BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Other Typist: A Novel
by Suzanne Rindell
(7/10/2013)
Rindell's voice is like a cross between Merricat in Shirley Jackson’s overlooked masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita. Her version of an unreliable narrator is less deft and layered than either of those books, but she has nonetheless constructed a suspenseful story with a propulsive pace.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Joseph Anton: A Memoir
by Salman Rushdie
(10/3/2012)
Rushdie's memoir puts me in the position of greatly admiring the life but lamenting its literary representation. I couldn't put Joseph Anton down, despite all of the ways it let me down. This is a deeply flawed memoir by someone with a fascinating and immensely important story to tell. I recommend it with many qualifications....
One cannot help but wonder what Rushdie's work would look like had the fatwa not pushed him to straight, literal chronology of one detail plodding aft
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Gillespie and I: A Novel
by Jane Harris
(3/7/2012)
From art-world gossip in the Glaswegian newspapers to the stilted language of the criminal trial at the end of the book, this is a noisy, full, and fast-paced story, both delightful and disturbing... but mainly delightful.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir That Inspired <i>Upstairs, Downstairs</i> and <i>Downton Abbey</i>
by Margaret Powell
(1/11/2012)
Oh sure, the life of a kitchen-maid was all about drudgery and humiliation, but Margaret Powell lets you know right away that there is more to her character than beaten-down servitude... Powell's feistiness does more than simply enliven her account of life in domestic service during the interwar period in England. It sharpens her observations to a fine point and turns her anecdotes into acute critiques of the class system and its hypocrisies.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick
(9/21/2011)
Like The Invention of Hugo Cabret, this will be an instantly successful book for children and adults...It is built on the bones of several quite sturdy ideas—about deaf culture, about museums and collections, about missing parents and lonely, fiercely intelligent children—but it moves by emotion. Sometimes Selznick's art is dazzling in its textured complexity, as when he portrays the historically accurate interior of the AMNH, and other times, it is the simplicity of a single image that s
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Family Fang: A Novel
by Kevin Wilson
(8/4/2011)
The premise of this book is so perfect I can't believe it hasn't been done before. Kevin Wilson takes performance art, which is meant to disrupt the everyday, and applies it to that most hidebound of institutions, the American middle-class family. The possibilities are so deliciously ripe.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool
(4/6/2011)
Moon Over Manifest strikes me as a children's book animated by an expressly adult sentiment: nostalgia for a simpler past. The Newbery award committee obviously related to this powerful emotion, but does its intended audience of fifth to eighth graders? Vanderpool calls upon a kind of a sepia-tinged longing for a very recent past which seems just out of reach. I'm not sure that young readers naturally feel that emotion, but perhaps the point of the book is to teach them this, to make them
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Swamplandia!: A Novel
by Karen Russell
(3/24/2011)
The elements of Swamplandia!'s world do not sound promising. They sound, admittedly, rather random and outlandish, as cheesy as the Bigtrees' amusement park itself: alligators, a Ouija board, a Depression-era ghost, buzzards by the dozens, a "bird man" who whistles to lure the buzzards away, another amusement park modeled on hell. But if this sounds over the top to you, it doesn't to Ava Bigtree, and the wise earnestness with which she narrates her life will seduce you into listening. If
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
(10/6/2010)
Scarlett Thomas has produced something sui generis: a realist metafiction novel. I'd be hard-pressed to think of something quite like it... Thomas' portrayal of Meg's writerly routine and her struggles with the blank page make this a fantastic book for the buried writer in all of us. The book's gentle exploration of generic convention is perfect for someone just beginning to explore literature beyond the purely realist. Its often risky discussions of things like reincarnation or the omega
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Mockingjay: The Final Book of The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
(9/8/2010)
If you are reading this review, chances are that you're wondering if the Hunger Games trilogy lives up to the hype. Yes. A thousand times yes. All you need to do is read the first few pages of The Hunger Games to verify this. You'll be pulled in and under. You'll set aside anything else you've been reading. You'll shirk your duties at work. You'll start reading under the table at dinnertime. I quickly learned that the only way I could make myself close the covers would be to break
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel
by David Mitchell
(7/8/2010)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is so unbelievably good that as soon as I started reading it, I grew anxious about how to convey its brilliance without resorting to overused words like, well, "brilliance." I'll do my best to produce a discerning review, but all I really want to say is: for the love of story, read this book!
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel
by Hilary Thayer Hamann
(6/9/2010)
Like a hazy summer day, Anthropology of an American Girl never fully clicked into focus for me, which, oddly enough, is precisely why it so thoroughly captured my mind ... This imprecision in Evie's narration rendered the book as unresolved, as unanswerable, as many of my own teenage longings. It felt almost like a memory, despite my many points of difference with the heroine. I now feel possessive of this book, and I will be eager to watch its fortune in the marketplace, eager to talk ab
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
(3/17/2010)
The Changeling is probably a good book, but it is not for everyone, and it was not for me. The book is pulled along with a compelling plot that frequently startled me with its eerie twists and sharp revelations... I had to force myself through dense blocks of text... meant, in the words of one reviewer, to demonstrate "a conviction that literature has the power to transfigure and redeem reality." But they were often quite chronologically confusing, and they lacked the psychological realis
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett
(3/3/2010)
Adam Haslett has absorbed the newspaper headlines and reimagined them as a pitch-perfect, tightly plotted novel of a singular moment in all-too-recent American history.... Union Atlantic is a novel sent into the future, a novel so embedded in its time that, like The Great Gatsby or Bonfire of the Vanities, it will epitomize a specific cultural moment to later generations... Haslett brings into embodiment the individual desires that power the global financial network.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Point Omega: A Novel
by Don DeLillo
(2/3/2010)
This is an aerated novel that wants to be a condensed, stylized short story, or maybe even a play... It is a novel that is supposed to be finished in the reader's head, completed by all the connections the reader finds between the long aftershocks of Bush's war on terror and the modern-day obsession with images and information flickering across screens large and small... I do wish it were longer - that is, I wish DeLillo had more omnivorously taken in the contemporary moment and fed it into the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Invisible by Paul Auster
(11/5/2009)
When you pick up a Paul Auster novel, a spell descends over you. As if you are in a funhouse car, you are hooked onto the tracks of the story and pulled into its depths... His abiding love for frame narratives places Auster in the company of metafiction novelists like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, or Italo Calvino, yet he is not a flashy, fancy, or difficult writer. Invisible sounds exactly like someone talking to you about something astonishing that happened to him when he was young.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Strength in What Remains: A journey of remembrance and forgiveness
by Tracy Kidder
(9/2/2009)
This is a smart book for what it does not do. It does not attempt to get inside Deo’s head to guess what he might have been thinking. It does not try to psychoanalyze him once he starts talking about his trauma. It does not overly dramatize this story of extreme suffering and redemption, simply allowing the events to unfold on the page. And it does not attempt to puff out Deo’s story and make it represent more than it does. Kidder takes on the role of a reporter on Deo’s life, but his unusual na
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
(3/8/2009)
... Ultimately, Grann's strategy doesn't pay off, and it doesn't elevate the book into something more than its subject matter. I will highly recommend this book to anyone I know with an interest in exploration. But this is not a book, like Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, that I'll push on everyone I know, whether or not they have an interest in the Amazon. Grann got me interested in Fawcett, but not obsessed. Given the maggots, that's probably a good thing.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer
(3/8/2009)
The Tourist is fast, slick, and gratifying... Though violations of rudimentary spycraft will drive some readers crazy, sometimes a story is so good at granting you an alternative look at your own world that you tug and pull to make it fit just right.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
by Daniel L. Everett
(1/7/2009)
Everett's gift as a writer is that he can make his linguistic discoveries as suspenseful as a detective on the scent of a murder. His gift as a linguist is his unsentimental cultural sensitivity. He insists many times that we view the Pirahãs lack of numbers or history not as a negative, as a gap in their culture that renders them less advanced than us, but as a positive choice that they've made in the service of their values. He portrays the Pirahãs as a deeply conservative culture. They have n
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Mercy: A Novel
(1/7/2009)
I was quite disappointed by A Mercy. There, I've said it. It feels
sacrilegious to speak ill of such a worthy book and such an exalted author. But
if a novel can be at once worthwhile and disappointing, this one is.
Morrison beautifully, terribly renders the world of America in the 1680s. It is
a world in which it is lawful for a man to beat his wife after nine o'clock, a
world in which the sight of a black girl is still rare enough to cause white
children to scream a
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
(11/12/2008)
... By the time the narrator has finished with her, death has brought the novel around to yet another fabulous terrain. The ending casts the first sentence in an entirely different light, and I closed the book in triumph and delight.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
(9/18/2008)
Even in disgrace, Jack projects an irresistible charm, and I couldn't help but bleed for him as he repeatedly attempts to make peace with his dying father only to enflame old wounds. But to focus on Jack's tortured soul, as so many reviewers have done, is to duplicate an injury that Robinson condemns within the novel—that of overlooking and taking for granted the state of Glory's soul. It is she who comes to know Jack better than anyone in the family, and it is her emotional wisdom that saves hi
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Better Angel: Stories
by Chris Adrian
(9/4/2008)
A Better Angel is a spiritual book that is noteworthy for what it lacks. There are no gods or saviors here, only a few angels and one very reluctant antichrist. The characters are inhabited or visited by entities they do not understand and who rarely strike them as divine. The people of Adrian's stories seem determined to live ordinary secular lives, despite the miracles that erupt into the everyday, as when a nineteenth-century farmboy begins seeing visions of people plummeting from a sk
BookBrowse Editorial Review
America America: A Novel
by Ethan Canin
(8/13/2008)
America America is a great read but a worrisome think, if I may coin a phrase. Ethan Canin writes in the storytelling tradition of Richard
Russo: a slow, detailed, fully realized, and gratifying portrait of small-town America. Yet his uncritical, almost adoring tale of wealth and power bothered me, and I wondered why this novel is being promoted so heavily at this
moment in time ....
The novel is filled with graceful moments .... but falls short in its delineation of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Slumberland: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
(7/11/2008)
If you prefer fleshed-out, psychologically rich characters and a gratifying plot, this is not the book for you. Slumberland is, rather, a book of ideas in fictional form. It is intensely thought-provoking and never has time to be dull as it races through itself. It makes you work to wrap your mind around racial politics in post-unification Berlin and the relationship between race and aesthetic form. And it ends on a note that even DJ Darky, with his phonographic memory, could not have anticipate
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel
by David Wroblewski
(6/18/2008)
As a shaggy dog tale, it doesn't get much better. The dogs practically luminesce in the gorgeous, precise prose with which Wroblewski conjures them. He is equally good at describing the dogs' physical characteristics and their inner lives ...
Dog lovers will take to this book like, well, like a retriever to water (beware, though, that you may come away feeling badly about treating your own dog like a pet rather than a glowingly, steadfastly sentient being). Yet the book also transcends
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Netherland: A Novel
by Joseph O'Neill
(6/1/2008)
Netherland is best when it introduces its kaleidoscopic and near-infinite
cast of background characters—the colorful denizens of the Chelsea Hotel, the
international team of cricketers on Staten Island, the marginal figures with
whom Chuck socializes and does shady business. But none of these characters
stick around for long, as Hans keeps taking up the story in his plodding and
uninflected voice, and even Chuck's story gets buried in the far less engaging
story of Hans' reuni
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
(6/1/2008)
It must be said that Legacy of Ashes is, after all, an institutional history, not a narrative history, which means that it lacks a singular plotline and cast of characters. Weiner strings together six decades' worth of excellent
stories a fast clip and with appealing understatement. But I found it occasionally difficult to keep track of all the bureaucrats, and sometimes wished Weiner would slow down and take me to the scene instead of reporting it
with as many of the journalistic who
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
(5/15/2008)
Lahiri does not demand much from her readers. She does not ask that we stand back and admire her prose—no show-stopping literary antics here. She does not ask that we contend with unlikable characters. If her women make mistakes, they are well-intentioned ones, free of malice or selfishness or immaturity. She does not ask us to ride a melodramatic rollercoaster of a plot, for her stories are quiet and ordinary. Her distanced narration pads the impact of the stories, so that we read about many of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
(5/15/2008)
It is simple to predict the fate of The Lazarus Project: it will deservedly turn up on many "best of 2008" lists. Its characters have lingered in my mind, but what sets the novel apart is the language that Hemon has imagined into being for describing the reality just to the side of the one in plain view. To dive into a Hemon novel is to feel, at least for the duration of its pages, that we are all exiles from the country of the real.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Fall of Frost: A Novel
by Brian Hall
(4/17/2008)
Is it too early to crown the best novel of 2008? It's hard to imagine that in the nine months remaining in this year I will glean more pleasure from a book than I did from Fall of Frost.
This is a novel that works on every possible level. For its too-short duration, I was completely immersed in its world, the emotional landscape of Robert Frost. Yet I also read it with enough critical distance to marvel, open-mouthed, at the skill with which Brian Hall constructed the book. Fal
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
(3/6/2008)
The result is a ragged and loping tale, captivating even in its imperfections. So what if characters are forever "groaning" or "screaming" or "shrieking" at one another, never just "saying" or "replying." Toltz's over-exuberant writing style is worth it for his nonstop comedy and his unruly metaphors ....
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
by Pope Brock
(2/21/2008)
Alas, the subtitle's promise to explore—or even define—the Age of Flimflam goes unfulfilled. By remaining so fully under the sway of Brinkley's charismatic personality, Brock fails to probe the psychology of Brinkley's patients, thus bypassing the opportunity to generate a larger theory about the persistence of snake oil in an era of scientific progress. Charlatan thus bears a certain similarity to the nostrums peddled by quacks like Brinkley: it does nothing to cure the disease—unremitti
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
(1/10/2008)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is quirky and funny and captivating in its improbability because it comes
straight from the author's own life - miraculously, wonderfully, improbably,
Junior possesses an internal strength untrammeled by the insults of others and
piercing in its illumination of sociological faultlines.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
An Ordinary Spy: A Novel
by Joseph Weisberg
(1/10/2008)
An Ordinary Spy is deeply engrossing and gratifying, first for the details of spycraft, but lastingly for the contortions to which it puts the reader's mind as it wends its way though its complex moral questions.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure
by Michael Chabon
(11/27/2007)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, without a doubt Chabon's best work to date, proved that his unit of composition is the chapter. In that work, as in Gentlemen of the Road, each one ends with a virtuosic flourish of the pen—a moment of exquisite suspense, a satisfying one-liner, a tiny release of narrative tension. In this way, Chabon is as generous to his readers as he is to his characters. Gentlemen of the Road is undiluted pleasure.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein
(11/27/2007)
The Shock Doctrine is a highly polemical book which, like all polemical books, will energize those already inclined to agree with her and will be quite easy for opponents to dismiss as exaggerated or histrionic. Read this book if you’ve been demoralized by the news from Sri Lanka after the tsunami, Iraq after the invasion, and New Orleans after the hurricane. The Shock Doctrine will give you a surprisingly long historical perspective from which to view the corruption and exploitation that
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
(11/8/2007)
Bridge of Sighs is captivating for its loving attention to the town of Thomaston and the particularities of its downtrodden residents, but even the most innocuous detail maps a world much larger than Thomaston, a generous world that, by the end of the book, comes to seem so familiar, one is loathe to leave it.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
(11/8/2007)
By all rights, I shouldn’t have to read this book. After all, Pierre Bayard begins with an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so." But I did read it, swiftly, ferociously, and with a pen in hand. Many times I underlined a sentence I admired, such as this one: "He who pokes his nose into a book is abandoning true cultivation, and perhaps even reading itself." But just as often, I underlined in fierce disagreement. This book isn’t, finally, about books
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell
(10/17/2007)
The virtue of this book is its absorbing, suspenseful narration. The reader joins Iris on a kind of detective hunt for her family's true story, and O'Farrell masterfully times the clues to both gratify the hunger for answers and extend the mystery even further. Yet the book's downfall is how thoroughly it sacrifices character development to the rhythms of its engrossing plot. The book dips into the heads of its female protagonists—Iris, Esme, and Esme's sister Kitty—but all three remain stock ch
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
(10/4/2007)
Brother, I’m Dying unfolds in a deliberately reserved, unornamented voice as the narrator subsumes herself into the story of her revered elders. Because of this, the passages about Danticat’s own childhood never fully snap into focus and she can only gesture toward her feeling of abandonment when her parents move to the U.S. For at least one reviewer, this self-effacement compromises Danticat’s honesty with the reader, especially since she was writing acclaimed novels and winning literary