' That sounds right—and true to the searing authenticity of this novel, which tries to answer the question, \'How do you get to be a scumbag? But this isn't storytelling; it's gossip... Once the novel gets back to the present day, it regains a more nuanced and satisfying tone... The sustained tension between the narrator and Mitko will remind some readers of Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room... [a] perfect articulation of despair that anyone with a heart will hear. Good Question ( 115). Ron randomly pulls a pen image. The real miracle of The World and All That It Holds is that despite holding so much, we come to know the fragile joys of this one melancholy man so well that he feels written into our own past. It stings — but oh, the sensation is exquisite.
But the artificial convolutedness of Cloud Cuckoo Land is not enough to confer any additional depth on Doerr's simple, belabored theme, a theme that thumps through the novel insisting that every character kneel in reverent submission... What's worse, julienning these disparate plots saps them of their natural drama, and no amount of grandiose narration can pump that tension back in. RaveThe Washington PostThat this powerful book is Nathan Harris's debut novel is remarkable; that he's only 29 is miraculous. It remains freshly mysterious despite its self-spoiling plot. But that's an intentional and rather brilliant representation of Willie's plight. Indeed, given the physical and emotional sacrifices he's made, some coincidences between this story and his life are almost too poignant to bear... Ron randomly pulls a pen.io. [An] ambitious reclamation of the imagination... The plot quickly gets snarled up in B. F. Skinner's theories of behaviorism, which the kids won't find all that rewarding. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren't for Demon's endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism... With Demon Copperhead, she's raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel's ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform. She's a book-loving girl, toughened by years of frequent moving, and a close student of her father's capricious Ernt and Cora play out the captivating disaster of their union, Leni remains an irresistibly sympathetic heroine who will resonate with a wide range of readers … The weaknesses of The Great Alone are usually camouflaged by its dramatic and often emotional plot.
Maguire explores this theme most sensitively over Dirk's long friendship with a gay musician... Maguire suggests that we all pine for some vaguely recalled but tantalizing moment from childhood. Through parts of this story, Kitamura is exploring impossibly remote territory... Ron randomly pulls a pen photo. …The dispiriting punch line to this complicated novel is that these mysteries are the least interesting thing about it. His satire is always marbled with tenderness... his most perfect novel.
If these chapters aren't wholly engaging, at least they're great for Anne Tyler Bingo Night... RaveThe Washington PostThe cover of her [Medoff's] new novel, This Could Hurt, is an employee termination checklist... Despite all of Mottley's good fortune, she demonstrates an extraordinary degree of sympathy with people who have none... What's even more remarkable is that Nightcrawling isn't one of those thinly disguised diaries we've come to expect from precocious young novelists who can't think of anything else to write about except their own heartache... Mottley wastes no time with subtlety. It seems at first a clever clip-job, an extended series of brief quotations from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, personal testimonies and later scholars, each one meticulously quickly Lincoln in the Bardo teaches us how to read it. She's created an indelible story about the substance of a woman's life. Psychologists, religious leaders, law enforcement officers, educators, and parents have sweat blood trying to fathom the dark forces that motivate these rare but terrifying acts of school violence. PanThe Washington Post\".. only thing you really need to know about Katerina is that it's ridiculous, a book so heated by narcissism that you have to read it wearing oven mitts... Katerina offers a volcanic regurgitation of Frey's dream of writing a bestseller, his descent into addiction and the literary scandal that made him infamous. He thinks about suicide, mulls his dreams, considers the smell of his urine... insights, often evocatively phrased, are the erratic rewards of reading this fitful book. Don't let the launch of this novelist's career be drowned out. All this neurological mumbo-jumbo creates a clammy atmosphere for what is, at its heart, a tender story about a child who responds to the plight of our planet just as passionately as we all should... MixedThe Washington PostClearly, Stevens has assembled all the accoutrements for a crazy political novel, but it suffers from a disappointing lack of satiric courage... Pining for a satire fit for our times, we get instead a perfectly reasonable Romneyesque comedy that probably has binders full of uproarious incidents stuffed away in a drawer somewhere.
References that initially seem disjointed soon twine into a rope on which the beads of American hatred are strung... Orange makes little concession to distracted readers, but as the number of characters continues to grow we begin to grasp the web of connections between these people... As these individual stories intersect, the plot accelerates until the novel explodes in a terrifying mess of violence. This is a novel that never takes a breath, that works for our attention like a stand-up comic in front of a firing squad... RaveThe Washington PostIs this resurrection something to celebrate, like the boys showing up at their own funeral? But Cleanness is not unrelentingly bleak. On a broader scale, his portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic... RaveThe Washington PostIn short: Don't underestimate this new novelist. Miss Subways is definitely single-tracking, with lots of unloading along the way. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft's translation, infuses many of the sections... We never feel anything like the elation of his early-morning reformation. There are corny cliffhangers, yes, and Winslow is liable to toss off bits of pastel fluff... Where's the thrill of sexual passion? But I didn't much mind the bouts of discombobulation because I was always enchanted by James's prose with its adroit mingling of ancient and modern tones... The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent — lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley's attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose... it's a chance to re-experience the thrill of Sophie's World, to wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see.
MixedThe Washington PostAmong other things, this multigenerational story is about 'the intimacy of siblings'.. The Porpoise is so riveting that I found myself constantly pining to fall back into its labyrinth of swashbuckling adventure and feminist resistance... She can enjoy the comedy of their naivete without subjecting them to mockery... We encounter Saoirse's life in finely cut anecdotes polished in the tumbler of her little home.
And far from feeling constrained by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Tóibín ventures into the lacunae of the old legends and pumps blood even into the silent figures of Greek tragedy... These opening 30 pages of sexual abuse are challenging to read, but hang on. Another author would have been eager to elaborate on the dystopian features of the not-too-distant era, but Ishiguro always implies, never details. But with a vision that exceeds this one tragic case, The Fortune Men also plumbs the existential plight of so many similar victims. He's essentially a Turkish Gulliver... Phillips laces Ezzedine's sojourn in England with melancholy wit, but the novel's real energy comes from its exploration of two related industries that flourished under Queen Elizabeth: theater and spycraft. The redemption the story ultimately offers is equally unlikely and gorgeous, painfully limited but gratefully received in a world thrown into chaos. Although Atwood acknowledges this painful issue in passing, it never attains the emotional weight one expects given her cast of prisoners and the racial taint of modern incarceration.
Yes, libraries are awesome, and we all love books. Indeed, despite its brevity, there's something claustrophobic about The Only Story... \'Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition, \' Paul thinks. I only wish we got to see more of that fire in this novel. Much of her novel is devoted to demystifying this quotidian work... carefully sketches out the geography of poverty, that invisible realm that lies just beyond the horizon of middle-class life. And that's pretty much where the revelations peter out. I only wish I could say that this absurd story feels more subtle in execution than in summary.
Orion has endured a rough year: He's been forced into early retirement by a sexual harassment claim, and his wife has left him for a woman … Eventually, we hear soliloquies from the Ohs' three unhappy adult children, a couple of neighbors and even Annie's old sexual abuser. But allow yourself to sink into that ambiguity, and you'll find Bangkok Wakes to Rain entrancing. I have switched dry cleaners with more drama... And so language serves as Mitchell's central subject throughout The Thousand Autumns. MixedThe Washington PostVikas Swarup provides a strange mixture of sweet and sour in this erratically comic novel … The theme here couldn't be any more obvious if Vanna White spelled it out for us, but what Q & A lacks in subtlety it makes up for in charm and melodrama. While therapists and prosecutors warn Eric and Laura not to ask their son about what happened to him, Johnston adheres to that advice, too, and so we learn almost nothing about those four missing years. It's just a fleeting switch in perspective, easy to discount, but oddly base-shifting if you pay attention. And that's a conflict any of us can relate to, even if we haven't stolen a friend's story — yet.
The book is written in a structure fluid enough to move back and forth in time, to shift from first to third person without warning, sometimes breaking into italics as though this febrile text couldn't contain the fervency of these words... To enter this masterpiece is to be captivated by the paradox of that tragic courage and to become invested in Oates's search for some semblance of atonement, secular or divine. Maybe it suffers from the conflicting motives of wanting to make a point but knowing that polemical novels are a drag. In a dazzling demonstration of Sathian's range, the book's second half jumps a decade later, beyond the tragedy of Neil's adolescence to the smoldering wreckage of his adulthood. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records... Drabble never sinks to the level of Beckett's despair, but she's refreshingly frank about the tragicomedy of aging.
Having underlined so many of Toltz's clever quips, I kept running up against the question of what this mound of philosophical pessimism amounts to? And Lanchester doesn't have the chilling style of, say, Cormac McCarthy or the wry satire of Margaret Atwood, which could have charged this apocalyptic vision... It's better than that. Before coming to Washington, he was editor of the Books section at The Christian Science Monitor in Boston.
But Yoon's narration is so closely pared, so free of excess drama that when violence rips through these lives, it feels especially shocking. It's a pleasure to see a smart writer having so much grisly fun... What's more, the plot maintains its centripetal acceleration, easily soaring over those swamps of Lethemian introspection that sometimes swallowed his previous novels... Who can really be saved in our collapsing society is the question that rumbles below these pages, but the story races along so fast you'll barely notice you've entered such dark territory till it's too late to head back. RaveThe Washington PostIt's a charming mixture of eccentricity, serendipity and impish fun. While acknowledging that his compendium of mayhem may read like a political argument against guns, that wasn't his intention. RaveThe Washington PostSurprise: Watts's novel is unfairly freighted with this allusion to its distant, white ancestor. Mikhail has a poet's sensitivity to what her audience needs and can endure... These stories unfurl with such verbal verisimilitude that they're like late-night phone calls from old friends.