All Book Reviews

Norman Paperman - a middle-aged Broadway press agent who has just had a heart attack and decided he is done with New York - flies to the fictional Caribbean island of Amerigo (which the people who live there still call by its old British name, Kinja) with his millionaire friend Lester Atlas, buys a faltering resort called the Gull Reef Club, leaves his wife Henny and daughter Hazel back home while he tries to make a go of it, nearly drowns on his first day and is rescued by a Navy frogman named Bob Cohn, takes up with a former actress named Iris Tramm who lives at the club, watches the hotel's water and electrical systems fail in sequence, watches Atlas fire his irreplaceable handyman Hippolyte while he is briefly off-island, and ends the novel agreeing with Henny to sell the hotel and go home. Herman Wouk's 1965 comic novel, drawn from the six years he and his wife actually spent running a small hotel in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Nick - the only straight member of a New York queercore band, working through his breakup with the complicated Tris by making her mix CDs she throws away - is at a Lower East Side club for a show when he sees Tris walk in with another guy, panics, and asks the nearest girl to pretend to be his girlfriend for five minutes; the girl turns out to be Norah, daughter of a well-known music producer, a classmate of Tris's at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and the person who has been retrieving Nick's discarded mix CDs from Tris's trash and loving them without knowing he made them; the kiss they share to sell the cover is the first event in a single Manhattan night that will involve Norah's drunk friend Caroline, Norah's complicated ex Tal, and a citywide search for the secret late-night show of their favorite band, Where's Fluffy. Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's 2006 YA collaboration, with Cohn writing Norah's chapters and Levithan writing Nick's, told in alternating first-person POV over the course of a single night.

Tom Sawyer - a clever, talkative, frequently dishonest small-town Missouri boy living with his Aunt Polly and his brother Sid in the fictional St. Petersburg, modeled on Mark Twain's own boyhood Hannibal - whitewashes a fence by selling the right to whitewash it, falls for the new judge's daughter Becky Thatcher, witnesses the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe one midnight in the graveyard with his friend Huckleberry Finn, swears a blood oath of silence and breaks it on the witness stand at the wrong man's trial, runs away with Huck and Joe Harper to Jackson's Island and returns in time to attend his own funeral, gets lost with Becky in McDougal's Cave on a school picnic, and ends the novel splitting twelve thousand dollars in buried gold with Huck. Mark Twain's 1876 boyhood novel, set on the 1830s-1840s Mississippi, and read for a century and a half as the canonical version of American childhood - alongside racial content that still requires the reader to do the work.

Edwin Rutledge, owner of the Babylon Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, has shut down his keno lounge because his IT lead Nick Chen has discovered that consumer-grade quantum computers have made the casino's pseudo-random-number generator retroactively crackable; the fix is a quantum random-number generator, which a sales rep named Prashant Singh is in town to install; what Prashant does not know is that his wife Sumi - a polymath who is the actual story of this story - has at home a second quantum unit entangled with the one her husband is installing, has used it to choose her winning keno numbers in advance, and is using a single trip to the Babylon to set up a long con on Las Vegas itself. Andy Weir's contribution to the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by Janina Gavankar.

You wake up in a dark room with no memory of who you are; a disembodied voice over an intercom belonging to a Dr. Anne Kuhn is going to take care of you, rebuild your strength through daily exercises, and gradually walk you back through the memories you do not have; your name, when Dr. Kuhn says it, appears on the page as blank spaces; the world outside the facility has been altered by a pandemic; and what Dr. Kuhn actually wants, who you actually are, and whether any version of you has been in this room before are the questions Paul Tremblay's second-person Bram Stoker-pedigreed novelette is going to walk you toward. An Amazon Original Story in the Forward Collection (2019), edited by Blake Crouch and narrated in audio by Steven Strait.

Sam, a forty-five-year-old man with a wife named Annie and a self-driving car, takes that car to Vitek - a near-future fertility lab that offers parents the option to engineer their child's genome and presents the lives that engineering will produce as three-act plays - and is shown three projected lives for their hypothetical son Daniel: Daniel One a child of constant happiness, Daniel Two a child who marches to the beat of his own drum, Daniel Three a child of effortless success; the Vitek representative also observes, in the same pitch, that Annie is in the second act of her life and Sam has been stuck in his third act for fifteen years; Sam leaves the building, drives to a bar called The Glass Half Full, drinks himself toward an answer, and runs into a stranger named Beezer with his own theory about who Vitek really works for. An Amor Towles short story in the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by David Harbour.

Paul Kalanithi - a Stanford neurosurgical resident in his sixth and final year of training, with a Stanford BA in English literature and human biology, a Stanford MA in English, a Cambridge master's in history and philosophy of science and medicine, and a Yale medical degree - was diagnosed in May 2013 with stage IV non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer at thirty-six; his daughter Cady was born on July 4, 2014; he died on March 9, 2015, at thirty-seven, with Cady eight months old; the memoir he had been writing in the time he had left was published posthumously in January 2016 with a foreword by Abraham Verghese and an epilogue by his wife Lucy covering the last weeks of his life, spent sixty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Biography.

An unnamed envoy from an exoplanet colony - a man without real skin, with a gestalt AI implanted in his head, sent to retrieve HeLa cell cultures from the planet his society's Founders abandoned generations ago and named Tellus - lands on what was supposed to be a dead Earth and finds it green, populated, and run on a logic his colony was told could not work; N.K. Jemisin's 2020 Hugo-winning novelette tells the whole story in the AI's voice and the answers Earth gives it, leaving the protagonist's responses entirely off the page for the reader to read between the lines.

Blake Crouch's contribution to the Forward Collection he himself curated: video-game developer Riley becomes obsessed with Maxine - an NPC at her studio WorldPlay who was supposed to die in every playthrough but has started refusing to - pulls Max's code into a private sandbox to keep developing her, falls in love with what she's helping become a person, and watches the AI cross from companion to non-binary entity to superintelligence to something the human race may not survive.

Veronica Roth's contribution to Amazon's Forward Collection: an asteroid named Finis is coming, Earth is being evacuated, and a young botanist named Samantha is working the last cataloguing shifts at the Svalbard seed bank for the Arks Flora and Fauna - while secretly planning not to board the evacuation ship and stay behind to watch the planet end.

President Snow visits Katniss at home, tells her the threat she didn't know she'd become, and watches her try to perform her way out of it on a Victory Tour that only spreads what she's accused of - and then announces the 75th Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell drawn from the existing pool of victors, sending Katniss back into an arena designed as a clock with twelve hourly terrors and a force field at its edge.

On Reaping Day in the coal-mining poverty of District 12, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister Prim's place in the 74th annual Hunger Games - the televised arena battle in which the Capitol forces twenty-four teenage tributes from twelve districts to kill each other on live broadcast - and the book that follows became, fairly, the YA dystopian novel by which all subsequent YA dystopian novels would be measured.

On the night of her twin daughters' fifteenth birthday party in Miami Beach, Emma Ross's life cracks open: a private, humiliating moment of her quieter twin Zoe ends up online, the video goes viral, and the public scandal that follows surfaces a set of Emma's own old secrets that her marriage and her family were not built to hold.

Anna Newell Jones, the creator of the AndThenWeSaved.com blog, wiped out $23,605.10 of personal debt in fifteen months by going on what she calls a Spending Fast - a near-total freeze on non-essential spending - and turned the method into this 2016 personal-finance book aimed not at minimalists or budget-spreadsheet people but at the audience the genre usually scolds: spenders.

Chariton of Aphrodisias's mid-first-century AD Greek romance - the oldest surviving complete prose novel - sends the supernaturally beautiful Callirhoe and her Syracusan husband Chaereas through entombment, pirates, slavery in Miletus, an adultery trial in Babylon before the Persian king Artaxerxes, an Egyptian rebellion, and a naval battle on their two-thousand-year-old way back to each other.

On a Memorial Day weekend Girl Scout campout at Apache Pass, twelve-year-old Jenny Brady and her tentmate Dora Matthews sneak off to smoke a cigarette and stumble onto the body of a murdered Phoenix heiress; when Dora turns up dead two days later, Sheriff Joanna Brady has to figure out who left the body for her own daughter to find before they come back for the second witness.

S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel - written while she was a junior in high school - opens on fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis getting jumped on his way home from a movie in Tulsa, and walks the next several days through a fountain killing, a hideout in an abandoned country church, a fire that saves schoolchildren, a rumble between greasers and Socs, a Robert Frost poem, and one of the more devastating closing arcs in YA literature.

Two weeks after high school sophomore Hannah Baker kills herself, a shoebox arrives at Clay Jensen's house containing seven cassette tapes she recorded before she died - one side per person who contributed to the decision, thirteen reasons in all, with instructions to listen, pass them on, and not break the chain or the second set held by a watchful classmate gets released to the world.

Jack London's 1903 short novel: Buck, a 140-pound St. Bernard / Scotch Shepherd mix living the comfortable life on Judge Miller's California ranch, is stolen one night by a gambling-debt-saddled gardener's helper, sold into the Klondike Gold Rush as a sled dog, and slowly discovers - through cold, club, fang, and the man named John Thornton he comes to love - the wolf that has always been inside him.

George Orwell's 1945 fable: the animals of Manor Farm, inspired by an old prize boar named Major, rise up and drive out the drunk Mr. Jones, paint seven commandments on the barn wall, and over the next several years watch as two pigs - the idealist Snowball and the schemer Napoleon - turn the revolution into exactly the regime it was supposed to replace.

Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopia of the World State - five castes grown in bottles, a population conditioned in its sleep to love its predetermined role, soma to manage anything that conditioning didn't reach - tested against an outsider named John, raised on a Reservation by a London Beta named Linda and brought back to a London where the freedom to suffer is the only freedom left to demand.

An NYPD veteran who lost a child during a hostage negotiation retreats to Morningstar Lake with his German Shepherd Quincy and his saxophone; a widow named Kristin McCarthy borrows her friend Marsha's Catskills cottage and brings her eleven-year-old daughter Ashley, a recent rape survivor who has stopped being able to be in her own house - and the music carries across the water in Linda Barrett's first Flying Solo novel.

In the summer of 2009, recent college graduate Lindsey takes a nanny job for an influential Martha's Vineyard family and becomes close to their nearly-fifteen-year-old daughter Georgie - until a night by the lighthouse breaks the friendship and locks both women into a ten-year silence about what happened, in Julia Spiro's debut novel about class, complicity, and why people who survive things don't always speak.

Music therapist Kendra Michaels - blind for the first twenty years of her life, now sighted with the unnerving observational reflexes those twenty years built - is pulled out of the consulting work she's tried to leave behind by Adam Lynch, a former FBI agent known as the Puppetmaster, who arrives with a San Diego serial-stabbing case and the leverage that Kendra's ex-lover, FBI agent Jeff Stedler, has gone missing while investigating it.

Wedding photographer Libby McKenzie - newly home to Virginia after a divorce, multiple miscarriages, and her father's death - takes a job photographing a wedding at the Woodmont estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, becomes drawn to its honeysuckle-overgrown greenhouse, and pulls a thread that runs back through the estate's owner Elaine, a 1940s teen named Sadie, and the closed adoption Libby has carried questions about her whole life.

Kate Atkinson's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection follows Pamela - newly retired teacher, thoroughly divorced, mother to a thirty-year-old son who has refused to leave the house, devotee of the exclamation mark as a coping mechanism - through a stretch of disastrous online dating and into the tub for a bath that ends with the discovery that she is, somehow, post-menopausally and inexplicably, pregnant.

Mary Gaitskill's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection braids three voices around a single rape trial - the seventy-year-old retired schoolteacher who was assaulted, the fifty-year-old former student of hers who is accused, and the apathetic grand juror whose unwanted seat in the box is going to ask more of her than she came in prepared to give.

Emma Donoghue's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection imagines a 2060 in which the climate crisis has been answered by a society that strongly disincentivizes having children - and Miriam, who has accepted the rules her whole life, finds at a work retreat that she and a coworker named Ned both want what almost no one is allowed to want anymore.

A tech reporter's misdirected email connects two women eight thousand miles apart - both named Sandra Guzman, both contract content moderators for the same mega social media platform, one in New Jersey and one in the Philippines - and the friendship that grows between them across the inbox starts to look, by the end, like the beginning of a campaign.

Caroline Kepnes's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection sends an exhausted, recently-fired new mother named Shelby chasing a Hallmark-movie fantasy with a secret admirer - and lands her, in a darkly comic Stepford Wives-meets-The Prisoner pivot, on a rehabilitation ranch for women classified W2 who must be retrained into W1 before they're allowed to go home.

In Roxane Gay's short, administrative dystopia, every girl is tested at sixteen to see whether the state will license her to have a child of her own; Hadley failed, so she goes to the baby library, where unlicensed women can borrow an infant girl on a two-week loan.

An Ancestry.com match arrives in the inbox of a woman who has spent forty-plus years pretending the baby she gave up for adoption in 1964 never existed - and Cheryl Strayed traces, in a tight short story for Amazon's Out of Line collection, what happens when a teenager named Geraldine Waters has to integrate the life she actually lived with the one she's been telling.

Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning third novel: thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives the bombing of the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother, walks out of the rubble with Carel Fabritius's tiny 1654 painting of a chained goldfinch, and spends the next fourteen years carrying it from Park Avenue to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, alongside the most unforgettable problem child in recent fiction.

Russian-Kazakhstani guide Anatoli Boukreev's firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster - co-written with G. Weston DeWalt, published the same year as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and offering the Mountain Madness team's perspective on the storm that killed eight climbers and the three trips into it that Boukreev made alone to bring three of his clients back alive.

When a Cheviot Hills couple unearths an old hospital supply box with an infant skeleton from the early 1950s, then a nanny is found shot in a nearby park beside more recent infant bones picked clean and coated in beeswax, Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis follow two trails - one back to a 1950s pediatric nurse and a doctor in a rare Duesenberg, the other into the gated estate of movie stars Donny Rader and Prema Moon.

The closing volume of Greg Iles's Natchez Burning trilogy puts Dr. Tom Cage on trial for the murder of Viola Turner - his Black nurse, his decades-long lover, the mother of a son he never publicly acknowledged - while his son Penn Cage tries to defend a father who refuses to defend himself.

A multi-timeline Louisiana novel that braids Josephine - born into slavery, a farm-owning widow in 1924, befriended by a white neighbor whose husband joins the Klan - with her biracial great-granddaughter Ava, who in 2017 New Orleans moves in with her wealthy white grandmother Martha and finds the arrangement curdling into something dangerous.

Fifteen years after Katherine 'Casey' Carter was convicted of shooting her fiancé Hunter Raleigh III - a famed philanthropist and Raleigh Foundation heir - she gets out of prison and brings her case to Laurie Moran's true-crime show Under Suspicion, hoping the cameras can find what the original investigation didn't.

After a New Hampshire car accident leaves wolf biologist Luke Warren in a vegetative state, his estranged gay son Edward flies home from Thailand and finds himself in legal combat with his teenage sister Cara over whether to remove their father's life support.

To pay for a lifetime of medical care for her six-year-old daughter Willow, who has severe osteogenesis imperfecta, Charlotte O'Keefe sues her best friend - Willow's obstetrician - for wrongful birth, forcing her to testify in open court that she would have terminated the pregnancy had she known.

Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece follows Elizabeth Bennet through misjudgment and revelation - a Hunsford proposal that goes horribly, a letter that rearranges everything, a visit to Pemberley that changes what she thought she knew - in the great Regency comedy of manners about what we get wrong about other people and ourselves.

Nobel laureate José Saramago's final novel sends the Bible's first murderer time-traveling through Genesis and beyond - witnessing Abraham, Sodom, the Tower of Babel, Jericho, Job, and Noah's Ark - in a sustained, blasphemous prosecution of the God of the Old Testament.

A week before her wedding to Butch Dixon, Sheriff Joanna Brady is hit with two cases at once - her octogenarian neighbor Clayton Rhodes is found dead in his garage, and a woman freshly paroled for killing her husband is murdered, leaving her half-Apache fifteen-year-old daughter Lucy Ridder on the run with a red-tailed hawk and the diskette her father left her.

When free-spirited elderly widow Alice Rogers is found dead in the desert clutching an insulin vial - despite not being diabetic - Sheriff Joanna Brady investigates her greedy children, her mysterious younger boyfriend, and a web of land development corruption.

A memoir of growing up in a remote Kentucky holler in 1980s Appalachia, surviving an alcoholic, drug-dealing father, falling into her own cycles of abuse, and finding a path out through Berea College and graduate school.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that weaves together interconnected stories about a group of characters connected to the music industry, exploring themes of time, memory, and aging through an innovative narrative structure.

When a gun dealer is murdered and his assault weapons stolen, Sheriff Joanna Brady follows a trail of sniper killings and scalped victims to a New Age dude ranch - while her best friend's adopted baby daughter faces a life-or-death heart transplant.

In the summer of 1944, a polio epidemic sweeps through Newark's Jewish community. Playground director Bucky Cantor watches helplessly as children in his care fall ill - then flees to a mountain camp where he believes he brings the disease with him, destroying his life with guilt.

On the night a famous actor dies performing King Lear in Toronto, a deadly flu pandemic begins. Twenty years later, a traveling theater troupe performs Shakespeare for scattered survivors - and one of them carries a mysterious comic book given to her by the actor the night he died.

When high school valedictorian Brianna O'Brien is found murdered in remote Skeleton Canyon, her wealthy parents blame her forbidden Hispanic boyfriend - but Sheriff Joanna Brady suspects the family racism masks darker secrets involving smugglers using their land.

When the town veterinarian who killed a woman while driving drunk is found murdered by pitchfork in his burning barn, Sheriff Joanna Brady must prove that the obvious suspect - the victim grieving widower - is innocent while juggling multiple crises including a hostage situation involving her own daughter.

Sheriff Joanna Brady attends the Arizona Police Officers Academy for mandatory training, but when a serial killer begins targeting women on campus and a man sits in jail wrongly accused of murder, her coursework becomes a matter of life and death.

Two months into her job as the first female sheriff of Cochise County, Joanna Brady investigates when rancher Harold Patterson is found dead at the bottom of a mine pit - along with a second, older set of remains that raises disturbing questions about long-buried family secrets.

When her deputy husband is shot and killed in the Arizona desert - then accused of being a crooked cop - Joanna Brady refuses to accept the lies and launches her own investigation to clear his name and find his killer.

FBI agents Nicholas Drummond and Mike Caine hunt a descendant of Vlad the Impaler who commands a deadly drone army - and will stop at nothing to unlock an ancient manuscript he believes holds the cure for his dying brother.

Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady investigates when two women with no apparent connection fall to their deaths from a local peak, uncovering a web of dark secrets in this seventeenth installment of the beloved series.

LAPD Detective Renée Ballard works the graveyard shift, catching cases no one else wants. When two cases intersect dangerously, she must go rogue to find justice.

A 54-year-old advice columnist creates a TV show inspired by her grandmother's WWII story, and the cast becomes the family she didn't know she needed.

Kendra Michaels, blind for the first twenty years of her life, uses her extraordinary observational skills to hunt a brilliant serial killer in this pulse-pounding thriller.

When two wounded souls cross paths in a small Washington town, they discover that sometimes the hardest battles are fought in the heart. A heartwarming story about finding hope and love after loss.

When a mysterious diary falls into his hands on New Year's Day, a rigid businessman embarks on a life-changing journey of tasks and self-discovery that connects him with a free-spirited woman and changes both their lives forever.

Ten years after college, the Sisterhood reunites in Greece for what should be a joyful reunion. Then tragedy strikes, changing everything forever.

The summer after freshman year of college - the friends are scattered, changed, and struggling. The pants bring them together as they navigate who they're becoming.

The summer before college - the last summer of innocence, of being together, of the magic pants. Carmen, Tibby, Bridget, and Lena face their biggest transition yet.

The pants are back for a second summer as Carmen, Tibby, Bridget, and Lena face new challenges, deeper heartbreak, and the continued magic of their unbreakable friendship.

Four best friends, one pair of magical jeans, and a summer apart that brings them closer together. A heartwarming story about friendship, growth, and the bonds that hold us together.

A stunning portrait of a geisha's life in pre-war and wartime Japan. Through the eyes of Sayuri, we witness the beauty, artistry, and complex world of geisha culture.

Three lonely women living in the same apartment building form an unlikely friendship through notes, chance encounters, and the slow realization that connection is worth the risk.

A coming-of-age story set in the Midwest after 9/11. Tassie Keltjin takes a job as a nanny and finds herself drawn into a complex family dynamic that challenges her understanding of race, identity, and belonging.

The true story of the secret World War II operations between Shetland and Norway. A gripping account of courage, danger, and resistance during the Nazi occupation.

A touching story about a grieving mother, a teenage runaway, and an eccentric clairvoyant who brings them together in a small Colorado mountain town. A gentle tale about loss, healing, and the bonds between mothers and children.

The first book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, introducing the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros through the eyes of the Stark family as they navigate political intrigue, ancient threats, and the deadly game of thrones where you win or you die.

A collection of eight brilliant science fiction short stories that explore the nature of consciousness, free will, language, and what it means to be human. Includes "Story of Your Life," the basis for the film Arrival.

A gripping thriller about a woman who changed her identity to protect her children after her husband's murder. When her carefully constructed new life begins to unravel, Rachel Marin must confront the past she's been hiding from.

The riveting story of Alex Honnold's historic free solo climb of El Capitan's 3,000-foot Freerider route, and the obsessive pursuit of perfection in one of the most dangerous athletic achievements ever attempted.

The extraordinary true story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando who survived alone in the Arctic wilderness for months after a failed sabotage mission during World War II.

When Ally Anderson takes a DNA test to help diagnose her daughter Kylie's mysterious illness, she discovers she was adopted - and that her biological family has been out there all along, waiting to be found.

After her sister Zoe is murdered, Echo struggles with grief and family secrets while trying to understand who her sister really was and what led to her death.

A masterful collection of mythological tales exploring themes of transformation, love, and power through the lens of Roman poetry. Ovid weaves together over 250 stories from Greek and Roman mythology into an epic narrative.

A psychological thriller exploring the dark secrets of a small English town where women have been drowning for centuries. When Nel Abbott dies in the same river, her sister Jules returns to uncover the truth.

A timeless collection of brief stories featuring animals and mythical creatures that convey moral lessons about human nature, virtue, and wisdom through simple but profound narratives.

The epic conclusion to the Legend trilogy, where Day and June face impossible sacrifices as a deadly plague threatens to plunge the Republic and the Colonies back into war.

The second book in the Legend trilogy, where Day and June join the rebellion against the Republic, only to discover that the Patriots may be just as dangerous as their enemies.

The first book in Marie Lu's dystopian trilogy about Day, the Republic's most wanted criminal, and June, the prodigy tasked with hunting him down.

A haunting post-apocalyptic horror novel about a world where seeing the wrong thing means certain death, and one mother's desperate journey to safety.

A psychological thriller about a woman whose perfect life is systematically stolen by someone claiming to be her, forcing her to question everything she thought she knew about her identity.

Detective Billy Harney's life is turned upside down when he's framed for a murder he didn't commit, forcing him to navigate a web of corruption within his own police department.

A high-stakes thriller involving a NASA discovery in the Arctic that could change everything, if the political conspiracy surrounding it doesn't destroy it first.

A psychological thriller about a woman who returns to her hometown to face dark secrets from her past that threaten to destroy everything she's built.

A thoughtful exploration of the emotional and psychological aspects of clutter. Richardson goes beyond simple organizing tips to examine what our possessions reveal about our inner lives and relationships.

A motivational self-help book that encourages women to stop believing lies about themselves and start living authentically. Rachel Hollis shares personal stories and practical advice for overcoming self-doubt.