Do you know a girl who bounces across the lawn, no matter what dress she’s wearing? Jumping, singing, climbing trees? That’s the kind of girl this story is about. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Rise Up With A Song: The True Read More
LaFarge’s Chopin journey began with an email to the creator of the video game “Frederic: The Resurrection of Music” during the 200th anniversary year of Chopin’s birth. An amateur pianist, she wanted to explore the game’s use of Chopin’s iconic “funeral march.” Of course, like all explorers, she couldn’t stop there. Read More
If you find yourself asking, “Who is Florence Price?” you’re not alone. Which is why that’s the title of a lively new book for and by young readers. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Who Is Florence Price? Young Musicians Read More
Read at night, at the end of a too-long day, and characters will enter and exit the rooms of memory, trailing the scent of cigarette smoke and faded perfume. With Simon Van Booy's new novel, Night Came With Many Stars, open in front of me, I know the smell of summer afternoons and the pattern of paint spattered on a workingman's boots. I can hear the bugs in the dark and Read More
Ly Tran's memoir House of Sticks brings to mind both the story of The Three Little Pigs and the myth of the unassimilated other in Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child (L'Enfant Sauvage), in its unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty. Read More
Heaven is a raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery, reminiscent of both Elena Ferrante's fiction and Bo Burnham's 2018 film Eighth Grade. I cannot, in good conscience, endorse it without a warning: This book is very likely to make you cry. Read More
"Son of the Storm" defines these tensions clearly from the start, as a prologue whirls readers into a society already at a dangerous crossroads, at once reaching for new levels of power, and busy walling itself off from risk. The effect is rich, wild, and occasionally dizzying. Read More
Nước — the Vietnamese word for country and water — permeates Eric Nguyen's haunting debut. Signifying both a place of origin and the means by which a boat refugee departs from such place of origin, Things We Lost to the Water poignantly explores all the ways in which Vietnamese refugees are affected by country and water — in sum, by dislocation. Read More
You fall in love with a person, but you get a package deal. That's one of the big messages of two new novels that ruminate on love and family, particularly the family that's thrust upon you when you happen to mate with one of their kith or kin. Read More
To say that The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a sly simulacrum of a rock oral history is to acknowledge only the most obvious of this novel's achievements. Walton aspires to so much more in this story about music, race and family secrets that spans five decades. And, all the glitzy, quick-change narrative styles don't detract attention from the core emotional power of her Read More
Libertie, a new novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge, is inspired by the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the third African American woman to earn a medical degree in this country. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: A Daughter Struggles To Read More
The Life of the Mind is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. It's about being young-ish at a time in history when it feels like many things might be fading away, including the natural world. The great accomplishment of Smallwood's taut novel is that while it is, indeed, about all those grim subjects, Read More
In John Lanchester's collection, Reality and Other Stories, the supernatural manifests itself through cell phones, social media, computers, reality tv shows, and smart houses. "Signal," the opening story, was originally published in The New Yorker and it's a standout: an eerie homage to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Read More
Once Upon a Quinceañera opens in Miami, the summer after Carmen Aguilar's senior year. Due to an incomplete internship credit, Carmen has yet to graduate high school. So she's working for an event company called Dreams Come True, where she dresses up as a singing, dancing Disney Princess for birthday parties. She's at one of these parties (dressed as Belle) with her best Read More
With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed -- Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to The Sympathizer -- continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and self-identified as Vo Danh (which literally means "Nameless"). Having survived a communist reeducation camp, a perilous sea crossing, and a long sojourn in an Indonesian refugee center, he arrives in Read More
The roads taken by the family in The Removed, Brandon Hobson's new novel, are essential ones in this moment of national reclaiming. The story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It's also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, Read More
Some time into his new book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, Charles Blow recalls hearing Harry Belafonte give a speech. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Charles Blow’s ‘The Devil You Know’ Is A Read More
At the start of the story, Fatima is a young Ghanian girl who has taken on the mantle of the Adopted Daughter of Death. Renamed Sankofa — an avian symbol of the West African Akan people, one that embodies the idea of harnessing the past to forge a better tomorrow — she wanders the land, inducing dread and awe in the towns she encounters, a living legend wielding the power Read More
Outlawed opens in an alternative America of 1894 that was torn asunder by a flu epidemic some 60 years earlier. West of the Mississippi, centralized government has been replaced by a patchwork of Independent Towns. One of the few things this fragmented America agrees on is that women are put on Earth to bear children. That's it. Read More
Jordan Scott is a poet, a master of words, and a stutterer. His new kids' book, gorgeously illustrated by Sydney Smith, chronicles his childhood journey towards coming to terms with his stutter. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
Obama's ascent thrilled millions but also stirred a countermovement that is still on the march. His new memoir, A Promised Land, covers his rise through the second year of his presidency. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
The British author writes beautifully of her own recent bout with a personal winter, a period when she felt low and overwhelmed — and aims to help others to embrace their winters. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: ‘Wintering,’ Read More
Robinson's latest Gilead novel centers on prodigal son Jack, newly released from prison and in love with a Black woman — a crime in 1950s Missouri. But it's not a pat tale of love overcoming racism. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: In Read More
Renowned ballerina Misty Copeland's new kids' book Bunheads draws on her own childhood experiences — if your kids love dance, it's just the thing to keep them going until classes come back. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
In her first book since the critically acclaimed H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald urges us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world — and fight to preserve it. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: ‘Vesper Flights’ Offers Read More
Kids' books columnist Juanita Giles says message books are often nutritious and boring — but LeBron James's new I Promise combines beautiful art with real emotional impact that her kids loved. Continue Reading ‘I Promise’ This Is A Read More
Alexis Daria's soapy, sizzling new novel follows two telenovela actors who fall for each other while playing bitter exes — and have to figure out how to balance private love and public stardom. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: ‘You Had Me At Read More
The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die, by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, centers on an Indian family haunted by a jealous ghost. And S. A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland is a noir thriller — with muscle cars. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
A young woman tries to free her cousin from a dangerous living situation in a crumbling family mansion in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new novel. Mexican Gothic injects fresh blood into a classic genre. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's atmospheric novel, about a young writer and her outcast friends in 1963 Iceland, will transport you to another time and place, though not necessarily a rosier time and place. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Read More
In Amanda Sellet's charming young adult romance, a teenage bookworm transfers to the local public high school and discovers that the literary classics she lives by aren't quite a match for real life. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Classic Read More
Kaouther Adimi's novel tells the real-life story of Edmond Charlot, the Algerian bookseller and publisher who witnessed his country's independence struggle — and famously discovered Albert Camus. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Love Of Read More
In Samantha Mabry's new novel, three prickly sisters are haunted, maybe literally, by their fourth, who's died in an accident. She has a message for them, but they may be too sunk in grief to hear it. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Read More
Rita Woods' ambitious novel spans 200 years and multiple storylines — it's a complex story of loss and survival that doesn't always work. But Woods creates memorable characters readers can relate to. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
Stafford is often remembered as wife No. 1 in the many biographies and studies of poet Robert Lowell. But a new Library of America edition of her three novels showcases her masterful writing. Continue Reading New Collection Read More
Wilson's new novel centers on a young woman taking care of two kids with a disturbing ability: When upset, they burst into flames. But in Wilson's hands, what could be scary is funny, even beautiful. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Kevin Wilson Is On Read More
The anthology demonstrates that American women are just now at the starting line of exploring and understanding their anger; it's more about how they live with anger than about what makes them angry. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Read More
Throughout his career, Edmund Morris repeatedly showed boredom, even disdain, for the traditional biography. In turn, he sometimes injected his books with an artistic flair that got in the way. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
Richard Bell's true tale details how even as the Underground Railroad ferried enslaved people north towards freedom, free black people vanished from northern cities to be sold into plantation slavery. Continue Reading In Read More
Jones grew up black, gay and isolated in Texas. He chronicles his wobbly path to self-affirmation in the raw and eloquent new memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Saeed Jones’ Read More
Aarti Shahani reports on Silicon Valley for NPR. But, as she details in her memoir, she's also from a family that followed a contorted, painful path to citizenship. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: In ‘Here We Are,’ Read More
Critic Ian Sansom's deeply informed and unapologetically digressive new book dives into Auden's life — as well as the life of his singular poem. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: W.H. Auden’s Poem ‘September 1, Read More
Jacqueline Woodson's exquisitely wrought new novel follows two black families of different classes whose lives become intertwined when their only children conceive a child together in their teens. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: ‘Red At The Bone’ Read More
It could be argued that Quichotte is a novel that aims to reflect back to us the total insanity of living in a world unmoored from reality — but it's about the power of believing more than anything. Continue Reading Read More
In Stacey Lee's new novel, an opinionated and talented Chinese American girl makes her way in Reconstruction-era Atlanta while preserving her secret work as an advice columnist in the local paper. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Read More
Téa Obreht's new novel is set against a familiar old West backdrop, but it tells a fresh story of two people, both haunted in their own ways — a tough frontier woman and an immigrant camel driver. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: ‘Inland’ Creates Read More
As the U.S. becomes more brown and black — resulting in a xenophobic backlash and nostalgia by some for white European immigrants — the ideas in Sarah Valentine's memoir become even more necessary. Continue Reading BOOK Read More
Even if we weren't in need of another road-trippy-addiction memoir, Peter Kaldheim's book recounts his very human efforts to swim to shore with compassion and gratitude. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: ‘Idiot Read More
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's novel is set in an alternate Jazz Age Mexico, where gods and monsters from Mayan mythology walk the Earth and war with each other for dominion over Xibalba, the land of death. Continue Reading ‘Gods Of Jade And Read More
Colson Whitehead's deeply affecting new novel is based on the true story of a segregated reform school in Florida where African American boys were brutalized and possibly murdered. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Rooted In History, Read More
