Drawing inspiration from America's most advanced missiles, the text of The President's Daughter is capable of hitting multiple stereotypes simultaneously... Save yourself. RaveThe Washington PostHer first novel, Panic in a Suitcase, is equal parts borscht stew and Borscht Belt — an immigration comedy that can't tell whether it's leaving or coming to America... A brilliant writer fluent in both English and Turkish, Shafak is a difficult problem for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's repressive government... Ron randomly pulls a pen.io. a deeply humane story about the cruel effects of Turkey's intolerant sexual attitudes... This story is much more likely to break your heart than your funny bone. If you can ignore the author's motive for creating such a sensitive and endearing cad, you'll find here a novel that explores the demands of acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and insight... The end product is well worth the extra care!! While Make Russia Great Again rushes along from one folly to the next, Herb's increasingly pained efforts to see only the bright side of Trump's reign is the joke that keeps on winning.
Stalked by the loneliness of middle age, you may think the last thing you need is a novel about a woman driven to wearing her dog. RaveThe Washington PostIt's a curious thought experiment... an elegant demonstration of Mandel's facility with a range of tones and historical periods... Mandel delivers [a] futuristic section with an impish blend of wit and dread... All these various stories are finely constructed, but they gather force only during the novel's time-traveling second half set in the year 2401. This late in the history of feminism that theme may sound too familiar, but Watkins's book sparks the same electric jolt that The Awakening must have sent juicing through Kate Chopin's readers in 1899. Again and again, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering, \'Can this story get any sillier? These stories unfurl with such verbal verisimilitude that they're like late-night phone calls from old friends. MixedThe Washington PostPrepare to be baffled... A different species than we've spotted before... McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. MixedThe Washington PostWhen does a publishing trend give voice to our anxieties, and when does it merely exploit those anxieties?... If the surface of her stories is lightly etched with charm and humor, darker forces burrow underneath. But Doerr has not only packed them together, he's put them in a blender and then laid out the bits in a great scramble, as though his own book were a textual puzzle as complicated as the ancient Diogenes codex... From start to finish, no matter what else he's up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love... Ron randomly pulls a pen out of a box. [An] epic...
The characters have been crunched into types. MixedThe Washington PostIf you read The Sympathizer, you'll immediately recognize this ironic and endlessly conflicted voice. Such writerly consternation may send students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop into fits of ecstasy, but most readers will be more moved by Nicole's reflections on the loss of love, on that indeterminate moment when romance evaporates... That struggle feels about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password. It's clever but not funny; a satire that never pricks its target. MixedThe Washington Post\"North of Dawn is bracingly honest about the difficulties of assimilation, the way hospitality curdles into condescension and gratitude sours into resentment... [The idea that Muslim radicalism is one side of the coin of intolerance that's gaining currency in liberal democracies] is such a timely, necessary argument, but I wish it were expressed more gracefully in these pages. The best historical fiction disorients us by demonstrating the uncanny nature of the past—a world like and not like ours, woven through with strands of ancient DNA.
RaveThe Washington Post\"Sarah Waters ain\'t afraid of no ghost. But there's nothing cloying about this unabashedly sweet story — and nothing unambitious about it, either. It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment. Then again, Dylan never regains the breathtaking verve of his childhood either, and that ultimately is the tragedy of The Fortress of Solitude. Although I respect Johnston's willingness to eschew the cheap titillation of lurid details, he's clearly sensitive enough and talented enough to have delved into the horror of whatever Justin experienced during that crucial quarter of his life. Part farce, part revenge fantasy, the climactic scene at a triple birthday party at the Oppenheimers' \'cottage\' on Martha's Vineyard is one of the most hilarious and horrible calamities I've ever found in a novel... Korelitz is not so sentimental as to finally draw the Oppenheimer triplets together in a hug, but she knows how to adopt the old conventions of romantic comedy and domestic drama to her thoroughly modern ends. Powers's thoroughly modern fable of environmental mourning hardly needs to dredge up that cringeworthy antecedent. Presumably, Gonzalez is pulling at least some of these funny shenanigans from her own experience: She once worked as a wedding planner herself. RaveThe Washington PostWilson scrapes away all the cloying sentimentality that so often sticks to young characters... that's the most wonderful aspect of Wilson's story: It's entirely true to life... except that now and then, the kids spontaneously combust... Wilson understands the mixture of affection and embarrassment that runs through all loving families. The tone of The Last White Man mplicated, shameful grief... For a novel that explores the functions and presumptions of racism, The Last White Man is a peculiarly hopeful story. In exchange for a series of diverting adventures, it demands only stamina from its readers. The sweetness of this novel would curdle if it weren't preserved by a tincture of tragedy that runs through so many of these lives... Williams's most affecting skill is his ability to narrate this novel in two registers simultaneously, capturing Noe's naivete as a teen and his wisdom as an old man... Alas, the plotting is sketchy, the social satire clunky.
The narrator is John Bartle, a pensive, guilt-ridden vet recalling his friendship with another young soldier he calls Murph … The first chapter demonstrates what Powers can do so well, and anthology editors should be fighting over the rights to excerpt it from the roughout The Yellow Birds, amid the gore and the terror and the boredom, you can hear notes of Powers's work as a poet … Frankly, the parts of The Yellow Bird are better than the whole. RaveThe Washington Post... riveting... surprising... vibrates between parable and particular. RaveThe Washington PostAs the Republican Congress plots to cripple Planned Parenthood and the right to choose hinges on one vacant Supreme Court seat, American Martyrs probes all the wounds of our abortion debate. MixedThe Washington Post As before, the author continues to demonstrate a deep sympathy for the ways women suffer and survive the vicissitudes of a society that gives them little agency. Fortunately, Christensen has something more mysterious and existential in mind. These various lapses may be irritating, but ultimately they don't derail what is a fairly ingenious adventure. I only wish we got to see more of that fire in this novel. And because we need some relief from the Plumbs — lest they grow intolerably annoying — the book expands to explore their far more mature friends, relations and victims. Characters are introduced and cast off the way one might rifle through old clothes in the attic—with the same amused sense of familiarity.
Indeed, there's as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write. It's like watching a building collapse in slow motion... Doyle draws adolescence with such crisp empathy and humor that Victor's memories feel as real as photos of your own childhood. Even before the police descend, 'Lally' Ledesma, a CNN reporter, is already lurking in the yard, greasing his way into Vernon's confidence, seducing his mother, and flattering her chubby friends. These stories, loosely linked together, become a way of preserving what is otherwise inscribed only on the liquid surface of memory. On a broader scale, his portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic... Still have questions? Yes, the ending is wildly improbable and hilariously predictable, but I wouldn't change a single note. North of Dawn suffers from a ramshackle quality one might expect from an exciting but not quite finished draft. It's just the style needed to carry along all these women's stories and then bring them to a perfectly calibrated moment of harmony — a grace note that rings out after the orchestral grandness of Girl, Woman, Other draws to a perfect close. Swing Time may be the most perceptive one I've read about the distortion field created by fame and wealth... 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. Though writing this fine is easy to praise, it's not always easy to enjoy.