BookBrowse Editorial Review
When the Harvest Comes: A Novel
by Denne Michele Norris
(6/4/2025)
Denne Michele Norris's debut novel is something to behold. Its parts are just as lovely as their sum. While the wedding is a vehicle to build drama about a relationship and a marriage that begins with the best intentions — being in love, having a person — Norris also digs into the forbidden parts of childhood with parents who lack understanding or empathy. Caribbean novelist Jamaica Kincaid once suggested that it was her duty as a writer to make everyone a little less happy. Kincaid'
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Old School Indian: A Novel
by Aaron John Curtis
(5/7/2025)
The Mohawk word "Aronhiakeh:te" means "he is carrying the sky on his back." It is a perfect description of Abe Jacobs and his failing marriage and his deteriorating body and the art of being uncomfortable in middle age because everything is disappearing. For decades, the literary community has mulled over Thomas Wolfe's posthumously published novel You Can't Go Home Again and its theme that the place of our childhood has reinvented itself. And while there is some truth that even the small
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Counting Backwards by Binnie Kirshenbaum
(4/9/2025)
The poet Rumi once wrote, "You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop." But
tell that to a caregiver whose lover has a deteriorating brain and doesn't recognize his life and
has delusions. Even for an artist like Addie, who carefully selects the pieces to use in her
collages, her humor, creativity, and wit cannot save Leo or their marriage. Counting Backwards doesn't pretend to know everything about dementia and the passages about the worst of the illness aren't heart
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim
(2/26/2025)
Although A Calamity of Noble Houses is a story of an affair, it really isn't a story about an affair. It's a story about women who have the independence to make their own choices and the chasm created within a family by those choices that are seen as unforgivable. While the story is set in Tunisia and within a Muslim family of wealth, Ghenim's novel lands across cultures and continents where husbands and fathers lack the ability to bend women to their will. By default, Gheni
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
by Jason De León
(1/15/2025)
While De León painstakingly illustrates the stories of smugglers who have accepted him into their clique, he cannot separate his own story from theirs. He understands their motivations and the unspeakable: PTSD, bad dreams, anxiety about surviving. While Soldiers and Kings offers little political commentary, it exposes the structural problems of troubled countries and the loose barriers in place that cannot prevent migrants from leaving their homelands. Despite De León's engagin
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The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
by Wright Thompson
(10/16/2024)
Thompson believes details matter. "The tragedy of humankind isn't that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It's that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it's pushed underground." And yet, even with that intention, it's not the story of Emmett Till itself that shapes The Barn into its greatness. Thompson offers a cogent argument that the culture of Mississippi
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Sky Full of Elephants: A Novel
by Cebo Campbell
(9/18/2024)
Is it believable in a speculative novel that negotiates both racial ambiguity and racial anxiety that Alabama is separated from its past trauma of Jim Crow, George Wallace, and the White Citizens' Council? That segregation-inducing poverty, white nationalism, and lack of opportunities would give way to a black monarchy? In this suspension of disbelief, Campbell has crafted a king and a kingdom that is the antithesis of everything Alabama offers in historical narratives. The poet Rumi wrote that
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Someone Like Us: A novel
by Dinaw Mengestu
(7/31/2024)
While suicide is the seminal event in the novel Someone Like Us, its characters anchor the story, shedding light on male anxiety and fragility. Ethiopian American writer Dinaw Mengestu portrays a relationship between two men as loyal, complicated, and gentle. While Samuel struggles to stay afloat as a cab driver in Virginia, his son Mamush is drowning in his marriage in France. The connection the men have with one another as they experience dissatisfaction is the putty that holds the stor
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The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union
by Stephen Puleo
(6/19/2024)
Despite being an eloquent writer, Charles Sumner didn't craft any legislation. What separated him from his colleagues was his moral compass, the willingness to fight for African American equality despite the cost, despite being despised by both Southerners and Northerners. Stephen Puleo's biography of Sumner has a lot of educational passages, as it tutors its readers in the Cotton Whigs, the Conscience Whigs, the Free Soilers, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The abolitionist movement is granted a close
BookBrowse Editorial Review
I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays
by Nell Irvin Painter
(5/15/2024)
From her unique lens as an artist and Princeton history professor emerita, Painter delivers intellectual think pieces that go beyond the easily digestible kind that become the subject of social media catfights. They reflect decades of scholarship. While the stunning introductory essay "Ego Histoire" is mostly autobiographical, a section of it retells a little-known Reconstruction-era murder. Interrogation of slavery is the subtext of Painter's "'Introduction' in Incidents in the Life of a Sla
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year
by Paul Alexander
(4/3/2024)
Billie's relevance returns annually whenever "Strange Fruit" is either sung or discussed during Black History Month. It is her best-selling song and Alexander devotes an entire chapter to its rich history. His stirring prose evokes a camera following Billie all over the world. Billie at the Blue Note. Billie at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Billie at the Chatterbox Musical Bar.
"No matter what the motherfuckers do to you, never let them see you cry" is one of my favorite Billie quotes resurrected
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Prima Facie: A Novel
by Suzie Miller
(2/7/2024)
It's easy to imagine, as you devour the chapters, how the play would be magnificent. (Jodie Comer won a Tony Award for Best Actress in the Broadway production.) But what a novel can make sense of that is limited in a dramatic depiction is the protagonist's complications. Tessa is a lonely character seeking validation. Because of emotional deprivation, she often overindulges in sex and alcohol as a substitute for meaningful intimacies. Because of her background of poverty, she often thinks she is
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
(12/6/2023)
Poverty, by America leans upon history, since poverty is like an old oak tree with a million gnarly roots. I was surprised to learn that tipping waitstaff began after slavery, when former slaves who worked at restaurants were not paid and had to depend on the charity of diners. Desmond wants to do away with the sub-minimum wage for waiters. In another section of the book, he compares the aftermath of the 2008 recession with the financial effects of the COVID pandemic. After the 2008 reces
BookBrowse Editorial Review
One Puzzling Afternoon: A Novel
by Emily Critchley
(11/15/2023)
One Puzzling Afternoon is a page-turning, enjoyable, easy read. The quaint portrait of a small village not far from London with its shops and bakeries and the British Red Cross is the sweet part of the story. That Lucy disappears in such a place magnifies the mystery. Where did she go? Critchley leaves nothing undone and nothing to guess at later. Her pacing is exceptional as she unpeels Edie's story, which is also the story of Nancy. All the pieces fit neatly. Lucy's wealth and status. E
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Unsettled: A Novel
by Ayana Mathis
(10/18/2023)
Creating a larger social map, Mathis threads a fictional story with current events, such as the ongoing fight of rural black families in southern states to keep their ancestral land from developers and the suffering of the homeless. There is also mention of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's notoriously racist mayor, which adds gravity to Ava's story in its time and place. The plot, at times, is fraught with tension because of the impulsivity of its financially fraught characters. Nevertheless, the sto
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Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping
by Shane McCrae
(9/6/2023)
McCrae is simply a stunning writer. Like when describing himself and his family: "When I was a child, whiteness and blackness weren't facts about me, whiteness was a wheat field I stood in; blackness was a pit somewhere in the field, hidden by the somehow taller stalks growing from it." He writes his story as if childhood is timeless. In the span of a few pages, he is a seven-year-old watching sideways rain and then a kindergartener and then an acne-faced teenager.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
(6/7/2023)
Egan's research of this nearly 100-year-old story is detailed and he makes the case that the details were imperative to the results. Oberholtzer's death triggered the death of the Klan. The Klan strategy of bribing and influencing rural men triggered boundless fantasies. One of the more ridiculous ones was that the Klan had the political capital, chops and numbers to win the White House and rule the United States.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
We Are a Haunting: A Novel
by Tyriek White
(5/3/2023)
Of the three timelines that saturate the story — 1988 when Key begins her career as a doula, 2007 when Key dies, and 2016 when college-educated Colly returns to the city that raised him — I was especially fascinated by the late 80s, when AIDS is rampant in New York and Key, in her caretaking role, shows tireless stewardship for the pregnant and vulnerable. She thrives in this role while also making note of how it is part of the history she comes from to soothe the discriminated-again
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Daughter in Exile: A Novel
by Bisi Adjapon
(3/15/2023)
There is an irony in how we as a society speak of immigrants and their courage while admiring them from afar, and the tropes that portray their resilience in a fantastical way. We don't necessarily examine what they experience hour after hour or see their daily lives clearly, but we lavish heroism upon them. Daughter in Exile is, in a way, a classic story of the American Dream. It is an aspirational tale with a heroine who takes on great risks, suffers incredible losses and stitches herse
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Call and Response: Stories
by Gothataone Moeng
(2/15/2023)
Moeng's talent as a writer is that she doesn't settle for the easy narrative. Her characters are complicated and layered and she writes with empathy, making us care about these women. Botswana is a sparsely populated country in a part of the world that gets little international attention, yet the vulnerability of Moeng's characters strikes a resonant chord of shared experience, reminding the reader that women are women all over the globe.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Someday, Maybe: A Novel
by Onyi Nwabineli
(1/4/2023)
If you have ever experienced an epic loss, the pain in this story may be retraumatizing. Eve schleps sorrow around, dragging it everywhere. As I empathized with her, a Virginia Woolf quote came to mind, the one about how nothing has happened until it's been recorded. Someday, Maybe is a sterling recording of grief and loss, of course, but also of how the white-affluent other the brown. How the wealthy, however they exercise power in other ways, lack power over their children's deaths. Thi
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
by Matthew F. Delmont
(11/2/2022)
Strategically, Delmont begins not with any widely known WWII event but with the black press and their sphere of influence. While it was somewhat in vogue to not fight the "white man's war," the black press promoted their own creation, a "Double V" campaign which signified victory both against inequality at home and against fascism overseas. In the meantime, the U.S. Army refused to integrate its segregated units, curiously saying they were not interested in "sociological experiments." Despite no
BookBrowse Editorial Review
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
(9/21/2022)
The undercurrent in Escoffery's collection of linked stories is the idea that belonging and attachment begin not at conception but at the place of birth, and that both can be toxic. Are you Jamaican if you were born in America? Is Jamaica in your soul? Or have you been so transplanted into American culture that you are just a Caribbean tourist? A thing of beauty is Escoffery's crisp prose, particularly as he describes the ramshackle Florida house Trelawny grew up in, ruined by Hurricane Andrew.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Sleeping Alone: Stories
by Ru Freeman
(8/3/2022)
It has often been said that the short story is a love affair while the novel is a marriage. You enter a short story and then you leave. You attach to the characters and their lives and then you dispose of them. But if short stories are about the weight of the human experience, then Freeman's collection is a great contribution to the genre. Born in Sri Lanka, she deftly handles elements of culture threaded through her African American, Caucasian, Irish and Sri Lankan protagonists. While reading,
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Corrections in Ink: A Memoir
by Keri Blakinger
(6/22/2022)
While Corrections in Ink is an immersive account of an athlete dealing with self-loathing, it also clarifies addiction for the untutored: It's not about what you do to yourself but rather how you feel about yourself. When Keri was competing, she was also vomiting and starving herself. But once her figure skating dream crashed, she was still self-harming. We're conditioned to believe that athletes can overcome their failures through willfulness, but Blakinger reminds us that some have a sp
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation
by Erika Krouse
(4/6/2022)
Memoirs are personal, and this one is painful: monsters on one side, suffering on the other. But there is more. Krouse explains the paper trail of depositions, grand jury testimony and prosecutorial discretion, while also reflecting on the larger issues behind the case. There is a passage in the latter part of the book when she says to Grayson, dispirited, "I don't understand how people can hurt women with absolutely no consequence." Her story goes deeper than the crime itself and reflects on th
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Yonder: A Novel
by Jabari Asim
(1/19/2022)
In many ways, Yonder is a place we have been in literature before, but Asim adds several new twists. For one, Placid Hall is a place where skilled laborers live — all slaves weren't of the fields. The author also creates names for the categories of captive and owner: Stolen and Thief. Chapter after chapter, Asim confronts a suppressed history that is still being marginalized. Rituals. Whippings. Horrors. Hate. Brotherhood. Lust. His prose returns humanity to stolen people as he writ
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood
by Dawn Turner
(11/3/2021)
Dawn is the story's anchor. While her resilience is the stuff of legends — the poor girl who tramples class barriers to write for the Chicago Tribune — her success isn't contagious. Debra and Kim have a tumultuous and predictable struggle, beginning in adolescence. And yet Turner's memoir isn't just about destiny and friendship. Her ability to masterfully dissect racialized Chicago, her parents' marriage and her father's flaws give the story its strength. In our society, we ar
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Assembly by Natasha Brown
(10/20/2021)
What makes Brown's story so affective and effective is that she writes lovely passages of her narrator's conflict: her external success and internal doubt. At work, despite her $2,000 office chair and corner window, she is seen as nothing more than a diversity hire, which leaves her feeling powerless despite her achievements. And at home, her privileged white boyfriend diminishes her wounds, suggesting that his wealth is the same as her success. There is no escaping her invisibility. I appreciat
BookBrowse Editorial Review
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
by Tiya Miles
(8/4/2021)
The conversation that should be had after viewing Ashley's Sack is how black women slaves transferred love despite living through perversions, violence and endless work. How they desired freedom even as they didn't expect it. How they maneuvered, saved one another, sewed up wounds and mothered. It is these conversations Tiya Miles has triggered with this holy work. Rose was a tender mother, and that is at the heart of Miles' story, which is enormous not because of its 400+ pages but because of i
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The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt
by Audrey Clare Farley
(6/9/2021)
A talented historical storyteller, Farley intermingles Ann's suffering and Maryon's hedonism with cultural details that frame the eugenics era; I imagine most readers will be as enlightened by the specifics of this unspoken time in American history as I was and feel contempt for those who let the trauma continue. However, there are flaws with this strategy. By steering the sterilization trauma lens away from Ann and onto other victims and the men behind eugenics, she alienates readers who have j
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The Kindest Lie
(3/17/2021)
Part of what is so captivating about The Kindest Lie is that Johnson nestles white grievances — "Black people are taking over everything" — next to black trauma. James Baldwin once said, "The imagination of a novelist has everything to do with what happens to his material." In The Kindest Lie, Johnson imagines black shame. Conscious of that shame, she builds Ruth's story with gentleness. She stacks like a sandcastle all the parts of the character, so by the end we are j
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Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller
(1/20/2021)
Dog Flowers is a difficult story that shines with an array of oddities. But Geller holds something back. Her memoir isn't a search for the truth so much as it is a search for a rainbow in a very dark cloud. Even with its rigidity, however, I found the book necessary as a work of art. We need accounts of how children of alcoholics are harmed in the horrible quiet. When those like Geller, who have survived such experiences, write about love, loss, fragility and pain, when they document thei
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Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir
by Kao Kalia Yang
(11/18/2020)
The collection is authored by Kao Kalia Yang, who was once a refugee herself. Though the stories are written by Yang, each is attributed to the person who told it. The accounts she has gathered are ones of escape and resettlement from her family and friends. This is a unique book in that the accounts read like short stories. There is not much background information regarding the political situations in individual countries, as the focus is on the refugees' personal and emotional reactions to the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place
by David Sheff
(9/2/2020)
Carefully mining Masters' pilgrimage through Buddhism, Sheff effectively reveals the religion as a tranquil partner to the incarcerated man in his struggles through legal and personal challenges: trying to prove his innocence, reconciling his violent past. Page after page, chapter after chapter, the reader is asked to reconsider, not prison, but the prisoner. To reconsider his soul. His divinity. His selflessness. A Buddhist on Death Row is a prison story notably absent of blame, victimiz
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A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
by Sonia Purnell
(7/10/2019)
Virginia Hall is largely unknown in the annals of history, but her World War II accomplishments were magnificent. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of How an American Spy Won World War II lovingly bestows upon Virginia Hall the notoriety and acclaim she rightly deserves. Lovingly bestows upon Virginia Hall the notoriety and acclaim she rightly deserves. Page after page, Sonia Purnell delivers a breathless and breathtaking thriller.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Normal People by Sally Rooney
(4/17/2019)
Sally Rooney is 27 years old. Her thirst for dialogue and her canny wit has a breezy engagement. She curates the cynical beauty of millennials better than any fiction writer I have read, and it is her greatest instrument as a writer, this tragicomedy oeuvre, that forces you to stay reading after you told yourself you would stop and go to bed.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Let It Bang: A Young Black Man's Reluctant Odyssey into Guns
by RJ Young
(10/31/2018)
What Young has penned will disappoint many. It is not a partisan story about his own comeuppance in a white world. It is not a book preaching to Democrats or castigating Republicans about their gun porn. It doesn't wave the banner of Black Lives Matter as a matter of conscience. It refuses to drown the 2nd Amendment in moral snobbery nor does it let the liberal gun haters have the last word. It doesn't say much about interracial marriage other than the fact that R.J. had one. Simply, h
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird
(10/3/2018)
Cathy's fictionalized story makes you cheer her bravado and guts, melt at her tenderness, and embrace her sisterhood. Her double life is its own message about challenging standards and the capacity of women to do men's work and the importance of intimacy... If her life – and Bird's novel – have any lingering message it is that women push their way into exceptionalism by their own guile and guts and desire. They dismiss boundaries and barriers and people telling them you can't.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
by Beth Macy
(8/29/2018)
After reading Macy's chilling account, you can't help but wonder if we have reached the point of ordinary: the addicted dying before they reach the age of 40 while people run away or look away or pretend they don't see. You can't help but wonder if they is actually we. It's not our fault a drug hit the market and was overprescribed, and the Center for Disease Control was apathetic. But it is our fault when we neglect the addicted.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Inward Empire: Mapping the Wilds of Mortality and Fatherhood
by Christian Donlan
(6/20/2018)
If Christian's memoir can be distilled down to just one thing it is that a disease of the brain is practice. It takes time to understand and patience to learn to live with. The Inward Empire, Mapping Out the Wilds of Mortality and Fatherhood is exemplary because it is not the story of an incurable disease, but of a calamitous diagnosis making landfall within a family. Where does illness stop, and humanity begin? As Christian reflects on his health and vulnerability, he makes note of the e