Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island, Kate Zernike's The Exceptions, and Priya Guns' Your Driver Is Waiting all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub's "Rotten Tomatoes for books."
*
Fiction
1. The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan
(Viking)
7 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Donal Ryan here
"Mr. Ryan works the details, nuances and upshot of this relationship into an intricate, painfully perceptive picture of failed empathy, of neediness meeting exploitation, genuineness confounded by presumption, truth misappropriated and transformed into travesty … As for Mr. Ryan's treatment of Saoirse: I do not know of another male writer who has so perfectly captured the experiences and thoughts of a woman as he has. Saoirse's shades of emotion and thought are poignantly true to life, recognizable, and perfectly conveyed. Further, as we have come to expect from Mr. Ryan, this very fine novel concludes on a note of sweetness and, also, in this case, triumph."
–Katherine A. Powers (The Wall Street Journal)
2. Homestead by Melinda Moustakis
(Flatiron)
6 Rave
Read an excerpt from Homestead here
"A book that's as stark and beautiful as its icy setting … Homestead is a deeply interior novel by necessity: Lawrence is reticent by nature, and the characters frequently find themselves alone with their thoughts. There is dialogue in the novel, and it's unfailingly true to life; Moustakis particularly does a wonderful, understated job with Marie and Sheila's east Texas vocabulary and cadences. But she's equally adept at the silences that mark the characters' seemingly small moments … Homestead is a beautiful novel, quiet as a snowfall, warm as a glowing wood stove. It's also a profound look at how we navigate one another, and what it means to reveal ourselves to the ones we care about."
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
3. Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns
(Doubleday)
2 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Your Driver Is Waiting here
"…[a] piercingly funny, scathingly censorious debut … It's rare for a writer to marry such deep social consciousness with a comic, sultry romance, rarer still to pull that off in a way that satisfies and provokes the reader."
–Meredith Maran (The Los Angeles Times)
**
Nonfiction
1. The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike
(Scribner)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
"Excellent and infuriating … An intimate, behind-the-scenes account of how those scientists conducted a four-year study that resulted in M.I.T.'s admitting to a long history of sexual discrimination … While you may feel the need to take a break and knock a hole through a wall, Zernike's excellent reporting forces you to read on. She tells her story with careful pacing and precise detail, illustrating each injustice with jaw-dropping quotes and solid facts."
–Bonnie Garmus (The New York Times Book Review)
2. All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia by Simon Garfield
(William Morrow)
2 Rave • 5 Positive
Read an excerpt from All the Knowledge in the World here
"Excellent … Garfield, an Englishman in his early 60s, is lucid, witty, learned and clearly a bibliomaniac … In All the Knowledge in the World, he has produced a lively threnody to the encyclopedic impulse, or the powerful desire to grasp and encapsulate everything that is known within a single book or set of books … A lively threnody may seem an oxymoron, but Mr. Garfield both loves encyclopedias and bewails their demise."
–Joseph Epstein (The Wall Street Journal)
3. We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee
(Hachette)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from We Are Electric here
"Excellent … Sally Adee has written an absorbing and fast-paced account of a field of research that could thus herald a whole new era of paradigm-shifting medicine. Moreover, she has done so without apparently drinking the Kool-Aid of today's many bioelectricity boosters."
–Simon Winchester (The New York Times Book Review)
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