saga told through thirteen linked short stories. Sanders provides a family tree at the beginning of the book that I referred back to as I started each of the stories so that I could be sure I understood how everyone was connected in this near-genius work of family, friendship, and growth. In the first story, two brothers return home to evict their mother’s boyfriend. In another, the brothers’ aunt attends a party with her nieces to celebrate her appointment as university provost after she is unable to convince either of her children to attend. In another, a cousin hosts his cousin in his apartment in D.C. while he is in town for a drag show. Each of the thirteen stories adds a layer to the family’s narrative, creating a depth and beauty that sets this collection apart. The writing in this book is so good that it is hard to believe this is Sanders’ debut. It takes pure skill to give so many characters life in such a believable and compelling manner, but Sanders pulls it off in stunning fashion.
After breaking up with her fiancé of nearly a decade, Greta, in her early forties, decides to move across the country to Hudson, New York, where she rents a room in the decaying home of her friend Sabine. Hudson, already a small town where everyone knows everything about everybody, becomes even smaller for Greta who is hired by the local sex therapist to transcribe his sessions. Although his patients are only identified in the recordings by their initials, it is not hard for Greta to figure out who the individuals are when she encounters them in town and hears their voices, which means Greta knows many people’s deepest secrets without even knowing them. One client, a young married woman attending therapy to prepare for the release from prison of someone who attacked her years before, sparks Greta’s interest. Greta nicknames her Big Swiss and quickly becomes obsessed, a feeling that is heightened after she recognizes her voice at the dog park and befriends her under a pseudonym. What was meant to be an innocuous friendship fueled by Greta’s insatiable curiosity turns into a romantic affair. In too deep to break it off, Greta struggles to keep track of the lies she’s told and the information she already knows from Big Swiss’s private therapy.
Greta is a singular character whose living circumstances and background border on the absurd. I believe this was, however, Beagin’s goal, and she writes Greta to tremendous effect. Fair warning that, in a book about a sex therapist, the scenes can be graphic. I also thought that the story could be about fifty pages shorter. Otherwise, Big Swiss was a unique story told with a unique voice and translated particularly well on audio.
No reader could feel jealous of the Barneses, a family of four falling into disrepair collectively and individually. The family-run auto shop and car dealership led by Dickie suffered in the post-2008 recession and never quite recovered. Dickie’s own personal mismanagement and repressed secrets certainly don’t help matters. To Imelda, Dickie’s wife, his behavior is nothing short of infuriating. Imelda, who grew up in poverty as the daughter of a low-level gangster, desperately craves stability but is quietly reckoning with her own tragedy from early in life. While their children might not be aware of the depth of Dickie and Imelda’s issues, they certainly notice that something is wrong. Cass, formerly a star student, falls headlong into an all-encompassing, binge-drinking filled friendship with a fellow-classmate as exit certification exams approach. Her younger brother PJ, a sweet twelve-year-old in love with science and random facts about the world, is afraid to tell his parents that his bloody feet have outgrown his shoes and instead finds solace in a friend he meets online who tries to convince PJ to run away with tempting stories of a Dublin house with a sunroof, loving parents, and a dog. As the story moves between characters and jumps from past to present, a fuller picture emerges of the Barneses in all their tragic ingloriousness.
Coming in at a whopping 656 pages, The Bee Sting requires an investment of one’s time. But wow is it worth the investment. This book garnered a lot of hype when it was released, was long-listed for the Booker prize, and earned its spot on The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year in 2023. Murray’s writing is acerbic, witty, and nothing short of masterful. While it’s not always clear where Murray is going - indeed, at about the halfway point I started to wonder if the book was long just to be long - somehow, he’s able to tie it all back together, linking references he made in the first pages to jaw-dropping, heart-pounding revelations at the end. By the final fifty pages I couldn’t and wouldn’t put the book down, having fully given myself over to the expert craftsmanship that is Murray’s writing, structure, and pacing.
For Luke and Celine, a young couple in Dublin, getting engaged seems like the proper next step. It’s clear from the start of the book, however, that marriage might not be in the cards for the two. In one of the first scenes of the book, Luke disappears from the couple’s engagement party and lies to Celine about having gone home. As the march towards the wedding continues, Celine discovers the lie, Luke cheats on Celine secretly, and close friends declare their unyielding love for the groom. Despite these obvious, early red flags, the entirety of The Happy Couple consists of many characters weighing in on the stability of a relationship that any dispassionate observer could easily say shouldn’t end in marriage. I had no qualms with the sentence-level writing of the book, but I thought there was way too much going on for Dolan to dedicate to meaningful character development. Even the most interesting portion of the story - why did Luke leave his engagement party and where did he go - was sacrificed to less interesting plot points down the road.
Long Island Compromise begins with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher from the driveway of his palatial Long Island home as he’s getting ready to head to work at his polystyrene factory. He is held hostage for a week, unfindable by the FBI, until his wife Ruth comes up with $250,000 ransom payment, dropped on a luggage turnstile at JFK. Although Carl returns to his previous life and his wife and mother attempt desperately to make things seem and feel normal, the family is never able to get over the trauma of that week, which is passed down to his three children.
The kidnapping, which took place in 1980, is only the first chapter of the book; the rest takes place in the present and is told through the lens of Carl’s three struggling adult children. While they have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of money from their father’s factory to pad their lifestyles, each of them is utterly dysfunctional in nearly everything they attempt. When they discover that the factory has been purchased by a hedge fund that sees no financial future in domestic styrofoam production, they are each forced to face the reality of a dwindling fortune while also salvaging their crumbling personal lives.
The description of this book reads like an utter downer, and that’s not totally untrue. Each character is living in a comedy of errors, hitting rock bottom right as you think there is no farther for them to fall. However, in the hands of Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman is in Trouble and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, the tragedy becomes absurdity which translates into comedy. The story is meant to be a type of satire on the evolution of American Jewish life and assimilation. It is also a quasi-moralistic fable about wealth and struggle, which wasn’t always subtle. My biggest problem with the book was that the central trauma inspires everyone’s problems - the kidnapping - is never fully explained or resolved. Brodesser-Akner reveals who the true kidnapper was at the end, and it is shocking, but the motivations and minutiae are either completely ignored or explained away in a few sentences. Given that the book is comprised of approximately four large chapters, each told from the perspective of a different member of the family, it would have been fully justified to dedicate an additional chapter to the kidnapper, which I think would have adequately addressed the larger ethical themes that Brodesser-Akner is attempting to explore. Overall, however, Long Island Compromise was an enjoyable reading experience and I look forward to seeing people’s reactions when it is released on July 9.
22-year-old Alex has nowhere to go after she is kicked out of the home of Simon, the older man she has been staying with in the Hamptons. Alex is behind on rent, despised by her roommates back in New York, and owes money to a man who we can only assume is dangerous. In light of all this plus a heavy dose of delusion, Alex resolves to stay in the Hamptons until Simon’s Labor Day party where she is convinced he will take her back if he is just given space for a few days. The novel unfolds over the course of these few days, as Alex flits from one temporary situation to the other. In one scene, Alex inserts herself into a house share, pretending to be friends with one of the people who hasn’t yet arrived. After they realize no one actually knows her, Alex sneaks her way into a beach club pretending to be a child’s nanny and takes advantage of the child’s family’s limitless tab at the snack bar. She spends one night in the guest house of one of Simon’s friends who isn’t home, another night sleeping on the dunes. In each of these scenarios Alex effortless shape-shifts and morphs to meet the needs of those around her in this rarefied world of money and exclusivity.
The Guest is more than just some beach read with a party girl whose life has gone awry. Instead, Cline has written both a biting commentary on a slice of society as well as a fascinating character study of someone who recognizes early on that to survive, “only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.”
In this collection of short stories, Vauhini Vara writes about childhood, faith, and connections with others. In one story, two teenagers start working at a questionable call-center amidst the throws of grief. In another, a young girl serves as a companion to an aging woman in her apartment complex. In my favorite, an experimental artist attempts to build a life-size ark according to the specifications set out in the King James bible by employing a subset of Seattle’s homeless population. Each of the stories tackles life’s challenges through the eyes of the rudderless and the searching. I liked a few more than others, but overall think this is an exceptionally strong collection filled with stories that are written with heart and full of characters that exhibit a deep emotional range.
Rating: 9/10
Thank you to W.W. Norton for the advance reader copy of this book!
Everything’s Fine is about a relationship between a liberal Black woman named Jess and a conservative white man named Josh, who first meet in college but then become friends when they reconnect while working at Goldman Sachs. As Jess struggles to find her footing in the hyper-competitive, white male driven world of finance, Josh is labeled a rising star and rockets to the top of a prestigious hedge fund due to prep school connections. At the same time, the two kindle a romantic relationship that is shunned by her friends and kept secret from her father. Their romance intersects with the 2016 election season, and Jess is forced to consider how far compatibility can stretch. It is important to note, however, that while a romance centers the plot, the novel is not part of the romance genre, and instead should be considered a work of literary fiction.
After this book was published, it became the subject of a lot of controversy for its marketing as an enemies to lovers romance, the argument being that racism is not a little quirk to get over in a relationship. It was the target of review bombing (when people, many of whom haven’t read the book, tank the its star rating on platforms like Goodreads to diminish its popularity - see this New York Times article for a helpful explainer), by angry users before it was even published. After finishing the book I did some research into the controversy, and found this comment by the author from an interview done by The Cut to be particularly illuminating:
"People were questioning the limits of my imagination as a Black writer, and they were conflating me with my character, suggesting there’s no way this could be fiction and nuanced. That there was no way I could write a story that asks more questions than it answers. And, more damning, I felt like a lot of the feedback was about holding a Black character to a higher idealized standard than we do white characters, who are celebrated for their messiness, their flaws. When a messy, chaotic 20-something character is a white woman, that’s fine, but I was hearing that people didn’t want that same amount of nuance from a Black-woman character. It surprised me, because it felt quite dehumanizing. Demanding perfection either in the form of perfect victimhood or the perfect hero doesn’t reflect who people are, and it doesn’t reflect their full humanity."
My take is that this book is worth reading. You don’t need to agree with the characters, their beliefs, or their decisions to recognize that the book is a nuanced, complex, and thorny portrayal of identity, privilege, and relationships with oneself, one’s partner, and the larger world.
Rachel, a student finishing her final year of university, meets James, a closeted high school graduate, while working at a bookstore in Cork, Ireland. The 2010 Recession is in full swing, Ireland having been hit particularly hard, and Rachel is unsure what she will do with her English degree after she graduates. Rachel and James develop a quick and tight-night friendship, choosing to move in together when James admits that he is need of a roommate. They tell each other everything and are unfailingly loyal to one another, including and until Rachel tells James about a crush on her married professor. Intending to facilitate their relationship, James organizes a scheme for Rachel to seduce him, but instead ends up in a relationship with the professor himself. Their secret romance sets off a cascade of intertwined events between Rachel, James, the professor, and his well-connected wife as Rachel and James try to figure out the next steps for their future.
This is a beautifully written, expertly crafted, character-driven novel filled with humor. It is the story of friendship, hardship, young adulthood, and discovery. It is an exploration of power dynamics and their fragility. It is filled to the brim with dysfunction but also tenderness, and I loved every second of it.
From the author of Funny You Should Ask, one of my favorite romance novels, comes Once More With Feeling, the story of a former celebrity pop-star who agrees to star in a new Broadway musical directed by an old fling. Kathleen Rosenberg met Cal Kirby when they were teenagers at a prestigious musical theater summer camp, reuniting a few years later after Kathleen has transformed into Katee Rose and Cal joins a boy band led by Kathleen’s fame-hungry boyfriend. A one night stand between Kathleen and Cal destroys the career of Katee Rose, and she goes into a self-enforced exile until her best friend presents her with the opportunity to play her dream role in a Broadway debut nearly a decade later. Kathleen’s dream was always to be on Broadway, but first she has to resolve the conflict between Cal and herself before she can fully commit to the show and her reputational redemption. Although this was an easy and quick read, I found the storyline and central conflict to be unnecessarily convoluted, which distracted Sussman from developing her characters and sustaining a believable plot. I don’t necessarily feel like I wasted my time by reading this book, but there are definitely better romances available, starting with Sussman’s debut.
After hearing about a devastating landslide on New Zealand’s South Island, Mira decides to assess the now cut-off and abandoned land as a potential location for a new outpost of Birnam Wood, the guerrilla gardening group that she leads. Birnam Wood’s mission is to plant crops, sometimes by permission and other times through trespass, on abandoned, underused, or unnoticed stretches of land throughout New Zealand to send a message about our capitalist society’s waste and inefficiency. The group is struggling as the book opens to make ends meet financially and to retain its membership. The landslide has created a massive opportunity for growth and publicity, which Mira is determined to take advantage of. When she arrives, she is surprised to find the quirky American billionaire Robert Lemoine already there, who offers the land and a sizable quantity of startup money to Birnam Wood. Lemoine is the CEO of a large company that specializes in surveillance drones, and it is almost immediately obvious to the reader that Lemoine has darker motivations attached to his gift, which are largely unknown to Mira and the group.
This book is gripping from start to finish and is probably best described as a slow burn with a fantastic structure. The book is told in alternating perspectives and as a result, readers know about the idiosyncrasies and motivations of each of the main characters (add in Birnam Wood’s second-in-command, a disgruntled former member, and the true owner of the land to the mix), as the book unfolds. The catch is that these internal plottings are not known to the other characters, leading to intrigue and peril. Things are not as they seem in this unique, psychological story set in the beauty of the New Zealand wilderness by a Booker Prize winning author with immense, glorious talent.
When readers meet Roland Baines, the protagonist of Lessons, his wife has just left him with their baby right as the Chernobyl disaster is unfolding. This is not the first woman who has wronged Roland. In the process of grieving what he has lost, Roland reflects on his childhood. Born in Tripoli to British parents stationed there after World War II, he is sent at a young age to boarding school in England, where he is seduced and taken advantage of at the age of fourteen by his young piano teacher. Convinced that the world is about to end during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Roland finds himself ensnared in a relationship that destroys his school life and charts him on a nonlinear path. As he grows, Roland lives through a span of extraordinary events but never does much with his life, bouncing from one thing to the next, raising his son, getting by. He has opinions on the world, but is mostly a passive observer, which can sometimes be a bit dry. Although McEwan’s quality of writing is superb, I thought that he was trying to do too much with this book, which spanned not just the 20th century but also through the pandemic. The central drama of the plot, the inappropriate relationship with the piano teacher, felt simultaneously important and unnecessary to the larger story. I kept waiting for McEwan to connect the dots between this event and the rest of his life in a more cohesive way, but it never arrived. Instead, Roland appears to be a man who is the victim of various women - his mother’s absence, the piano teacher, his ex-wife - and unable to get out of a rut to live anything more than a mundane existence.
Sally Millz is a ten-year veteran writer for The Night Owls, a late-night sketch comedy show modeled on SNL. When the book opens, Sally is preparing for a week with host and musical guest Noah Brewster, an aging pop star known for a cheesy love song that made him popular as a teenager. The sketches that Sally proposes for his week - including one that pokes fun at the idea that mediocre looking men are allowed to date beautiful women but not vice versa - catches Noah’s attention, and the two establish a fleeting connection that is put on pause after Sally puts her foot in her mouth at the show’s afterparty.
Romantic Comedy is broken up into three distinct sections. Part 1 takes place over the course of the week in 2018 that Noah hosts TNO, following Sally as the show comes together and the two work together to write a sketch. This was my favorite section of the book because it felt like a chance to see behind the curtain on the making of SNL, a show that I love and watch every week. I also felt like it gave Sittenfeld the opportunity to let her romance play out in an untraditional way. Ultimately, however, the story became more traditional in part 2 when Sally and Noah reconnect via long email exchanges during the height of the pandemic and in part 3 when Sally heads out to LA to visit Noah and establish their relationship.
This book has been criticized for being a bit of a let down. Unable to make the genre her own, Sittenfeld’s book instead follows its normal trajectory: boy meets girl, boy looses girl, boy and girl get together. Although Romantic Comedy doesn’t do anything revelatory or new, I did think it delivered on what its title advertises - a fun read with enjoyable, humorous characters, even if I wasn’t enamored by some of their choices at the very end.
Three siblings and their families gather to celebrate Christmas in upstate New York. They get together every year, but this holiday is marked by the notable absence of the siblings’ mother who died eight months earlier. As the family gathers they are reminded of all the ways their mother held them together, most notably through the Florida home where they grew up. The beginning of the book is a whirlwind as the author introduces readers to her large cast of characters: the three siblings, their spouses, and the kids. Steger Strong alternates her focus from one adult to the other, exposing their issues, concerns, and anxieties. The central tension between the group is revealed early, when one of the couples announces their desire to move to the Florida house rather than sell it, and although there is much consternation about this, the stakes never feel as high as they probably could. A smaller family lives a couple of miles away consisting of a young recovering addict mother and her smart precocious daughter. Their social worker, one of the in-laws back at the big family house, has fallen in love with the girl after discovering that she can not have children of her own, and becomes entangled in their emergency on Christmas Eve. I enjoyed this book for the messy family dynamics and the fleshed out characters but would have enjoyed the book more if it had stayed at that. There was nothing about the story that I didn’t like and everything was written exceptionally well, but I think it could have been stronger without the addition of the outside mother and daughter, which would have allowed Steger Strong to spend more time in the quiet, dysfunctional, and intricate lives of her central characters.
Less is Loss is the sequel to the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, Less. Although Less was not my favorite based on the writing style (I gave it an 8/10) of the Pulitzer winners that I have read, I was interested in picking up the sequel to see if my view could be changed. Less is about a middle-aged, little-known, gay writer named Arthur Less who takes a trip around the world. Less is Lost, has a similar premise, except this time, it follows Arthur as he takes a trip across the United States. Arthur has recently published a book that boosted his name recognition from basically none to maybe some. When he learns that he owes over a decade’s worth of back rent on a Maine cabin that he and his partner have been living in for free, Arthur decides to take advantage of his minuscule fame and accept every speaking, interview, or panel offer given to him to earn the money. What follows is a journey across the country, with the book’s sections organized based on geographic region. While the book doesn’t lack for physical movement, I still felt like nothing much happened. The strength of the book comes from Andrew Sean Greer’s (who potentially loosely mirrors the character of Andrew Less on himself) creation of Less’ internal monologues where he is able to put his writing on display. However, I feel fairly confident in saying that unless you loved Less, there isn’t much of a reason to pick up Less is Loss - they are arguably very similar books.
Hannah Brooks is an Executive Protection Agent (aka a bodyguard) whose agency has been hired to protect movie superstar Jack Stapleton while he is home visiting his family. Not wanting to worry his mother who is undergoing cancer treatment, Jack and the agency cook up a plan to have Hannah pose as his girlfriend so that she can more easily keep an eye on Jack. Hannah, who attended her mother’s funeral and then was broken up with the next day, is a workaholic who is skeptical about this new assignment. Her time on the Stapleton ranch, however, gives her time to heal and open up, and potentially fall in love (shocker!) with Jack Stapleton himself. This was a super entertaining story, and a great example of a book that might not get the highest rating, but is still enjoyable and worth a read if you are in the right mood. The characters are vehicles to drive the plot forward so there are few details that stand alone outside of a storytelling device, but what is revealed is fun and enjoyable. I think this is one of the better books in the romance genre, so I recommend picking this up if you are looking for something light, entertaining, and easy to get through.
The hero of this book is the unnamed narrator’s mother, who died ten months before the narrator writes the book. The narrator is a writer, making the story a thinly veiled rendering of Elizabeth McCracken’s own life, whose mother died in 2018. McCracken writes somewhat self-consciously, informing the reader that the book can’t be a memoir because she does not want the pressure to get every fact right, and although her mother did not approve of memoirs because of how they destroyed a person’s privacy, the narrator of this book feels that writing about her mother’s life will allow her to live on. As the book opens the narrator checks herself into a hotel in London where she has decided to go by herself to grieve her mother and reminisce on trips that the two took in the past. Between descriptions of her travels, the narrator recounts more intimate details of her mother’s past, from her childhood as a Jewish woman in Iowa with cerebral palsy to a brief stint in acting to a fulfilling career in academia. The book is a beautiful love letter to the memory of the narrator’s mother, warts and all, and a moving reflection on love, relationships, and mourning.
Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, which was one of my favorite books of 2021. Like Infinite Country, which was set in Colombia and followed one family’s splintered immigration journey to the United States. the stories in The Faraway World all center around community, identity, and, in many, the complex motivations behind immigration. There are no overlapping characters in this collection, but each story is set in either Colombia, Cuba, or New York. In one story, a taxi driver finds salvation by driving a woman to a different church every day for a year to support her attempt to receive a divine blessing to move to the United States. In another, a girlfriend unknowingly shepherds kilos of cocaine for her boyfriend between drop sites in Miami until they are caught and her boyfriend must flee to Colombia. In one of my favorites, a woman works as a maid in New York for a family from her hometown, and struggles with the distinction the now affluent family has placed between their two situations. Every story in the collection is written with compassion and clarity, bringing to life forgotten corners of the world and the people that inhabit them. I think that Patricia Engel is an excellent storyteller, which is highlighted by her ability to create so many different complex characters who all share common hopes, values, and struggles.
Named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, The Furrows is a unique story about love, loss, grief, and memory. When Cee was twelve years old, she and her seven year old brother Wayne walked over to the beach. While there, Wayne got caught in the furrow of the waves and Cee watched him die. His body, however, is never found, leaving unanswered questions of whether he is really dead or just missing. The first half of the book follows Cee’s grief through the recounting of different situations in which Wayne dies again and again. In doing this, Serpell twists reality to make the reader question what is real and what is not, and although Cee insists that her brother is dead, these instances make the reader wonder if this is even true.
The second half of the book breaks dramatically from the first when Serpell introduces an adult named Wayne who looks very similar to the one that was lost. This Wayne is obsessed with finding Cee’s Wayne, and follows her around the country looking for clues. The introduction of this character is a bit confusing, and I began to question who was dead, alive, and what was going on. In some ways, however, this book is not about trying to figure out what is going on. In a frequently quoted line from the book, Cee tells the reader that she wants to tell you how it felt, not what happened, and the introduction of this alternative Wayne feels like a manifestation of Cee’s attempts to cope. If it wasn’t obvious already, the plot of this book is extremely difficult to describe and there is a lot of nuance that is difficult to unpack within the framework of traditional storytelling. What I can say, however, is that Serpell writes with immense empathy and creativity about a tough subject. The structure of the novel is unique and it is a book that made me think more deeply about stylistic choices than I typically do.
Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, which was one of my favorite books of 2021. While I thought this satire on climate catastrophe was phenomenal, it also freaked me out, which is why when I saw that Dinosaurs was being published, I was hesitant to give it a try. Now I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read it. Dinosaurs is an incredible book about protagonist Gil, who walks from New York to Phoenix after a failed romantic relationship. There could probably be enough material for an entire tome about this journey, but as a sign of Millet’s genius, the walk is only written about in passing. Instead, the heft of the book comes out of a dissection of Gil’s relationships with those around him, most prominently the family of four that lives next door in a large glass house. Without shades or blinds, Gil has a front row seat to the lives of Ardis, Ted, and their two kids Tom and Clem. Slowly at first and then quickly later on, Gil becomes a type of uncle to Tom and a wonderful friend to Ardis and Ted. He volunteers at a local battered women’s shelter and discovers a fascination for bird watching (hence the title of the book, as birds are our closest living ancestors to dinosaurs). This is a beautiful and perfectly crafted story of found family, love, and connection. Out of the solitary journey west, Millet expertly sets the stage to ask larger questions about the role of the individual amidst larger societal issues and constraints.
In 1980s Ireland, a father drops off his child at a couple’s farm where she will stay over the summer. The father’s wife is pregnant yet again, and sending his eldest away will temporarily relieve their burdens. The unnamed narrator of Claire Keegan’s novella, Foster, is young enough to be treated as a child but old enough to be perceptive about the world around her. She is nervous when she arrives at the childless Kinsella’s home, but is soon welcomed by the husband and wife who treat her as if she is their own. Over the course of the summer the child learns how milk the cow, runs as fast as she can to get the mail, and follows around the wife like a shadow. Part way through the summer a nosy neighbor explains to her that the Kinsellas had a young boy who drowned, allowing readers to understand the role that the child plays for the couple.
While the book is extremely short - only 95 pages - I loved every second of it. Like her previous novella, Small Things Like These, Keegan is able to craft a fully realized world using limited words. Although I kept waiting for something dramatic to happen, this is not that type of story. Instead, I finished the book with a dual feeling of warmth and sadness. There’s something extremely satisfying about being able to finish a book in one or two sittings, and this is made even more true when the writing is as clear and purposeful as Keegan’s.
I’m a goal-oriented person, which means that even when I’m enjoying a book I’m always looking forward to the next one. I rarely find myself approaching the end of a book and wishing that it would keep going. Katherine Heiny’s latest wonderful collection of short stories, Games and Rituals, made me do just that. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that Katherine Heiny is one of my absolute favorite authors. Early Morning Riser, released last year, was my favorite book of 2021 and probably the book I recommend most often to other people. Take this as my call to you to read this book if you somehow have not. It is rare to find an author who is so gifted at creating the fullest, funniest, most relatable cast of characters who you root for even if you don’t agree with all of their choices. As a result, the characters in all of Heiny’s books are definitively the stars of the show, not the plots.
When I saw that her next publication would be a collection of short stories I was simultaneously excited and nervous - what if the brevity of a story meant that I wouldn’t have time to fall in love with her characters? I shouldn’t have been worried. Games and Rituals is one of those rare and remarkable collections where every one of the eleven stories is as captivating and enjoyable as the next. While they are not necessarily connected, each story contains themes of love, friendship, the follies of youth, and reflection on past choices. In one story, a mother considers her behavior in her adolescence while simultaneously trying to figure out if her sweet seventeen-year-old son is doing drugs after work. In another, a woman reflects on her complicated relationship with her father while she cares for him after he mistook his hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In one of my favorites, a woman’s life unravels over the course of an evening after she discovers a series of clues about her actor husband’s behavior that don’t add up. I was sad as I came to the close of the book, because I knew that soon there would be no more of Heiny’s complex and fulsome protagonists to discover.
1930s Denver resembles a city not too far removed from the era of the Wild West. At the height of the Great Depression, the city became a magnet for people of all backgrounds looking for work and opportunity, which was met by a fierce backlash from the city’s growing Klan population. At the center of this tension are Luz and her older brother Diego, who has recently been forced to flee Denver after he impregnates his white girlfriend. Just shy of 18, Luz finds a job as a secretary in a Greek lawyer’s office who has made a name for himself representing people who have been abused by the police and the Klan. Interspersed throughout this story are chapters dating back to the late 19th century featuring three generations of Luz’s ancestors. Readers experience the trauma that runs deep in Luz’s Native American and Mexican family as their rights and land are taken from them with the westward expansion of white settlers. I picked this book up after seeing it recommended by Ann Patchett. A western multi-generational historical saga is fairly different from the books that I typically read, and I enjoyed getting to see what life was like in Denver and the Lost Territory of Colorado in an era not too long ago. I did feel that the book was not as literary as advertised, equating Luz’s relationship challenges with the actual hardships and traumas experienced by her ancestors.
In the late 1960s an intentional community was formed in Southeastern India outside of Pondicherry by a Frenchwoman referred to as “The Mother” who claimed to have achieved enlightenment. The goal was to build a town as an experiment in “human unity and transformation of consciousness.” While the town, Auroville, now has a website and a PR team attempting to attract tourists, at the time, the land was arid and spiritual naïveté rampant. Attracting people from all over the world searching to build a just and equal society, the town also attracted extremists who did not believe in traditional school or supervision for children, eschewed the medical establishment, and explained fully preventable deaths as part of the “universe’s plan.” Amongst the early inhabitants are the author, Akash Kapur’s, in-laws, who both died preventable death’s when Kapur’s now-wife was 14. This book is Kapur’s exploration of their lives and the intersection between their beliefs and the development of Auroville.
This is not a book for audio - there are too many characters to keep track of and too many political grievances and tangents briefly explored. Further, although Kapur is obviously not an objective narrator, the ending of the book left me thoroughly confused. Kapur spends the first 300 pages telling a story about an idealistic “utopian” community gone wrong - including the traumatic deaths of his wife’s parents - Kapur becomes an apologist for the community in his conclusion, arguing that Auroville is special and a wonderful place to live and raise kids. His previous descriptions of the town gave me no impression that this is a place I would want to visit, let alone live, and the “ideals” that he speaks about so reverently seem to be debunked by the naive and dangerous behavior described throughout the entirety of the book.
Carrie Soto is Back is the latest from Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of the popular summer books Daisy Jones and the Six and Malibu Rising. Reid is known for well-timed, fast-paced, plot-driven books that also prioritize character development, and this book is no exception. Carrie Soto is a tennis legend of the late 1970s and 1980s. Trained by her father, Javier, Carrie doesn’t just strive to be good, she strives to be the best, which she achieves when she breaks the record for most Slam titles of any man or woman. But a knee injury in her early-thirties prompts an early retirement, and in her six years out of the sport a different player, Nikki Chan, comes onto the scene and challenges Carrie’s record. Her whole life, Carrie has told herself that if she is not the very best, then she is the worst, so when Chan ties her world record in 1994 Soto decides to come out of retirement at age 37 and play the four Slam tournaments in order to defend her crown. This is a book about tennis, but it is also a book about perseverance, family, and vulnerability. While I was drawn to the tension and drama surrounding the tennis world and the outcomes of Carrie’s matches, I thought that the book could have been trimmed a bit on the descriptions of Carrie’s training program and the play by play of matches that weren’t the pinnacle of a tournament. If you love tennis, this is absolutely the book for you. If you’re like me and only know the basics of the sport, Reid will draw you in with her impeccable writing about the intrigue and politics of professional sports, even if she loses you a bit on the minutiae of how each point is scored.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Fiction, 416 pages
Sadie meets Sam in the mid-1980s when they are both twelve-years-old. Her sister is in the hospital receiving treatment for leukemia and while she waits, a nurse invites her to pass her time in the hospital game room. Sitting and playing Mario Cart is Sam Mauser, who has been in and out of the hospital following a devastating car crash that killed his mother and irreparably damaged his foot. Sam is withdrawn and depressed, but playing with Sadie day after day draws him out of his shell, and the two develop a friendship based on their love of video games as well as their creativity. Six years later, they both move to Cambridge, Massachusetts for college - Sadie to MIT and Sam to Harvard. A chance encounter at the train station draws them back together, and Sam, noticing Sadie’s own depression, invites her to make a video game with him and his roommate Marx during the summer between their junior and senior years. The game they create becomes an overnight success, launching the three of them onto an illustrious career path of creative partnership. However, their decades long success does not come without its challenges. While the gaming world allows for one to create whatever world they want and reboot it at will, Sadie and Sam must grapple with the contrasts between fantasy and the unfairness and hardships associated with reality.
I was skeptical when I picked up this book because not only do I not play video games, I also know nothing about them. And while this is absolutely a book about video games and the artistic process behind them, the video games are just the backdrop for a much larger story about friendship, growing up, reinvention, and grief. It takes an author with incredible skill to be able to craft such a sweeping yet intimate story with fully formed and complicated characters. I do not have a negative thing to say about this book, contrary to what I think is an overly critical review in the New York Times. It is one of those rare novels that transports you to someplace new while also connecting you with a universal story.
Mia is a British actress who comes to Los Angeles for "pilot season," a series of high-stress auditions where actors and actresses hoping to make it in the industry try out for a slate of upcoming roles. While waiting for her turn at one audition, Mia meets Emily. Right before Emily's turn, she asks Mia to top up her parking meter, handing her her keys in the process. When Mia returns, Emily is gone. After a few days of silence, she receives a text from Emily's number asking if she can come by Mia's apartment and get her items. Relieved, Mia says yes. But when she opens the door it's not Emily standing there but someone impersonating her. What happened to Emily? Where did she go? And how far does the conspiracy go? As Mia works to answer these questions she finds herself falling down a dramatic rabbit hole bigger than herself, uncovering the tension between scandal and ambition ever present in a city of people trying to make a name for themselves regardless of the cost.
Catherine Steadman is an actress herself - I know her from Downton Abbey - and she writes with authority on the subject matter. I am disappointed in myself that I received this book as an ARC almost a year ago and did not pick it up until now. This is the best kind of mystery thriller, one that I could not put down as I neared the final third. There is no excessive gore or violence, but rather slow creeping suspense and tension that culminates in a dramatic and satisfying conclusion.
Carla is a young woman in her late-twenties living in California and working as a landscaper. She enjoys the work and is content for the time being, but is not so sure what her future looks like. After completing a job at the home of Viridian, a poet with a certain gravitas, Carla gets drawn into the lives of Viridian and her friends in the poetry community. While Carla is becoming more involved with this group, she never exists as more than a young helper - a free assistant at a poetry magazine and a coordinator for a local poetry retreat - further exacerbating her questioning of self.
The Poet's House received a rave view on NPR, which propelled this book to the top of my pile. The book is being advertised as similar to Lily King's Writers and Lovers which is one of my favorites. While there are some similarities - both follow young women attempting to find themselves and both take place on the fringes of the literary world - I personally liked Writers and Lovers much more, mostly because I cared more about the stakes of the story and the characters contained therein. The Poet's House is certainly well-written, but I was not particularly attached to any of the characters or the central conflict.
Nora Hamilton is a romance screenwriter known for her ability to churn out formulaic scripts for Hallmark channel-style films. Her career is ironic, however, given that her husband has just left her and her two young children after years of a loveless marriage. Reacting to her divorce, Nora writes a new screenplay about her experience, deviating fully from her typical genre. The script is picked up by a major producer who is able to get big stars in the lead roles. Portions of the film are even filmed in Nora's backyard, which is how she meets and gets to know the star Leo Vance, who after filming wraps up, remains in Nora's home in a desperate bid for a taste of normal life. When Leo leaves to film a major action movie and stops communicating with Nora, she is left to wonder if what she had was way too good to be true. This romance novel deviates slightly from the standard formula utilized by the genre because the required "break-up" before the happily-ever-after (which typically takes place in the final quarter of the book), occurs right in the middle, allowing Monaghan to develop Nora as a character independent of her romantic interests. Annie Jones of the Bookshelf (my favorite books podcast) absolutely raved about this book, admitting to having read it twice in the span of four months. I'm not sure I was as blown away as she was, but I can attest that the book was fast-paced, entertaining, and cute - definitely an ideal summer read.
Tracy Flick Can't Win is a follow-up to Tom Perrotta's 1998 novel, Election. Election followed go-getter social outcast Tracy as she ran for student body president. Now, twenty years later, instead of being a high-powered lawyer, doctor, or senator as she had once dreamed, Tracy is toiling away as an assistant principal in a public New Jersey high school. Her big career plans have been sidetracked by her mother's battle with MS and an unexpected pregnancy, but Tracy still approaches every day with zeal. When Jack Weede, the school's aging principal, announces plans for retirement, Tracy assumes she is a shoo-in. Eager to please the school board in order to ingratiate herself for a promotion, Tracy agrees to participate in the School Board President's pet project to create a "hall of fame" for the school's (un)successful alumni. But no matter how hard Tracy tries she is never quite rewarded, and obstacles appear for her at every turn. Tracy's story, and the story of the school, are told in the alternating perspectives of Tracy, Jack, two students, a hall of fame alum, and a few other characters. The chapters are very short, providing quick glimpses into their lives and perspectives. I wish that these chapters had been longer because I wanted to see some of the ideas more fully fleshed out, although the brevity did keep the book moving. I think that if this book was written by a woman it would be (unfairly) labeled as "women's fiction" and not given a lot of critical literary attention. Because it was written by Tom Perrotta, a well-respected (male) author known for complicated character studies, the book has received a lot of positive critical coverage, particularly in the New York Times. I enjoyed Tracy Flick Can't Win despite never having read Election, and think this book is as enjoyable as it is complicated and thought-provoking.
Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life - Delia Ephron
Memoir, 304 pages
Delia Ephron’s memoir begins with the death of her husband from pancreatic cancer. It is searing and traumatic - certainly a grim way to start a book. Delia’s loss, however, frames the next five or so years in her life, which is the subject of her memoir. After writing an op-ed in the New York Times about the terrible customer service at Verizon she encounters while trying to discontinue her late-husband’s landline, Delia receives an email from a man named Peter, who had been introduced to Delia by her late sister Nora when she was 18. Their correspondence turns into late in life marriage, the ceremony for which takes place in a hospital wing on the eve of the start of Delia’s treatment for leukemia, the same cancer that killed her sister. The second half of Delia’s memoir focuses on her medical journey, from an experimental therapy she is given to a harrowing bone marrow transplant. Along the way, Delia introduces readers to her many wonderful doctors and friends, who support her in ways big and small. Delia preserves these moments by reprinting the emails sent by friends while she was in the hospital. I think the New York Times review would agree with me that not all of these emails needed to be printed in full and that it was difficult to keep track of the numerous people in her life - but boy does Delia Ephron have a literate group of friends. Left on Tenth was a challenging story of hardship and resilience, of finding love after death, and in some ways, an ode to New York City.
Notes On Your Sudden Disappearance - Alison Espach
Fiction, 352 pages
Sally and Kathy are sisters and best friends. They share the same room and every night Kathy, who is three years older than Sally, fills her in on all the world has to offer, including school politics, crushes - mostly Billy Barnes, and growing up. In eighth grade, Sally gets a ride to school with Kathy and her now-boyfriend Billy, and, in an attempt to avoid a deer on the road, Billy swerves and hits a tree, instantly killing Kathy. All at once, the lives of Sally, her parents, and Billy are shattered and they are each left to grieve in their own way. The book is written from Sally's perspective as a type of letter to Kathy, who she updates on how life has been in the fifteen years following the crash. Sally never truly gets over the death of Kathy, seeing reminders of her in everything around her, including her mother's loss of grip on reality and Billy's continuation of a semi-normal life. The beautifully written heaviness of each character's grief and complicated relationships with one another is not reflected in the book’s cover that was most likely chosen by a publisher who wanted to market the book as a summer read.
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty - Akwaeke Emezi
Fiction, 288 pages
Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian author perhaps best known for their 2020 novel, The Death of Vivek Oji. You made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is being advertised as Emezi's romance debut, which I think might be a marketing misnomer. While the initial premise of the book fits within the traditional confines of the romance genre - Feyi is re-entering the dating scene 5 years after the tragic loss of her young husband - what follows deviates from a standard plot structure seen in most romance novels. After meeting Nasir at a bar, he connects Feyi with a prominent art curator and invites her to come back with him to his family home in the Caribbean to participate in one of the curator's shows. Upon arriving, Feyi discovers that Nasir's father is a Michelin star-rated celebrity chef with an opulent home and magnetic personality. Whatever spark Feyi was lacking with Nasir is present in full force with the father, Alim. The two bond over their previous traumas while falling in love, which inevitably creates conflict. While the book may have gone on for a bit too long and included some convenient resolutions, Emezi is no doubt a talented writer who has crafted a book that certainly deviates from any traditional romance plot structure.
In Austin, Texas on the first day of summer in 2019, a young woman’s body is found dead in a swimming hole off of the famous greenbelt trail. Best friends Robert, Xavier, and Charlie, (who also happen to be summer lifeguards at a nearby pool), witness the woman fall into the water and bike home to tell their mothers, who are also best friends. Terrified of the consequences for their children, each mother sets out to protect her son in any way that she can. But what happened on the trail? How did the girl die? These are obvious questions one might expect to be answered, but surprisingly, they are not. Just as quickly as the mystery seems to be solved the book abruptly ends, leaving more questions than answers about the crime and the involvement of the its many characters. In addition, the character development was forced and superficial, while the cover - which aggrandizes the inconsequential fact that the boys are lifeguards - is completely misleading.
Funny You Should Ask begins with a celebrity profile of Gabe Parker, who has recently and controversially been picked to be the next James Bond. The writer, Chani Horowitz, is struggling to make a name for herself and this profile is her chance. Over the course of a weekend, Chani and Gabe get to know each other, starting in a restaurant, heading to a movie premier, and ending at a party thrown at Gabe’s house. The will-they-or-won’t-they tension that percolates sets the stage for a reunion piece ten years later. In the time that has passed Gabe has seen success at the box office as well as personal setbacks, including two stints in a rehab facility. Chani, who’s career took off following the publication of her article ten years earlier, is living in the aftermath of her divorce. Together once again, Gabe and Chani reflect on past events as readers discover what parts of the famous profile really happened, and what was left out.
The “then” portions of this book are based on a real 2011 GQ profile of Chris Evans written by Edith Zimmerman in advance of his filming of Captain America. If you read this book and then go back and read the profile as I did, you can see how closely Sussman stuck with not only the events that took place but also the writing style of Zimmerman’s original piece. The “now” sections of the book are, I have to imagine, an invention of Sussman’s imagination of what could have been if what took place between the lines played out in reality. The result is a charming and clever read, in which I unwittingly became immersed.
Rating: 8/10
Thank you to Dell and Ballantine for the advance reader copy of this book.
The Harrison family is political royalty in New York. After taking over her late-husband's seat in Congress, Nancy Harrison has worked hard to do all the things a Democratic congresswoman is supposed to do, setting her up perfectly for a Senate run. Control of the Senate is at stake and Nancy must win, not least because of her opponent - a former TV actor turned Republican firebrand. Enter Nick, Nancy's oldest child and former staffer cum fixer. Burned out by politics, Nick is now a writing professor at NYU and working on a musical about Joan Didion. He's called in as the fixer one more time just weeks before the election when his younger sister Greta goes viral throwing a champagne bottle through the window of a fancy restaurant in Paris. Upon arriving in Paris, Nick and Nancy's team discover that Greta has been living with a far-right nationalist named Xavier, who has been manipulating Greta's anger towards her mother's parenting to enhance his fame and mess with American politics. Let's Not Do This Again, is equal parts political satire and social commentary on the lives of the ultra elite. It is fast-paced, funny, and engaging, leaving me invested in characters even if I didn't like them.
Elizabeth Zott is first and foremost a chemist, pushing boundaries in the field of abiogenesis at the Hastings Research Institute in California. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, however, is that in the 1950s and 1960s, no one will take her seriously as a female scientist. With her PhD pursuit cut short after her thesis advisor rapes her, Elizabeth takes a job as the lone woman in a research lab where her voice is discounted and discredited despite her obvious intelligence. It is only when she meets Calvin Evans, a Nobel Prize-nominated scientist who has his own lab a few floors above, that she finds someone who will take her seriously. A few years, unfortunate twists, and unplanned pregnancy later, Elizabeth is a single-mother struggling to raise her brilliant daughter Madeline and make ends meet. A chance confrontation with the father of Madeline’s classmate, who happens to be a producer at a local television station, lands Elizabeth a role as the host of a daytime cooking show, Supper at Six. The show quickly becomes a national success, not least because of Elizabeth’s commitment to teaching her viewers the chemical principles behind cooking, which inspires women across the country to push beyond their prescribed limits. Don’t be fooled by the pretty pink cover of Lessons in Chemistry that is sure to superficially place it in the category of “women’s fiction.” Lessons in Chemistry is at its core a story about resilience and moxie, with witty characters and a protagonist who refuses to give up.
Douglas Stuart's first novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize last year for its stunning portrayal of a young boy growing up in working-class Scotland. Young Mungo, which was released in early April, is a type of cousin to Shuggie Bain, following a young boy in the Protestant tenements of Glasgow in a post-Thatcher era of unemployment and strife. Mungo is fifteen-years-old with an innocence that sharply contrasts with his gang-leader brother, Hamish and his alcoholic mother, Maureen. Mostly raised by his older sister Jodie, Mungo spends his days at school with the assumption that his future will begin at age sixteen when he can drop out and become a laborer. He is not interested in girls, and as a result, his family sees and treats him as younger than he really is. One day, while wandering around his neighborhood, Mungo comes across a pigeon dovecote maintained by James, a Catholic boy a year older than him who lives down the street. Mungo and James become friends and then quickly develop a romantic relationship, which they must keep secret from everyone around them.
Interspersed throughout the book are chapters that jump forward in time to a weekend fishing trip at a loch in western Scotland involving Mungo and two strange men who readers meet in the opening scene of the novel. Why sweet Mungo is with these men and what they intend to do to him are questions that haunt the entire book and are dramatically revealed as the weekend moves forward. This is a book that will break your heart. It is filled with striking details about a common life of poverty without hope for the future as well as a breathtaking story of a young boy attempting to discover who he is within a society that does not give him options.
Jennifer Egan's latest work, The Candy House, is an inventive, miraculous piece of writing and impossible to fully capture in one review. The story begins with Bix Bouton (who readers might recognize from A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning novel), a tech demi-god reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. Bouton has developed a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows users to upload and preserve their memory into "cubes" that can be shared with the "collective," a type of digital space where people around the world can access peoples' experiences. Each chapter moving forward is a window into a different character's life, incorporating some element of Own Your Unconscious into the plot. However, this technology is not the driver of the story. Instead, Own Your Unconscious sits quietly in the background as a type of quasi-setting - a reminder of the ever present themes of memory and authenticity in a world that mirrors ours.
Although I have read books before where each chapter follows a different character but are all somehow linked together, Egan's structural foundation is wholly unique. Egan does not center the narratives around one time, place, event, or voice (indeed, one chapter is written entirely as an instruction manual in the second person in the mid-2030s while another is a series of email exchanges between different characters). Instead, as is discussed in the New York Times review, the structure has the feel of a social network, where people across time and space are connected in unexpected, wonderful, and often inconsequential ways. The Candy House blew me away, not least of all because of Egan's inventive brilliance. You do not need to have read A Visit from the Good Squad in order to read this book, but if you have not already you certainly will want to after reading The Candy House.
Ingrid Yang is a PhD candidate at Barnes University studying the poetic techniques of the late-Chinese American poet Xiou-Wen Chou. Although she’s in her final year, her boredom towards the subject-matter - which was thrust upon her by the eager (white) department head of the East Asian Studies department who assumed Ingrid’s Taiwanese-American background would translate well to the study of a Chinese-American poet - prevents her from making any real headway on her dissertation. Instead, Ingrid sits in the library day after day idly passing the time. One day, while sitting in the archive, Ingrid comes across a note left on one of the poems she had been studying, sending Ingrid on a wild goose chase to uncover its meaning, which ultimately reveals shocking secrets and truths about Chou and Barnes.
It’s hard to summarize the plot of the book without giving away the many twists and turns that give this biting satire its punch. Hseih Chou has written a remarkable debut that humorously and deftly tackles the big issues of discrimination against Asians, political correctness on campus, and institutionalized elitism. This is satire at its very best - it makes you laugh and it makes you think.
Anya and Milka are best friends coming of age in the Soviet Union in the 1980s as the country opens up and then crumbles. As members of the perestroika generation, Anya, Milka, and their classmates have a unique vantage point within the Soviet consciousness. They are old enough to have lived under the Soviet Union's iron fist but young enough to have hope for the future as new leadership and policies signal change to come. At home, Anya's parents and grandmother talk frequently about the hardships of the Second World War, life under Stalin, and argue over the foundations of the Soviet Union. Amongst friends, however, Anya and Milka experience a life freer than the ones of her parents when they read banned books, listen to Queen, learn English, and talk about traveling the world. But even within this friend group exists a microcosm of Soviet political conflict - one friend argues for change and eventually protests the 1991 coup while another who benefited during the height of the Communist era argues for stability. As Anya and Milka enter young adulthood, the Soviet Union begins to collapse, and so too do the lives and dreams that Anya and Milka have built together. The Orchard is Gorcheva-Newberry's debut novel, and in many ways it mirrors the experiences her own life. Above all, however, this is a book about a beautiful friendship navigated through the dangerous waters of circumstance, politics, and hardship beyond control.
Megan is looking for a fresh start after losing her job as a local reporter in New York and moving back to her hometown of Evanston, Illinois. While struggling to find a new job as a journalist, Megan stumbles across Jocelyn Jones, a famous national reporter who readers are supposed to assume is similar to Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric in stature. Jocelyn promises Megan that she will introduce her to journalism contacts in the Chicago area in return for a short-term gig working as her publicist to promote her new memoir. Shortly after taking the job, however, an anonymous Twitter account begins accusing Jocelyn of plagiarism, and it becomes Megan’s mission to figure out what’s going on and if the accusations have merit. Introduced as side-characters are Megan’s mother who is running for Congress on a conservative anti-abortion platform anathema to Megan’s beliefs, and her childhood best friend Becca who cheats on her husband and needs an abortion herself. These side-threads are completely separated from the main plot until the point in the book when Smith needs to generate conflict, during which Megan’s mother and Becca are quickly thrown into the tumult before their issues are tidily resolved to Megan’s benefit. While the plot moves relatively quickly, I was not particularly impressed with Smith’s writing, especially how key elements of the mystery were always revealed at the most convenient moment. The way in which Smith wrote Megan’s character as a completely righteous person with an unimpeachable understanding of morals and ethics often made the dialogue and character development feel forced.
Following the sudden death of her mother, indie rockstar Greta James has a breakdown on stage that quickly goes viral. Traumatized by the confluence of events, Greta can not bring herself to keep performing, and her music career, which was once lauded as extremely promising, becomes less certain. When her brother calls to ask if she will accompany her father on an Alaskan cruise that was supposed to be her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary trip, Greta has no option other than to say yes. Although her relationship with her father is frayed - he never supported her music career despite her success - this trip is a chance to make things better. Over the course of the one week cruise, Greta meets and develops a relationship with a recently-separated Columbia professor and writer, becomes closer with her father, learns how to live with her grief, and re-discovers her passion for music and performing. This is certainly a lot of growth to take place over the course of one week, and the different issues in Greta’s life appear to be resolved at an expedient time for the movement of the plot. While the book is meant to be uplifting, I think the best writing in this book takes place when Greta and her father discuss and deal with their grief, which felt like honest portrayals of tough issues. Otherwise, the book moved forward predictably, if not a bit conveniently.
Owen Callahan is an aspiring writer who moved back to Kentucky in 2016 to live with his conservative grandfather and uncle. During the day he works as a groundskeeper at a prestigious college in Louisville, which allows him to take one free writing class and gives him a chance at the non-blue collar life that he wants for himself. Owen has spent most of his life adrift. He grew up in western Kentucky with evangelical conservative parents from whom he felt removed. Looking to get a fresh start, Owen moved to Colorado to work as a tree-trimmer, but quickly fell into a pattern of drug abuse that ended in him living in his car. In many ways, moving back to Kentucky, a place that he feels connected to and yet wants to desperately leave, feels like defeat. Soon after enrolling in his class, Owen meets and becomes involved with Alma, the winner of a prestigious writing in residence fellowship on campus. In many ways, Alma is the archetype of a liberal millennial and the exact inverse of Owen's family. Alma is the daughter of Bosnian Muslim refugees, grew up upper-middle class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and attended Princeton. Her fellowship is only for published writers and her feeling of academic and intellectual superiority over Owen is apparent throughout their relationship despite their clear feelings for one another.
Lee Cole is an incredible writer and this is a fantastic debut. I was so impressed with Cole's ability to write about the political fragility of America through the experiences of one couple. In the scenes in which Alma meets Owen's parents the tension and awkwardness is palpable, and the stark divide between two groups of people so stubbornly encamped in their political beliefs was on full display. Cole's descriptions of Kentucky and the contrasts between liberal Louisville full of chic restaurants serving upscale southern food, Owen's grandfather's dilapidated house in the outskirts of the city filled with used MacDonalds wrappers, and the trailer parks that dot the road on the way to Owen's parents' homes highlighted both the reinvention of the south as well as its decline. This is a powerful novel with so much to think through and unpack.
When Eleanor Bennett dies, she leaves behind two things: a long audio recording to be played for her children, Byron and Benny, and a traditional Caribbean black cake in the freezer to be shared when the moment is right. Benny has been estranged from her family for nearly eight years, and it is Eleanor's hope that this recording, which reveals the long and secret backstory of her life, will bring the siblings together and introduce them to a legacy of which they were previously unaware. The cake, ever-present in the freezer, serves as a reminder of the long journey that Eleanor took to come to the United States and provide her children with the life they knew, which included her escape from the island on which she grew up, a train crash and the assumption of a new identity, and the birth of a child who was taken from her by disapproving Catholic nuns. This book has the makings of an exciting multi-generational saga, but unfortunately, nearly all of the reveals (of which there are many) felt a little too convenient, causing the whole story to fall a bit flat. I've seen that this book has been picked up to be turned into a Hulu series, and maybe some of the twists will translate better to dramatics in a TV show, but in this format they sometimes felt forced and not as exciting as intended.
At face value, Vladimir is about an unnamed narrator, a 58-year-old English professor at a small college in upstate New York, who is married to John, a fellow professor facing accusations of inappropriate sexual relationships with students many years prior. The narrator is not surprised by the allegations - she knew about the relationships at the time - but disputes the claim that they were not consensual. John and the narrator still live together but have grown apart naturally over the years, coexisting in the same house and within their respective lives. When Vladimir and Cynthia, two new professors move to town, the narrator becomes interested in the couple and their vitality, but especially with Vladimir. Interestingly, however, the plot points that will probably be used to advertise the book, including the ones described above, are not necessarily the point of the book or what propels it forward. Instead, the book is full of contemplation about the hard questions of aging, social values, and power dynamics.
I assume that the author made a deliberate choice by never giving her narrator a name. The narrator, a 58-year-old woman, is self-conscious about her body and very conscious about how she is perceived by others. Her interactions with students are couched in her desire to be liked and appreciated and she is fearful of being deemed matronly or old when she interacts with Vladimir. At the end of the day, despite the fact that it was her husband who transgressed, the narrator endures the cost of his actions after being asked to stop teaching and forced to contend with students who are uncomfortable by her presence. Indeed, she appears distinctly visible to others only within the context of her marriage, leaving the narrator to assert her own idea of control on the situation.
Grace Travis is an interior design student who recently inherited her grandparents' small house on the coast of southern California. As she wraps up her studies, Grace is excited to renovate the house and start her career. Her neighbor, Noah, however, has other ideas, mainly that he wants to buy Grace's house. During the times that Grace and Noah spar they also get to know each other, participating in painting challenges in their respective homes and meeting each other's friends and family. Their hate, as is expected in the "enemies to lovers" romance trope, quickly develops into a relationship at the same time that a home design magazine decides to run a feature on Noah's house renovations and encourages Noah to pick Grace as the interior designer in order to pad the story-line. How to Love Your Neighbor is a fun rom com, but not one with much substance. The characters were endearing, but I found the first half of the book a bit repetitive and boring. It also felt like everything in the book happened too quickly - from the speed of the completion of the renovations to the intensity reached by multiple relationships in such a short span of time. Overall, this book was light and enjoyable but maybe not the best in its genre.
The Examiner - Janice Hallett
Mystery, 465 pages
Janice Hallett is one of the smartest mystery authors writing today. All of her books are told through a variety of secondary sources that leave the reader guessing what and who should be trusted. Hallett sticks with this unconventional structure in The Examiner, which tells the story of a small British graduate arts program gone awry using texts, message boards, and coursework. I’m continually blown away by Hallett’s creativity and ability to use seemingly benign source material, like final essays, as legitimate, suspenseful clues in a mystery. The use of sources removed from traditional narration also ensures that the reader is always unsure of what to believe because it is never clear if Hallett has presented all of the relevant information or not (spoiler, she does not). I still think that Hallett’s best book to date is The Appeal, but the fact that I’ve read three of her four books in this year alone confirms that I’m game for whatever unique mystery she writes.
Rating: 8.5/10
Henry Henry - Allen Bratton
Fiction, 350 pages
Advertised as a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad (which I didn’t know until reading the summary of the book just now), Henry Henry is the story of Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, the Duke of Lancaster. As the eldest of six, Hal is aware of his long ancestral history and the traditional expectations for its continuation. This weighs heavily on Hal, who, as a young gay man in 2014, knows that adoption is not viewed as a proper means of succession. On top of this, Hal is grieving the death of his mother, struggles with nascent alcohol and drug addictions, and is experiencing continued abuse that began in childhood. If that wasn’t enough, he is also forging a romantic relationship with a fellow future Duke, also named Henry; of which both of their fathers heartily disapprove. The book is a weighty downer made worse by the fact that I was never really able to root for Hal, who is so guarded and cynical that his actions feel borderline absurd. I also made the mistake of reading the author’s blurb on the back flap and discovering that Bratton is American, which dampened my favorite parts of the story — the haughty descriptions of aristocratic British society.
Rating: 7/10
Oye - Melissa Mogollon
Fiction, 336 pages
Oye is structured as a one-sided phone conversation between Luciana, a senior in high school, and her older sister Mari, a sophomore in college. Over the course of the year Luciana calls Mari to vent, complain, and share updates about their grandmother, Abue, a fiercely stubborn woman who has recently been diagnosed with caner. After Abue’s diagnosis, she reluctantly moves into Luciana’s bedroom and regales her with long-lost family secrets from her life in Colombia, which Luciana dutifully relays to Mari despite frustration over Mari’s absence. Every conversation with Mari seems to begin with Luciana’s disdain that Mari has chosen to stay away rather than be near at the end of Abue’s life, and because the reader is never given Mari’s side of the conversation, the dramatic angst emanating from Luciana can become tiring. I appreciated that Mongollon was trying to be unique in the way she wrote the story, but the amount of spoken “OMGs” and “LOLs” verged on unbelievable. If you’re going to read this book, I recommend listening to the audio because the narrator puts on a performance.
Rating: 7/10
Company - Shannon Sanders
Fiction/Short Stories, 190 pages
Company is a first-class multigenerational family saga told through thirteen linked short stories. Sanders provides a family tree at the beginning of the book that I referred back to as I started each of the stories so that I could be sure I understood how everyone was connected in this near-genius work of family, friendship, and growth. In the first story, two brothers return home to evict their mother’s boyfriend. In another, the brothers’ aunt attends a party with her nieces to celebrate her appointment as university provost after she is unable to convince either of her children to attend. In another, a cousin hosts his cousin in his apartment in D.C. while he is in town for a drag show. Each of the thirteen stories adds a layer to the family’s narrative, creating a depth and beauty that sets this collection apart. The writing in this book is so good that it is hard to believe this is Sanders’ debut. It takes pure skill to give so many characters life in such a believable and compelling manner, but Sanders pulls it off in stunning fashion.
Rating: 9/10
Big Swiss - Jen Beagin
Fiction, 352 pages
After breaking up with her fiancé of nearly a decade, Greta, in her early forties, decides to move across the country to Hudson, New York, where she rents a room in the decaying home of her friend Sabine. Hudson, already a small town where everyone knows everything about everybody, becomes even smaller for Greta who is hired by the local sex therapist to transcribe his sessions. Although his patients are only identified in the recordings by their initials, it is not hard for Greta to figure out who the individuals are when she encounters them in town and hears their voices, which means Greta knows many people’s deepest secrets without even knowing them. One client, a young married woman attending therapy to prepare for the release from prison of someone who attacked her years before, sparks Greta’s interest. Greta nicknames her Big Swiss and quickly becomes obsessed, a feeling that is heightened after she recognizes her voice at the dog park and befriends her under a pseudonym. What was meant to be an innocuous friendship fueled by Greta’s insatiable curiosity turns into a romantic affair. In too deep to break it off, Greta struggles to keep track of the lies she’s told and the information she already knows from Big Swiss’s private therapy.
Greta is a singular character whose living circumstances and background border on the absurd. I believe this was, however, Beagin’s goal, and she writes Greta to tremendous effect. Fair warning that, in a book about a sex therapist, the scenes can be graphic. I also thought that the story could be about fifty pages shorter. Otherwise, Big Swiss was a unique story told with a unique voice and translated particularly well on audio.
Rating: 8/10
The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
Fiction, 656 pages
No reader could feel jealous of the Barneses, a family of four falling into disrepair collectively and individually. The family-run auto shop and car dealership led by Dickie suffered in the post-2008 recession and never quite recovered. Dickie’s own personal mismanagement and repressed secrets certainly don’t help matters. To Imelda, Dickie’s wife, his behavior is nothing short of infuriating. Imelda, who grew up in poverty as the daughter of a low-level gangster, desperately craves stability but is quietly reckoning with her own tragedy from early in life. While their children might not be aware of the depth of Dickie and Imelda’s issues, they certainly notice that something is wrong. Cass, formerly a star student, falls headlong into an all-encompassing, binge-drinking filled friendship with a fellow-classmate as exit certification exams approach. Her younger brother PJ, a sweet twelve-year-old in love with science and random facts about the world, is afraid to tell his parents that his bloody feet have outgrown his shoes and instead finds solace in a friend he meets online who tries to convince PJ to run away with tempting stories of a Dublin house with a sunroof, loving parents, and a dog. As the story moves between characters and jumps from past to present, a fuller picture emerges of the Barneses in all their tragic ingloriousness.
Coming in at a whopping 656 pages, The Bee Sting requires an investment of one’s time. But wow is it worth the investment. This book garnered a lot of hype when it was released, was long-listed for the Booker prize, and earned its spot on The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year in 2023. Murray’s writing is acerbic, witty, and nothing short of masterful. While it’s not always clear where Murray is going - indeed, at about the halfway point I started to wonder if the book was long just to be long - somehow, he’s able to tie it all back together, linking references he made in the first pages to jaw-dropping, heart-pounding revelations at the end. By the final fifty pages I couldn’t and wouldn’t put the book down, having fully given myself over to the expert craftsmanship that is Murray’s writing, structure, and pacing.
Rating: 10/10
The Happy Couple - Naoise Dolan
Fiction, 272 pages
For Luke and Celine, a young couple in Dublin, getting engaged seems like the proper next step. It’s clear from the start of the book, however, that marriage might not be in the cards for the two. In one of the first scenes of the book, Luke disappears from the couple’s engagement party and lies to Celine about having gone home. As the march towards the wedding continues, Celine discovers the lie, Luke cheats on Celine secretly, and close friends declare their unyielding love for the groom. Despite these obvious, early red flags, the entirety of The Happy Couple consists of many characters weighing in on the stability of a relationship that any dispassionate observer could easily say shouldn’t end in marriage. I had no qualms with the sentence-level writing of the book, but I thought there was way too much going on for Dolan to dedicate to meaningful character development. Even the most interesting portion of the story - why did Luke leave his engagement party and where did he go - was sacrificed to less interesting plot points down the road.
Rating: 6/10
Long Island Compromise - Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Fiction, 464 pages
Long Island Compromise begins with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher from the driveway of his palatial Long Island home as he’s getting ready to head to work at his polystyrene factory. He is held hostage for a week, unfindable by the FBI, until his wife Ruth comes up with $250,000 ransom payment, dropped on a luggage turnstile at JFK. Although Carl returns to his previous life and his wife and mother attempt desperately to make things seem and feel normal, the family is never able to get over the trauma of that week, which is passed down to his three children.
The kidnapping, which took place in 1980, is only the first chapter of the book; the rest takes place in the present and is told through the lens of Carl’s three struggling adult children. While they have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of money from their father’s factory to pad their lifestyles, each of them is utterly dysfunctional in nearly everything they attempt. When they discover that the factory has been purchased by a hedge fund that sees no financial future in domestic styrofoam production, they are each forced to face the reality of a dwindling fortune while also salvaging their crumbling personal lives.
The description of this book reads like an utter downer, and that’s not totally untrue. Each character is living in a comedy of errors, hitting rock bottom right as you think there is no farther for them to fall. However, in the hands of Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman is in Trouble and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, the tragedy becomes absurdity which translates into comedy. The story is meant to be a type of satire on the evolution of American Jewish life and assimilation. It is also a quasi-moralistic fable about wealth and struggle, which wasn’t always subtle. My biggest problem with the book was that the central trauma inspires everyone’s problems - the kidnapping - is never fully explained or resolved. Brodesser-Akner reveals who the true kidnapper was at the end, and it is shocking, but the motivations and minutiae are either completely ignored or explained away in a few sentences. Given that the book is comprised of approximately four large chapters, each told from the perspective of a different member of the family, it would have been fully justified to dedicate an additional chapter to the kidnapper, which I think would have adequately addressed the larger ethical themes that Brodesser-Akner is attempting to explore. Overall, however, Long Island Compromise was an enjoyable reading experience and I look forward to seeing people’s reactions when it is released on July 9.
Rating: 8.5/10
The Guest - Emma Cline
Fiction, 304 pages
22-year-old Alex has nowhere to go after she is kicked out of the home of Simon, the older man she has been staying with in the Hamptons. Alex is behind on rent, despised by her roommates back in New York, and owes money to a man who we can only assume is dangerous. In light of all this plus a heavy dose of delusion, Alex resolves to stay in the Hamptons until Simon’s Labor Day party where she is convinced he will take her back if he is just given space for a few days. The novel unfolds over the course of these few days, as Alex flits from one temporary situation to the other. In one scene, Alex inserts herself into a house share, pretending to be friends with one of the people who hasn’t yet arrived. After they realize no one actually knows her, Alex sneaks her way into a beach club pretending to be a child’s nanny and takes advantage of the child’s family’s limitless tab at the snack bar. She spends one night in the guest house of one of Simon’s friends who isn’t home, another night sleeping on the dunes. In each of these scenarios Alex effortless shape-shifts and morphs to meet the needs of those around her in this rarefied world of money and exclusivity.
The Guest is more than just some beach read with a party girl whose life has gone awry. Instead, Cline has written both a biting commentary on a slice of society as well as a fascinating character study of someone who recognizes early on that to survive, “only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman.”
Rating: 9/10
This is Salvaged - Vauhini Vara
Short Stories/Fiction, 181 pages
In this collection of short stories, Vauhini Vara writes about childhood, faith, and connections with others. In one story, two teenagers start working at a questionable call-center amidst the throws of grief. In another, a young girl serves as a companion to an aging woman in her apartment complex. In my favorite, an experimental artist attempts to build a life-size ark according to the specifications set out in the King James bible by employing a subset of Seattle’s homeless population. Each of the stories tackles life’s challenges through the eyes of the rudderless and the searching. I liked a few more than others, but overall think this is an exceptionally strong collection filled with stories that are written with heart and full of characters that exhibit a deep emotional range.
Rating: 9/10
Thank you to W.W. Norton for the advance reader copy of this book!
Everything’s Fine - Cecilia Rabess
Fiction, 336 pages
Everything’s Fine is about a relationship between a liberal Black woman named Jess and a conservative white man named Josh, who first meet in college but then become friends when they reconnect while working at Goldman Sachs. As Jess struggles to find her footing in the hyper-competitive, white male driven world of finance, Josh is labeled a rising star and rockets to the top of a prestigious hedge fund due to prep school connections. At the same time, the two kindle a romantic relationship that is shunned by her friends and kept secret from her father. Their romance intersects with the 2016 election season, and Jess is forced to consider how far compatibility can stretch. It is important to note, however, that while a romance centers the plot, the novel is not part of the romance genre, and instead should be considered a work of literary fiction.
After this book was published, it became the subject of a lot of controversy for its marketing as an enemies to lovers romance, the argument being that racism is not a little quirk to get over in a relationship. It was the target of review bombing (when people, many of whom haven’t read the book, tank the its star rating on platforms like Goodreads to diminish its popularity - see this New York Times article for a helpful explainer), by angry users before it was even published. After finishing the book I did some research into the controversy, and found this comment by the author from an interview done by The Cut to be particularly illuminating:
"People were questioning the limits of my imagination as a Black writer, and they were conflating me with my character, suggesting there’s no way this could be fiction and nuanced. That there was no way I could write a story that asks more questions than it answers. And, more damning, I felt like a lot of the feedback was about holding a Black character to a higher idealized standard than we do white characters, who are celebrated for their messiness, their flaws. When a messy, chaotic 20-something character is a white woman, that’s fine, but I was hearing that people didn’t want that same amount of nuance from a Black-woman character. It surprised me, because it felt quite dehumanizing. Demanding perfection either in the form of perfect victimhood or the perfect hero doesn’t reflect who people are, and it doesn’t reflect their full humanity."
My take is that this book is worth reading. You don’t need to agree with the characters, their beliefs, or their decisions to recognize that the book is a nuanced, complex, and thorny portrayal of identity, privilege, and relationships with oneself, one’s partner, and the larger world.
Rating: 9/10
The Rachel Incident - Caroline O’Donoghue
Fiction, 304 pages
Rachel, a student finishing her final year of university, meets James, a closeted high school graduate, while working at a bookstore in Cork, Ireland. The 2010 Recession is in full swing, Ireland having been hit particularly hard, and Rachel is unsure what she will do with her English degree after she graduates. Rachel and James develop a quick and tight-night friendship, choosing to move in together when James admits that he is need of a roommate. They tell each other everything and are unfailingly loyal to one another, including and until Rachel tells James about a crush on her married professor. Intending to facilitate their relationship, James organizes a scheme for Rachel to seduce him, but instead ends up in a relationship with the professor himself. Their secret romance sets off a cascade of intertwined events between Rachel, James, the professor, and his well-connected wife as Rachel and James try to figure out the next steps for their future.
This is a beautifully written, expertly crafted, character-driven novel filled with humor. It is the story of friendship, hardship, young adulthood, and discovery. It is an exploration of power dynamics and their fragility. It is filled to the brim with dysfunction but also tenderness, and I loved every second of it.
Rating: 10/10
Once More With Feeling - Elissa Sussman
Fiction/Romance, 416 pages
From the author of Funny You Should Ask, one of my favorite romance novels, comes Once More With Feeling, the story of a former celebrity pop-star who agrees to star in a new Broadway musical directed by an old fling. Kathleen Rosenberg met Cal Kirby when they were teenagers at a prestigious musical theater summer camp, reuniting a few years later after Kathleen has transformed into Katee Rose and Cal joins a boy band led by Kathleen’s fame-hungry boyfriend. A one night stand between Kathleen and Cal destroys the career of Katee Rose, and she goes into a self-enforced exile until her best friend presents her with the opportunity to play her dream role in a Broadway debut nearly a decade later. Kathleen’s dream was always to be on Broadway, but first she has to resolve the conflict between Cal and herself before she can fully commit to the show and her reputational redemption. Although this was an easy and quick read, I found the storyline and central conflict to be unnecessarily convoluted, which distracted Sussman from developing her characters and sustaining a believable plot. I don’t necessarily feel like I wasted my time by reading this book, but there are definitely better romances available, starting with Sussman’s debut.
Rating: 6.5/10
Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton
Fiction, 432 pages
After hearing about a devastating landslide on New Zealand’s South Island, Mira decides to assess the now cut-off and abandoned land as a potential location for a new outpost of Birnam Wood, the guerrilla gardening group that she leads. Birnam Wood’s mission is to plant crops, sometimes by permission and other times through trespass, on abandoned, underused, or unnoticed stretches of land throughout New Zealand to send a message about our capitalist society’s waste and inefficiency. The group is struggling as the book opens to make ends meet financially and to retain its membership. The landslide has created a massive opportunity for growth and publicity, which Mira is determined to take advantage of. When she arrives, she is surprised to find the quirky American billionaire Robert Lemoine already there, who offers the land and a sizable quantity of startup money to Birnam Wood. Lemoine is the CEO of a large company that specializes in surveillance drones, and it is almost immediately obvious to the reader that Lemoine has darker motivations attached to his gift, which are largely unknown to Mira and the group.
This book is gripping from start to finish and is probably best described as a slow burn with a fantastic structure. The book is told in alternating perspectives and as a result, readers know about the idiosyncrasies and motivations of each of the main characters (add in Birnam Wood’s second-in-command, a disgruntled former member, and the true owner of the land to the mix), as the book unfolds. The catch is that these internal plottings are not known to the other characters, leading to intrigue and peril. Things are not as they seem in this unique, psychological story set in the beauty of the New Zealand wilderness by a Booker Prize winning author with immense, glorious talent.
Rating: 10/10
Lessons - Ian McEwan
Fiction, 448 pages
When readers meet Roland Baines, the protagonist of Lessons, his wife has just left him with their baby right as the Chernobyl disaster is unfolding. This is not the first woman who has wronged Roland. In the process of grieving what he has lost, Roland reflects on his childhood. Born in Tripoli to British parents stationed there after World War II, he is sent at a young age to boarding school in England, where he is seduced and taken advantage of at the age of fourteen by his young piano teacher. Convinced that the world is about to end during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Roland finds himself ensnared in a relationship that destroys his school life and charts him on a nonlinear path. As he grows, Roland lives through a span of extraordinary events but never does much with his life, bouncing from one thing to the next, raising his son, getting by. He has opinions on the world, but is mostly a passive observer, which can sometimes be a bit dry. Although McEwan’s quality of writing is superb, I thought that he was trying to do too much with this book, which spanned not just the 20th century but also through the pandemic. The central drama of the plot, the inappropriate relationship with the piano teacher, felt simultaneously important and unnecessary to the larger story. I kept waiting for McEwan to connect the dots between this event and the rest of his life in a more cohesive way, but it never arrived. Instead, Roland appears to be a man who is the victim of various women - his mother’s absence, the piano teacher, his ex-wife - and unable to get out of a rut to live anything more than a mundane existence.
Rating: 8/10
Romantic Comedy - Curtis Sittenfeld
Fiction/Romance, 305 pages
Sally Millz is a ten-year veteran writer for The Night Owls, a late-night sketch comedy show modeled on SNL. When the book opens, Sally is preparing for a week with host and musical guest Noah Brewster, an aging pop star known for a cheesy love song that made him popular as a teenager. The sketches that Sally proposes for his week - including one that pokes fun at the idea that mediocre looking men are allowed to date beautiful women but not vice versa - catches Noah’s attention, and the two establish a fleeting connection that is put on pause after Sally puts her foot in her mouth at the show’s afterparty.
Romantic Comedy is broken up into three distinct sections. Part 1 takes place over the course of the week in 2018 that Noah hosts TNO, following Sally as the show comes together and the two work together to write a sketch. This was my favorite section of the book because it felt like a chance to see behind the curtain on the making of SNL, a show that I love and watch every week. I also felt like it gave Sittenfeld the opportunity to let her romance play out in an untraditional way. Ultimately, however, the story became more traditional in part 2 when Sally and Noah reconnect via long email exchanges during the height of the pandemic and in part 3 when Sally heads out to LA to visit Noah and establish their relationship.
This book has been criticized for being a bit of a let down. Unable to make the genre her own, Sittenfeld’s book instead follows its normal trajectory: boy meets girl, boy looses girl, boy and girl get together. Although Romantic Comedy doesn’t do anything revelatory or new, I did think it delivered on what its title advertises - a fun read with enjoyable, humorous characters, even if I wasn’t enamored by some of their choices at the very end.
Rating: 8/10
Flight - Lynn Steger Strong
Fiction, 240 pages
Three siblings and their families gather to celebrate Christmas in upstate New York. They get together every year, but this holiday is marked by the notable absence of the siblings’ mother who died eight months earlier. As the family gathers they are reminded of all the ways their mother held them together, most notably through the Florida home where they grew up. The beginning of the book is a whirlwind as the author introduces readers to her large cast of characters: the three siblings, their spouses, and the kids. Steger Strong alternates her focus from one adult to the other, exposing their issues, concerns, and anxieties. The central tension between the group is revealed early, when one of the couples announces their desire to move to the Florida house rather than sell it, and although there is much consternation about this, the stakes never feel as high as they probably could. A smaller family lives a couple of miles away consisting of a young recovering addict mother and her smart precocious daughter. Their social worker, one of the in-laws back at the big family house, has fallen in love with the girl after discovering that she can not have children of her own, and becomes entangled in their emergency on Christmas Eve. I enjoyed this book for the messy family dynamics and the fleshed out characters but would have enjoyed the book more if it had stayed at that. There was nothing about the story that I didn’t like and everything was written exceptionally well, but I think it could have been stronger without the addition of the outside mother and daughter, which would have allowed Steger Strong to spend more time in the quiet, dysfunctional, and intricate lives of her central characters.
Rating: 9/10
Less is Lost - Andrew Sean Greer
Fiction, 272 pages
Less is Loss is the sequel to the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, Less. Although Less was not my favorite based on the writing style (I gave it an 8/10) of the Pulitzer winners that I have read, I was interested in picking up the sequel to see if my view could be changed. Less is about a middle-aged, little-known, gay writer named Arthur Less who takes a trip around the world. Less is Lost, has a similar premise, except this time, it follows Arthur as he takes a trip across the United States. Arthur has recently published a book that boosted his name recognition from basically none to maybe some. When he learns that he owes over a decade’s worth of back rent on a Maine cabin that he and his partner have been living in for free, Arthur decides to take advantage of his minuscule fame and accept every speaking, interview, or panel offer given to him to earn the money. What follows is a journey across the country, with the book’s sections organized based on geographic region. While the book doesn’t lack for physical movement, I still felt like nothing much happened. The strength of the book comes from Andrew Sean Greer’s (who potentially loosely mirrors the character of Andrew Less on himself) creation of Less’ internal monologues where he is able to put his writing on display. However, I feel fairly confident in saying that unless you loved Less, there isn’t much of a reason to pick up Less is Loss - they are arguably very similar books.
Rating: 8/10
The Bodyguard - Katherine Center
Fiction/Romance, 309 pages
Hannah Brooks is an Executive Protection Agent (aka a bodyguard) whose agency has been hired to protect movie superstar Jack Stapleton while he is home visiting his family. Not wanting to worry his mother who is undergoing cancer treatment, Jack and the agency cook up a plan to have Hannah pose as his girlfriend so that she can more easily keep an eye on Jack. Hannah, who attended her mother’s funeral and then was broken up with the next day, is a workaholic who is skeptical about this new assignment. Her time on the Stapleton ranch, however, gives her time to heal and open up, and potentially fall in love (shocker!) with Jack Stapleton himself. This was a super entertaining story, and a great example of a book that might not get the highest rating, but is still enjoyable and worth a read if you are in the right mood. The characters are vehicles to drive the plot forward so there are few details that stand alone outside of a storytelling device, but what is revealed is fun and enjoyable. I think this is one of the better books in the romance genre, so I recommend picking this up if you are looking for something light, entertaining, and easy to get through.
Rating: 7.5/10
The Hero of This Book - Elizabeth McCracken
Fiction, 192 pages
The hero of this book is the unnamed narrator’s mother, who died ten months before the narrator writes the book. The narrator is a writer, making the story a thinly veiled rendering of Elizabeth McCracken’s own life, whose mother died in 2018. McCracken writes somewhat self-consciously, informing the reader that the book can’t be a memoir because she does not want the pressure to get every fact right, and although her mother did not approve of memoirs because of how they destroyed a person’s privacy, the narrator of this book feels that writing about her mother’s life will allow her to live on. As the book opens the narrator checks herself into a hotel in London where she has decided to go by herself to grieve her mother and reminisce on trips that the two took in the past. Between descriptions of her travels, the narrator recounts more intimate details of her mother’s past, from her childhood as a Jewish woman in Iowa with cerebral palsy to a brief stint in acting to a fulfilling career in academia. The book is a beautiful love letter to the memory of the narrator’s mother, warts and all, and a moving reflection on love, relationships, and mourning.
Rating: 9/10
The Faraway World - Patricia Engel
Fiction/Short Stories, 224 pages
Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, which was one of my favorite books of 2021. Like Infinite Country, which was set in Colombia and followed one family’s splintered immigration journey to the United States. the stories in The Faraway World all center around community, identity, and, in many, the complex motivations behind immigration. There are no overlapping characters in this collection, but each story is set in either Colombia, Cuba, or New York. In one story, a taxi driver finds salvation by driving a woman to a different church every day for a year to support her attempt to receive a divine blessing to move to the United States. In another, a girlfriend unknowingly shepherds kilos of cocaine for her boyfriend between drop sites in Miami until they are caught and her boyfriend must flee to Colombia. In one of my favorites, a woman works as a maid in New York for a family from her hometown, and struggles with the distinction the now affluent family has placed between their two situations. Every story in the collection is written with compassion and clarity, bringing to life forgotten corners of the world and the people that inhabit them. I think that Patricia Engel is an excellent storyteller, which is highlighted by her ability to create so many different complex characters who all share common hopes, values, and struggles.
Rating: 9/10
The Furrows - Namwali Serpell
Fiction, 268 pages
Named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, The Furrows is a unique story about love, loss, grief, and memory. When Cee was twelve years old, she and her seven year old brother Wayne walked over to the beach. While there, Wayne got caught in the furrow of the waves and Cee watched him die. His body, however, is never found, leaving unanswered questions of whether he is really dead or just missing. The first half of the book follows Cee’s grief through the recounting of different situations in which Wayne dies again and again. In doing this, Serpell twists reality to make the reader question what is real and what is not, and although Cee insists that her brother is dead, these instances make the reader wonder if this is even true.
The second half of the book breaks dramatically from the first when Serpell introduces an adult named Wayne who looks very similar to the one that was lost. This Wayne is obsessed with finding Cee’s Wayne, and follows her around the country looking for clues. The introduction of this character is a bit confusing, and I began to question who was dead, alive, and what was going on. In some ways, however, this book is not about trying to figure out what is going on. In a frequently quoted line from the book, Cee tells the reader that she wants to tell you how it felt, not what happened, and the introduction of this alternative Wayne feels like a manifestation of Cee’s attempts to cope. If it wasn’t obvious already, the plot of this book is extremely difficult to describe and there is a lot of nuance that is difficult to unpack within the framework of traditional storytelling. What I can say, however, is that Serpell writes with immense empathy and creativity about a tough subject. The structure of the novel is unique and it is a book that made me think more deeply about stylistic choices than I typically do.
Rating: 8.5/10
Dinosaurs - Lydia Millet
Fiction, 230 pages
Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, which was one of my favorite books of 2021. While I thought this satire on climate catastrophe was phenomenal, it also freaked me out, which is why when I saw that Dinosaurs was being published, I was hesitant to give it a try. Now I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read it. Dinosaurs is an incredible book about protagonist Gil, who walks from New York to Phoenix after a failed romantic relationship. There could probably be enough material for an entire tome about this journey, but as a sign of Millet’s genius, the walk is only written about in passing. Instead, the heft of the book comes out of a dissection of Gil’s relationships with those around him, most prominently the family of four that lives next door in a large glass house. Without shades or blinds, Gil has a front row seat to the lives of Ardis, Ted, and their two kids Tom and Clem. Slowly at first and then quickly later on, Gil becomes a type of uncle to Tom and a wonderful friend to Ardis and Ted. He volunteers at a local battered women’s shelter and discovers a fascination for bird watching (hence the title of the book, as birds are our closest living ancestors to dinosaurs). This is a beautiful and perfectly crafted story of found family, love, and connection. Out of the solitary journey west, Millet expertly sets the stage to ask larger questions about the role of the individual amidst larger societal issues and constraints.
Rating: 10/10
Foster - Claire Keegan
Fiction, 95 pages
In 1980s Ireland, a father drops off his child at a couple’s farm where she will stay over the summer. The father’s wife is pregnant yet again, and sending his eldest away will temporarily relieve their burdens. The unnamed narrator of Claire Keegan’s novella, Foster, is young enough to be treated as a child but old enough to be perceptive about the world around her. She is nervous when she arrives at the childless Kinsella’s home, but is soon welcomed by the husband and wife who treat her as if she is their own. Over the course of the summer the child learns how milk the cow, runs as fast as she can to get the mail, and follows around the wife like a shadow. Part way through the summer a nosy neighbor explains to her that the Kinsellas had a young boy who drowned, allowing readers to understand the role that the child plays for the couple.
While the book is extremely short - only 95 pages - I loved every second of it. Like her previous novella, Small Things Like These, Keegan is able to craft a fully realized world using limited words. Although I kept waiting for something dramatic to happen, this is not that type of story. Instead, I finished the book with a dual feeling of warmth and sadness. There’s something extremely satisfying about being able to finish a book in one or two sittings, and this is made even more true when the writing is as clear and purposeful as Keegan’s.
Rating: 9.5/10
Games and Rituals - Katherine Heiny
Fiction/Short Stories, 240 pages
I’m a goal-oriented person, which means that even when I’m enjoying a book I’m always looking forward to the next one. I rarely find myself approaching the end of a book and wishing that it would keep going. Katherine Heiny’s latest wonderful collection of short stories, Games and Rituals, made me do just that. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that Katherine Heiny is one of my absolute favorite authors. Early Morning Riser, released last year, was my favorite book of 2021 and probably the book I recommend most often to other people. Take this as my call to you to read this book if you somehow have not. It is rare to find an author who is so gifted at creating the fullest, funniest, most relatable cast of characters who you root for even if you don’t agree with all of their choices. As a result, the characters in all of Heiny’s books are definitively the stars of the show, not the plots.
When I saw that her next publication would be a collection of short stories I was simultaneously excited and nervous - what if the brevity of a story meant that I wouldn’t have time to fall in love with her characters? I shouldn’t have been worried. Games and Rituals is one of those rare and remarkable collections where every one of the eleven stories is as captivating and enjoyable as the next. While they are not necessarily connected, each story contains themes of love, friendship, the follies of youth, and reflection on past choices. In one story, a mother considers her behavior in her adolescence while simultaneously trying to figure out if her sweet seventeen-year-old son is doing drugs after work. In another, a woman reflects on her complicated relationship with her father while she cares for him after he mistook his hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In one of my favorites, a woman’s life unravels over the course of an evening after she discovers a series of clues about her actor husband’s behavior that don’t add up. I was sad as I came to the close of the book, because I knew that soon there would be no more of Heiny’s complex and fulsome protagonists to discover.
Rating: 10/10
Woman of Light - Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Historical Fiction, 304 pages
1930s Denver resembles a city not too far removed from the era of the Wild West. At the height of the Great Depression, the city became a magnet for people of all backgrounds looking for work and opportunity, which was met by a fierce backlash from the city’s growing Klan population. At the center of this tension are Luz and her older brother Diego, who has recently been forced to flee Denver after he impregnates his white girlfriend. Just shy of 18, Luz finds a job as a secretary in a Greek lawyer’s office who has made a name for himself representing people who have been abused by the police and the Klan. Interspersed throughout this story are chapters dating back to the late 19th century featuring three generations of Luz’s ancestors. Readers experience the trauma that runs deep in Luz’s Native American and Mexican family as their rights and land are taken from them with the westward expansion of white settlers. I picked this book up after seeing it recommended by Ann Patchett. A western multi-generational historical saga is fairly different from the books that I typically read, and I enjoyed getting to see what life was like in Denver and the Lost Territory of Colorado in an era not too long ago. I did feel that the book was not as literary as advertised, equating Luz’s relationship challenges with the actual hardships and traumas experienced by her ancestors.
Rating: 7.5/10
Better to Have Gone - Akash Kapur
Non-Fiction/Memoir, 366 pages
In the late 1960s an intentional community was formed in Southeastern India outside of Pondicherry by a Frenchwoman referred to as “The Mother” who claimed to have achieved enlightenment. The goal was to build a town as an experiment in “human unity and transformation of consciousness.” While the town, Auroville, now has a website and a PR team attempting to attract tourists, at the time, the land was arid and spiritual naïveté rampant. Attracting people from all over the world searching to build a just and equal society, the town also attracted extremists who did not believe in traditional school or supervision for children, eschewed the medical establishment, and explained fully preventable deaths as part of the “universe’s plan.” Amongst the early inhabitants are the author, Akash Kapur’s, in-laws, who both died preventable death’s when Kapur’s now-wife was 14. This book is Kapur’s exploration of their lives and the intersection between their beliefs and the development of Auroville.
This is not a book for audio - there are too many characters to keep track of and too many political grievances and tangents briefly explored. Further, although Kapur is obviously not an objective narrator, the ending of the book left me thoroughly confused. Kapur spends the first 300 pages telling a story about an idealistic “utopian” community gone wrong - including the traumatic deaths of his wife’s parents - Kapur becomes an apologist for the community in his conclusion, arguing that Auroville is special and a wonderful place to live and raise kids. His previous descriptions of the town gave me no impression that this is a place I would want to visit, let alone live, and the “ideals” that he speaks about so reverently seem to be debunked by the naive and dangerous behavior described throughout the entirety of the book.
Rating: 7/10
Carrie Soto is Back - Taylor Jenkins Reid
Fiction, 384 pages
Carrie Soto is Back is the latest from Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of the popular summer books Daisy Jones and the Six and Malibu Rising. Reid is known for well-timed, fast-paced, plot-driven books that also prioritize character development, and this book is no exception. Carrie Soto is a tennis legend of the late 1970s and 1980s. Trained by her father, Javier, Carrie doesn’t just strive to be good, she strives to be the best, which she achieves when she breaks the record for most Slam titles of any man or woman. But a knee injury in her early-thirties prompts an early retirement, and in her six years out of the sport a different player, Nikki Chan, comes onto the scene and challenges Carrie’s record. Her whole life, Carrie has told herself that if she is not the very best, then she is the worst, so when Chan ties her world record in 1994 Soto decides to come out of retirement at age 37 and play the four Slam tournaments in order to defend her crown. This is a book about tennis, but it is also a book about perseverance, family, and vulnerability. While I was drawn to the tension and drama surrounding the tennis world and the outcomes of Carrie’s matches, I thought that the book could have been trimmed a bit on the descriptions of Carrie’s training program and the play by play of matches that weren’t the pinnacle of a tournament. If you love tennis, this is absolutely the book for you. If you’re like me and only know the basics of the sport, Reid will draw you in with her impeccable writing about the intrigue and politics of professional sports, even if she loses you a bit on the minutiae of how each point is scored.
Rating: 8/10
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Fiction, 416 pages
Sadie meets Sam in the mid-1980s when they are both twelve-years-old. Her sister is in the hospital receiving treatment for leukemia and while she waits, a nurse invites her to pass her time in the hospital game room. Sitting and playing Mario Cart is Sam Mauser, who has been in and out of the hospital following a devastating car crash that killed his mother and irreparably damaged his foot. Sam is withdrawn and depressed, but playing with Sadie day after day draws him out of his shell, and the two develop a friendship based on their love of video games as well as their creativity. Six years later, they both move to Cambridge, Massachusetts for college - Sadie to MIT and Sam to Harvard. A chance encounter at the train station draws them back together, and Sam, noticing Sadie’s own depression, invites her to make a video game with him and his roommate Marx during the summer between their junior and senior years. The game they create becomes an overnight success, launching the three of them onto an illustrious career path of creative partnership. However, their decades long success does not come without its challenges. While the gaming world allows for one to create whatever world they want and reboot it at will, Sadie and Sam must grapple with the contrasts between fantasy and the unfairness and hardships associated with reality.
I was skeptical when I picked up this book because not only do I not play video games, I also know nothing about them. And while this is absolutely a book about video games and the artistic process behind them, the video games are just the backdrop for a much larger story about friendship, growing up, reinvention, and grief. It takes an author with incredible skill to be able to craft such a sweeping yet intimate story with fully formed and complicated characters. I do not have a negative thing to say about this book, contrary to what I think is an overly critical review in the New York Times. It is one of those rare novels that transports you to someplace new while also connecting you with a universal story.
Rating: 10/10
The Disappearing Act - Catherine Steadman
Mystery/Thriller, 352 pages
Mia is a British actress who comes to Los Angeles for "pilot season," a series of high-stress auditions where actors and actresses hoping to make it in the industry try out for a slate of upcoming roles. While waiting for her turn at one audition, Mia meets Emily. Right before Emily's turn, she asks Mia to top up her parking meter, handing her her keys in the process. When Mia returns, Emily is gone. After a few days of silence, she receives a text from Emily's number asking if she can come by Mia's apartment and get her items. Relieved, Mia says yes. But when she opens the door it's not Emily standing there but someone impersonating her. What happened to Emily? Where did she go? And how far does the conspiracy go? As Mia works to answer these questions she finds herself falling down a dramatic rabbit hole bigger than herself, uncovering the tension between scandal and ambition ever present in a city of people trying to make a name for themselves regardless of the cost.
Catherine Steadman is an actress herself - I know her from Downton Abbey - and she writes with authority on the subject matter. I am disappointed in myself that I received this book as an ARC almost a year ago and did not pick it up until now. This is the best kind of mystery thriller, one that I could not put down as I neared the final third. There is no excessive gore or violence, but rather slow creeping suspense and tension that culminates in a dramatic and satisfying conclusion.
Rating: 8.5/10
The Poet's House - Jean Thompson
Fiction, 304 pages
Carla is a young woman in her late-twenties living in California and working as a landscaper. She enjoys the work and is content for the time being, but is not so sure what her future looks like. After completing a job at the home of Viridian, a poet with a certain gravitas, Carla gets drawn into the lives of Viridian and her friends in the poetry community. While Carla is becoming more involved with this group, she never exists as more than a young helper - a free assistant at a poetry magazine and a coordinator for a local poetry retreat - further exacerbating her questioning of self.
The Poet's House received a rave view on NPR, which propelled this book to the top of my pile. The book is being advertised as similar to Lily King's Writers and Lovers which is one of my favorites. While there are some similarities - both follow young women attempting to find themselves and both take place on the fringes of the literary world - I personally liked Writers and Lovers much more, mostly because I cared more about the stakes of the story and the characters contained therein. The Poet's House is certainly well-written, but I was not particularly attached to any of the characters or the central conflict.
Rating: 8/10
Nora Goes Off Script - Annabel Monaghan
Fiction/Romance, 272 pages
Nora Hamilton is a romance screenwriter known for her ability to churn out formulaic scripts for Hallmark channel-style films. Her career is ironic, however, given that her husband has just left her and her two young children after years of a loveless marriage. Reacting to her divorce, Nora writes a new screenplay about her experience, deviating fully from her typical genre. The script is picked up by a major producer who is able to get big stars in the lead roles. Portions of the film are even filmed in Nora's backyard, which is how she meets and gets to know the star Leo Vance, who after filming wraps up, remains in Nora's home in a desperate bid for a taste of normal life. When Leo leaves to film a major action movie and stops communicating with Nora, she is left to wonder if what she had was way too good to be true. This romance novel deviates slightly from the standard formula utilized by the genre because the required "break-up" before the happily-ever-after (which typically takes place in the final quarter of the book), occurs right in the middle, allowing Monaghan to develop Nora as a character independent of her romantic interests. Annie Jones of the Bookshelf (my favorite books podcast) absolutely raved about this book, admitting to having read it twice in the span of four months. I'm not sure I was as blown away as she was, but I can attest that the book was fast-paced, entertaining, and cute - definitely an ideal summer read.
Rating: 8/10
Tracy Flick Can't Win - Tom Perrotta
Fiction, 259 pages
Tracy Flick Can't Win is a follow-up to Tom Perrotta's 1998 novel, Election. Election followed go-getter social outcast Tracy as she ran for student body president. Now, twenty years later, instead of being a high-powered lawyer, doctor, or senator as she had once dreamed, Tracy is toiling away as an assistant principal in a public New Jersey high school. Her big career plans have been sidetracked by her mother's battle with MS and an unexpected pregnancy, but Tracy still approaches every day with zeal. When Jack Weede, the school's aging principal, announces plans for retirement, Tracy assumes she is a shoo-in. Eager to please the school board in order to ingratiate herself for a promotion, Tracy agrees to participate in the School Board President's pet project to create a "hall of fame" for the school's (un)successful alumni. But no matter how hard Tracy tries she is never quite rewarded, and obstacles appear for her at every turn. Tracy's story, and the story of the school, are told in the alternating perspectives of Tracy, Jack, two students, a hall of fame alum, and a few other characters. The chapters are very short, providing quick glimpses into their lives and perspectives. I wish that these chapters had been longer because I wanted to see some of the ideas more fully fleshed out, although the brevity did keep the book moving. I think that if this book was written by a woman it would be (unfairly) labeled as "women's fiction" and not given a lot of critical literary attention. Because it was written by Tom Perrotta, a well-respected (male) author known for complicated character studies, the book has received a lot of positive critical coverage, particularly in the New York Times. I enjoyed Tracy Flick Can't Win despite never having read Election, and think this book is as enjoyable as it is complicated and thought-provoking.
Rating: 8.5/10
Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life - Delia Ephron
Memoir, 304 pages
Delia Ephron’s memoir begins with the death of her husband from pancreatic cancer. It is searing and traumatic - certainly a grim way to start a book. Delia’s loss, however, frames the next five or so years in her life, which is the subject of her memoir. After writing an op-ed in the New York Times about the terrible customer service at Verizon she encounters while trying to discontinue her late-husband’s landline, Delia receives an email from a man named Peter, who had been introduced to Delia by her late sister Nora when she was 18. Their correspondence turns into late in life marriage, the ceremony for which takes place in a hospital wing on the eve of the start of Delia’s treatment for leukemia, the same cancer that killed her sister. The second half of Delia’s memoir focuses on her medical journey, from an experimental therapy she is given to a harrowing bone marrow transplant. Along the way, Delia introduces readers to her many wonderful doctors and friends, who support her in ways big and small. Delia preserves these moments by reprinting the emails sent by friends while she was in the hospital. I think the New York Times review would agree with me that not all of these emails needed to be printed in full and that it was difficult to keep track of the numerous people in her life - but boy does Delia Ephron have a literate group of friends. Left on Tenth was a challenging story of hardship and resilience, of finding love after death, and in some ways, an ode to New York City.
Rating: 8/10
Notes On Your Sudden Disappearance - Alison Espach
Fiction, 352 pages
Sally and Kathy are sisters and best friends. They share the same room and every night Kathy, who is three years older than Sally, fills her in on all the world has to offer, including school politics, crushes - mostly Billy Barnes, and growing up. In eighth grade, Sally gets a ride to school with Kathy and her now-boyfriend Billy, and, in an attempt to avoid a deer on the road, Billy swerves and hits a tree, instantly killing Kathy. All at once, the lives of Sally, her parents, and Billy are shattered and they are each left to grieve in their own way. The book is written from Sally's perspective as a type of letter to Kathy, who she updates on how life has been in the fifteen years following the crash. Sally never truly gets over the death of Kathy, seeing reminders of her in everything around her, including her mother's loss of grip on reality and Billy's continuation of a semi-normal life. The beautifully written heaviness of each character's grief and complicated relationships with one another is not reflected in the book’s cover that was most likely chosen by a publisher who wanted to market the book as a summer read.
Rating: 9/10
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty - Akwaeke Emezi
Fiction, 288 pages
Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian author perhaps best known for their 2020 novel, The Death of Vivek Oji. You made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is being advertised as Emezi's romance debut, which I think might be a marketing misnomer. While the initial premise of the book fits within the traditional confines of the romance genre - Feyi is re-entering the dating scene 5 years after the tragic loss of her young husband - what follows deviates from a standard plot structure seen in most romance novels. After meeting Nasir at a bar, he connects Feyi with a prominent art curator and invites her to come back with him to his family home in the Caribbean to participate in one of the curator's shows. Upon arriving, Feyi discovers that Nasir's father is a Michelin star-rated celebrity chef with an opulent home and magnetic personality. Whatever spark Feyi was lacking with Nasir is present in full force with the father, Alim. The two bond over their previous traumas while falling in love, which inevitably creates conflict. While the book may have gone on for a bit too long and included some convenient resolutions, Emezi is no doubt a talented writer who has crafted a book that certainly deviates from any traditional romance plot structure.
Rating: 8/10
The Lifeguards - Amanda Eyre Ward
Fiction/Mystery, 368 pages
In Austin, Texas on the first day of summer in 2019, a young woman’s body is found dead in a swimming hole off of the famous greenbelt trail. Best friends Robert, Xavier, and Charlie, (who also happen to be summer lifeguards at a nearby pool), witness the woman fall into the water and bike home to tell their mothers, who are also best friends. Terrified of the consequences for their children, each mother sets out to protect her son in any way that she can. But what happened on the trail? How did the girl die? These are obvious questions one might expect to be answered, but surprisingly, they are not. Just as quickly as the mystery seems to be solved the book abruptly ends, leaving more questions than answers about the crime and the involvement of the its many characters. In addition, the character development was forced and superficial, while the cover - which aggrandizes the inconsequential fact that the boys are lifeguards - is completely misleading.
Rating: 6/10
Funny You Should Ask - Elissa Sussman
Fiction/Romance, 300 pages
Funny You Should Ask begins with a celebrity profile of Gabe Parker, who has recently and controversially been picked to be the next James Bond. The writer, Chani Horowitz, is struggling to make a name for herself and this profile is her chance. Over the course of a weekend, Chani and Gabe get to know each other, starting in a restaurant, heading to a movie premier, and ending at a party thrown at Gabe’s house. The will-they-or-won’t-they tension that percolates sets the stage for a reunion piece ten years later. In the time that has passed Gabe has seen success at the box office as well as personal setbacks, including two stints in a rehab facility. Chani, who’s career took off following the publication of her article ten years earlier, is living in the aftermath of her divorce. Together once again, Gabe and Chani reflect on past events as readers discover what parts of the famous profile really happened, and what was left out.
The “then” portions of this book are based on a real 2011 GQ profile of Chris Evans written by Edith Zimmerman in advance of his filming of Captain America. If you read this book and then go back and read the profile as I did, you can see how closely Sussman stuck with not only the events that took place but also the writing style of Zimmerman’s original piece. The “now” sections of the book are, I have to imagine, an invention of Sussman’s imagination of what could have been if what took place between the lines played out in reality. The result is a charming and clever read, in which I unwittingly became immersed.
Rating: 8/10
Thank you to Dell and Ballantine for the advance reader copy of this book.
Let's Not Do This Again - Grant Grinder
Fiction, 305 pages
The Harrison family is political royalty in New York. After taking over her late-husband's seat in Congress, Nancy Harrison has worked hard to do all the things a Democratic congresswoman is supposed to do, setting her up perfectly for a Senate run. Control of the Senate is at stake and Nancy must win, not least because of her opponent - a former TV actor turned Republican firebrand. Enter Nick, Nancy's oldest child and former staffer cum fixer. Burned out by politics, Nick is now a writing professor at NYU and working on a musical about Joan Didion. He's called in as the fixer one more time just weeks before the election when his younger sister Greta goes viral throwing a champagne bottle through the window of a fancy restaurant in Paris. Upon arriving in Paris, Nick and Nancy's team discover that Greta has been living with a far-right nationalist named Xavier, who has been manipulating Greta's anger towards her mother's parenting to enhance his fame and mess with American politics. Let's Not Do This Again, is equal parts political satire and social commentary on the lives of the ultra elite. It is fast-paced, funny, and engaging, leaving me invested in characters even if I didn't like them.
Rating: 9/10
Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
Fiction, 400 pages
Elizabeth Zott is first and foremost a chemist, pushing boundaries in the field of abiogenesis at the Hastings Research Institute in California. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, however, is that in the 1950s and 1960s, no one will take her seriously as a female scientist. With her PhD pursuit cut short after her thesis advisor rapes her, Elizabeth takes a job as the lone woman in a research lab where her voice is discounted and discredited despite her obvious intelligence. It is only when she meets Calvin Evans, a Nobel Prize-nominated scientist who has his own lab a few floors above, that she finds someone who will take her seriously. A few years, unfortunate twists, and unplanned pregnancy later, Elizabeth is a single-mother struggling to raise her brilliant daughter Madeline and make ends meet. A chance confrontation with the father of Madeline’s classmate, who happens to be a producer at a local television station, lands Elizabeth a role as the host of a daytime cooking show, Supper at Six. The show quickly becomes a national success, not least because of Elizabeth’s commitment to teaching her viewers the chemical principles behind cooking, which inspires women across the country to push beyond their prescribed limits. Don’t be fooled by the pretty pink cover of Lessons in Chemistry that is sure to superficially place it in the category of “women’s fiction.” Lessons in Chemistry is at its core a story about resilience and moxie, with witty characters and a protagonist who refuses to give up.
Rating: 9/10
Young Mungo – Douglas Stuart
Fiction, 400 pages
Douglas Stuart's first novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize last year for its stunning portrayal of a young boy growing up in working-class Scotland. Young Mungo, which was released in early April, is a type of cousin to Shuggie Bain, following a young boy in the Protestant tenements of Glasgow in a post-Thatcher era of unemployment and strife. Mungo is fifteen-years-old with an innocence that sharply contrasts with his gang-leader brother, Hamish and his alcoholic mother, Maureen. Mostly raised by his older sister Jodie, Mungo spends his days at school with the assumption that his future will begin at age sixteen when he can drop out and become a laborer. He is not interested in girls, and as a result, his family sees and treats him as younger than he really is. One day, while wandering around his neighborhood, Mungo comes across a pigeon dovecote maintained by James, a Catholic boy a year older than him who lives down the street. Mungo and James become friends and then quickly develop a romantic relationship, which they must keep secret from everyone around them.
Interspersed throughout the book are chapters that jump forward in time to a weekend fishing trip at a loch in western Scotland involving Mungo and two strange men who readers meet in the opening scene of the novel. Why sweet Mungo is with these men and what they intend to do to him are questions that haunt the entire book and are dramatically revealed as the weekend moves forward. This is a book that will break your heart. It is filled with striking details about a common life of poverty without hope for the future as well as a breathtaking story of a young boy attempting to discover who he is within a society that does not give him options.
Rating: 9/10
The Candy House - Jennifer Egan
Fiction, 350 pages
Jennifer Egan's latest work, The Candy House, is an inventive, miraculous piece of writing and impossible to fully capture in one review. The story begins with Bix Bouton (who readers might recognize from A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning novel), a tech demi-god reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. Bouton has developed a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows users to upload and preserve their memory into "cubes" that can be shared with the "collective," a type of digital space where people around the world can access peoples' experiences. Each chapter moving forward is a window into a different character's life, incorporating some element of Own Your Unconscious into the plot. However, this technology is not the driver of the story. Instead, Own Your Unconscious sits quietly in the background as a type of quasi-setting - a reminder of the ever present themes of memory and authenticity in a world that mirrors ours.
Although I have read books before where each chapter follows a different character but are all somehow linked together, Egan's structural foundation is wholly unique. Egan does not center the narratives around one time, place, event, or voice (indeed, one chapter is written entirely as an instruction manual in the second person in the mid-2030s while another is a series of email exchanges between different characters). Instead, as is discussed in the New York Times review, the structure has the feel of a social network, where people across time and space are connected in unexpected, wonderful, and often inconsequential ways. The Candy House blew me away, not least of all because of Egan's inventive brilliance. You do not need to have read A Visit from the Good Squad in order to read this book, but if you have not already you certainly will want to after reading The Candy House.
Rating: 10/10
Disorientation - Elaine Hseih Chou
Fiction, 416 pages
Ingrid Yang is a PhD candidate at Barnes University studying the poetic techniques of the late-Chinese American poet Xiou-Wen Chou. Although she’s in her final year, her boredom towards the subject-matter - which was thrust upon her by the eager (white) department head of the East Asian Studies department who assumed Ingrid’s Taiwanese-American background would translate well to the study of a Chinese-American poet - prevents her from making any real headway on her dissertation. Instead, Ingrid sits in the library day after day idly passing the time. One day, while sitting in the archive, Ingrid comes across a note left on one of the poems she had been studying, sending Ingrid on a wild goose chase to uncover its meaning, which ultimately reveals shocking secrets and truths about Chou and Barnes.
It’s hard to summarize the plot of the book without giving away the many twists and turns that give this biting satire its punch. Hseih Chou has written a remarkable debut that humorously and deftly tackles the big issues of discrimination against Asians, political correctness on campus, and institutionalized elitism. This is satire at its very best - it makes you laugh and it makes you think.
Rating: 9/10
The Orchard - Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
Fiction, 385 pages
Anya and Milka are best friends coming of age in the Soviet Union in the 1980s as the country opens up and then crumbles. As members of the perestroika generation, Anya, Milka, and their classmates have a unique vantage point within the Soviet consciousness. They are old enough to have lived under the Soviet Union's iron fist but young enough to have hope for the future as new leadership and policies signal change to come. At home, Anya's parents and grandmother talk frequently about the hardships of the Second World War, life under Stalin, and argue over the foundations of the Soviet Union. Amongst friends, however, Anya and Milka experience a life freer than the ones of her parents when they read banned books, listen to Queen, learn English, and talk about traveling the world. But even within this friend group exists a microcosm of Soviet political conflict - one friend argues for change and eventually protests the 1991 coup while another who benefited during the height of the Communist era argues for stability. As Anya and Milka enter young adulthood, the Soviet Union begins to collapse, and so too do the lives and dreams that Anya and Milka have built together. The Orchard is Gorcheva-Newberry's debut novel, and in many ways it mirrors the experiences her own life. Above all, however, this is a book about a beautiful friendship navigated through the dangerous waters of circumstance, politics, and hardship beyond control.
Rating: 9/10
Truth and Other Lies – Maggie Smith
Fiction, 340 pages
Megan is looking for a fresh start after losing her job as a local reporter in New York and moving back to her hometown of Evanston, Illinois. While struggling to find a new job as a journalist, Megan stumbles across Jocelyn Jones, a famous national reporter who readers are supposed to assume is similar to Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric in stature. Jocelyn promises Megan that she will introduce her to journalism contacts in the Chicago area in return for a short-term gig working as her publicist to promote her new memoir. Shortly after taking the job, however, an anonymous Twitter account begins accusing Jocelyn of plagiarism, and it becomes Megan’s mission to figure out what’s going on and if the accusations have merit. Introduced as side-characters are Megan’s mother who is running for Congress on a conservative anti-abortion platform anathema to Megan’s beliefs, and her childhood best friend Becca who cheats on her husband and needs an abortion herself. These side-threads are completely separated from the main plot until the point in the book when Smith needs to generate conflict, during which Megan’s mother and Becca are quickly thrown into the tumult before their issues are tidily resolved to Megan’s benefit. While the plot moves relatively quickly, I was not particularly impressed with Smith’s writing, especially how key elements of the mystery were always revealed at the most convenient moment. The way in which Smith wrote Megan’s character as a completely righteous person with an unimpeachable understanding of morals and ethics often made the dialogue and character development feel forced.
Rating: 6.5/10
The Unsinkable Greta James - Jennifer Smith
Fiction, 320 pages
Following the sudden death of her mother, indie rockstar Greta James has a breakdown on stage that quickly goes viral. Traumatized by the confluence of events, Greta can not bring herself to keep performing, and her music career, which was once lauded as extremely promising, becomes less certain. When her brother calls to ask if she will accompany her father on an Alaskan cruise that was supposed to be her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary trip, Greta has no option other than to say yes. Although her relationship with her father is frayed - he never supported her music career despite her success - this trip is a chance to make things better. Over the course of the one week cruise, Greta meets and develops a relationship with a recently-separated Columbia professor and writer, becomes closer with her father, learns how to live with her grief, and re-discovers her passion for music and performing. This is certainly a lot of growth to take place over the course of one week, and the different issues in Greta’s life appear to be resolved at an expedient time for the movement of the plot. While the book is meant to be uplifting, I think the best writing in this book takes place when Greta and her father discuss and deal with their grief, which felt like honest portrayals of tough issues. Otherwise, the book moved forward predictably, if not a bit conveniently.
Rating: 7/10
Groundskeeping - Lee Cole
Fiction, 336 pages
Owen Callahan is an aspiring writer who moved back to Kentucky in 2016 to live with his conservative grandfather and uncle. During the day he works as a groundskeeper at a prestigious college in Louisville, which allows him to take one free writing class and gives him a chance at the non-blue collar life that he wants for himself. Owen has spent most of his life adrift. He grew up in western Kentucky with evangelical conservative parents from whom he felt removed. Looking to get a fresh start, Owen moved to Colorado to work as a tree-trimmer, but quickly fell into a pattern of drug abuse that ended in him living in his car. In many ways, moving back to Kentucky, a place that he feels connected to and yet wants to desperately leave, feels like defeat. Soon after enrolling in his class, Owen meets and becomes involved with Alma, the winner of a prestigious writing in residence fellowship on campus. In many ways, Alma is the archetype of a liberal millennial and the exact inverse of Owen's family. Alma is the daughter of Bosnian Muslim refugees, grew up upper-middle class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and attended Princeton. Her fellowship is only for published writers and her feeling of academic and intellectual superiority over Owen is apparent throughout their relationship despite their clear feelings for one another.
Lee Cole is an incredible writer and this is a fantastic debut. I was so impressed with Cole's ability to write about the political fragility of America through the experiences of one couple. In the scenes in which Alma meets Owen's parents the tension and awkwardness is palpable, and the stark divide between two groups of people so stubbornly encamped in their political beliefs was on full display. Cole's descriptions of Kentucky and the contrasts between liberal Louisville full of chic restaurants serving upscale southern food, Owen's grandfather's dilapidated house in the outskirts of the city filled with used MacDonalds wrappers, and the trailer parks that dot the road on the way to Owen's parents' homes highlighted both the reinvention of the south as well as its decline. This is a powerful novel with so much to think through and unpack.
Rating: 9/10
Black Cake - Charmaine Wilkerson
Fiction, 400 pages
When Eleanor Bennett dies, she leaves behind two things: a long audio recording to be played for her children, Byron and Benny, and a traditional Caribbean black cake in the freezer to be shared when the moment is right. Benny has been estranged from her family for nearly eight years, and it is Eleanor's hope that this recording, which reveals the long and secret backstory of her life, will bring the siblings together and introduce them to a legacy of which they were previously unaware. The cake, ever-present in the freezer, serves as a reminder of the long journey that Eleanor took to come to the United States and provide her children with the life they knew, which included her escape from the island on which she grew up, a train crash and the assumption of a new identity, and the birth of a child who was taken from her by disapproving Catholic nuns. This book has the makings of an exciting multi-generational saga, but unfortunately, nearly all of the reveals (of which there are many) felt a little too convenient, causing the whole story to fall a bit flat. I've seen that this book has been picked up to be turned into a Hulu series, and maybe some of the twists will translate better to dramatics in a TV show, but in this format they sometimes felt forced and not as exciting as intended.
Rating: 7/10
Vladimir - Julia May Jonas
Fiction, 256 pages
At face value, Vladimir is about an unnamed narrator, a 58-year-old English professor at a small college in upstate New York, who is married to John, a fellow professor facing accusations of inappropriate sexual relationships with students many years prior. The narrator is not surprised by the allegations - she knew about the relationships at the time - but disputes the claim that they were not consensual. John and the narrator still live together but have grown apart naturally over the years, coexisting in the same house and within their respective lives. When Vladimir and Cynthia, two new professors move to town, the narrator becomes interested in the couple and their vitality, but especially with Vladimir. Interestingly, however, the plot points that will probably be used to advertise the book, including the ones described above, are not necessarily the point of the book or what propels it forward. Instead, the book is full of contemplation about the hard questions of aging, social values, and power dynamics.
I assume that the author made a deliberate choice by never giving her narrator a name. The narrator, a 58-year-old woman, is self-conscious about her body and very conscious about how she is perceived by others. Her interactions with students are couched in her desire to be liked and appreciated and she is fearful of being deemed matronly or old when she interacts with Vladimir. At the end of the day, despite the fact that it was her husband who transgressed, the narrator endures the cost of his actions after being asked to stop teaching and forced to contend with students who are uncomfortable by her presence. Indeed, she appears distinctly visible to others only within the context of her marriage, leaving the narrator to assert her own idea of control on the situation.
Rating: 8.5/10
How to Love Your Neighbor - Sophie Sullivan
Fiction/Romance, 351 Pages
Grace Travis is an interior design student who recently inherited her grandparents' small house on the coast of southern California. As she wraps up her studies, Grace is excited to renovate the house and start her career. Her neighbor, Noah, however, has other ideas, mainly that he wants to buy Grace's house. During the times that Grace and Noah spar they also get to know each other, participating in painting challenges in their respective homes and meeting each other's friends and family. Their hate, as is expected in the "enemies to lovers" romance trope, quickly develops into a relationship at the same time that a home design magazine decides to run a feature on Noah's house renovations and encourages Noah to pick Grace as the interior designer in order to pad the story-line. How to Love Your Neighbor is a fun rom com, but not one with much substance. The characters were endearing, but I found the first half of the book a bit repetitive and boring. It also felt like everything in the book happened too quickly - from the speed of the completion of the renovations to the intensity reached by multiple relationships in such a short span of time. Overall, this book was light and enjoyable but maybe not the best in its genre.
Rating: 6/10