Ever wonder how someone could wake up every morning next to George W. Bush and think, “Hey, I love that guy!”? Yeah, me too. Which is exactly why I couldn’t wait to read American Wife, in which Curtis Sittenfeld imagines the life of Laura Bush.
In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the most sharply drawn, most enticing character is contemporary Beijing itself, its “cramped side streets where the walls were like the scales of fish–tall shelves tightly packed with pirated discs.” The city and the promise behind it sparkle in Guo’s descriptions, which are sharp, fresh, and free of clichéd exoticism.
Cashore’s debut is an engaging, action-driven fantasy that will please young adult and adult readers alike. In a genre populated with Gossip Girls and A-Listers, Graceling‘s heroine Katsa–who struggles with a terrible gift–stands out for her strength, intelligence, and will to live life on her own terms.
From its beginning The Flying Troutmans evokes Tolstoy’s famous line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Troutmans take top honors for truly unique dysfunction, and Miriam Toews writes their road trip saga brilliantly; here is one hot mess of a family in a book so enchanting it’s hard to tear your eyes away.
Published posthumously, this international bestseller is the first novel in a trilogy of crime thrillers by Swedish activist-journalist Stieg Larsson. A publisher struggles to clear his name and save his magazine by helping a rich businessman investigate the mystery of his missing niece.
Without the need for description, and with the supposed thousand words per illustration, graphic novelists are allowed quiet moments of focus that might be dull or ponderous–or even nigh-impossible–to convey with straight prose. In Bottomless Belly Button, cartoonist Dash Shaw takes this technique to an extreme, decompressing what might typically, in prose form, be material for a short story or a novella into 700 pages of evocative panels: three grown siblings reunite at their childhood home after learning that their elderly parents have decided to split up.
I picked up Chris Crutcher’s Stotan! on an early-morning flight to Boston, ready to mock both the book and the 10-year-old version of myself who loved it. Starting with the exclamation point in the title and some early cumbersome exposition (which includes a very excellent and totally non-ironic mention of Tom Selleck as a sex symbol), I was sure the book would be dated and ridiculous and that I was in for a very good time. Of course, 180 pages later, I was in tears as I returned my tray table to the upright position.
In his second novel, Zachary Lazar captures the shadow lurking just on the other side of Woodstock; Sway delivers a fresh and haunting take on cultural icons like Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson–and on the era they helped characterize.
The first review in FWR’s “You’ve Got to Re-Read This” series. These days there is always something for children to do–often a rather shallow electronic distraction–but Tove Jansson’s Moomin books show readers of all ages that quietly sitting and thinking by yourself is a valuable activity. Her characters let us know that almost everyone is lonely from time to time, and that while community can be an antidote to loneliness, we can also learn from solitude.
Most reviews of Netherland have focused on the relationship between two main male characters, Chuck and Hans, and on the dramatic and emblematic role of cricket in the novel. Yet a quieter but equally resonant storyline–the unraveling of Hans and Rachel’s marriage–seems to have been labeled by critics as secondary, or even undeveloped. Perhaps this is because so-called important books don’t deal with issues of domesticity and marriage. Or, if they do, we’re quick to give them another, more important label as well: a book about identity, or politics, or globalization, or exile.
Sadie Jones’s exciting debut is saturated in the same high color as the embracing couple on its cover. Simultaneously tender and urgent, claustrophobic and wistful, The Outcast tells the story of Lewis Aldridge, a tortured romantic figure in the Heathcliff tradition, and of the repressive postwar English society that drives him to self-destruction.
Near the middle of Maureen Freely’s Enlightenment, one character explains to another that in Turkey, “the first thing they make you do in a murder case is put you through a reenactment.” One of the book’s central storylines explores the supposed murder of a mentor of a group of leftist students in Istanbul in the early 1970s. And the novel itself functions as a reenactment, a piecing together of stories and perspectives. But Enlightenment is far more than a murder mystery: it’s about imperialism and politics and human rights, about love and memory, about the subjectivity of truth.
