Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars, Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz, and Kelly Link's The Book of Love all feature among this month's best reviewed fiction titles.
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1. Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
(Scribner)
14 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
"One of the signal achievements of this exceptional novel is the generosity and rigour with which it conjures up Cahokia. Spufford's creation absolutely feels like a place you could visit, or could have visited, if you happened to be travelling westward across the United States in the year of modernism, 1922. Spufford has imagined a history, a culture, a full suite of territorial and ethnic tensions; he even knows when and where the Cahokian trains run. And every detail is pertinent to his beautifully buttoned-up plot. And there is no clumsy expository dialogue."
–Kevin Power (The Irish Times)
2. Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
(Little Brown and Company)
10 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
"Nolan begins by embracing the genre's major tropes (dead child, plucky journalist, family secrets) only to turn their governing logics against them with prosecutorial persistence and precision. This is a murder mystery in which there is little mystery about the murder, a page-turner in which the suspense hinges less on what happened than on how and why certain people become the people to whom such things happen … Nolan's prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan's writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is … Nolan's vision is grim but not hopeless, unflinching yet uncynical."
–Justin Taylor (The Washington Post)
3. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
(Knopf)
10 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Wandering Stars here
"An eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the massacre, dislocation and forced assimilation of Native Americans, it is also a heartfelt paean to the importance of family and of ancestors' stories in recovering a sense of belonging and identity … A somewhat manic polyphonic construction that deploys first, second, and third person narration in its determination to capture the perspectives of its varied cast … Orange has a predilection for repeating words that concern endurance and survival, which results in incantatory phrases that loop and curl in on themselves, as does his narrative. His language soars … More than fulfills the promise of There There."
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
4. The Book of Love by Kelly Link
(Random House)
7 Rave • 4 Positive • 4 Mixed
Read a craft essay by Kelly Link here
"Long, but never boring … Reviewing The Book of Love feels like trying to describe a dream. It's profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that's left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain … So much of Link's work steps lightly, a tempering of the commonplace with vivid, delicate surprise … Its composition, its copiousness, suggests that love, in the end, contains all — that frustration, rage, vulnerability, loss and grief are love's constituent parts, bound by and into it."
–Amal El-Mohtar (The New York Times)
5. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
(Grove Press/Black Cat)
7 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an interview with Martin MacInnes here
"An elegiac voyage through these questions, a vaulting exploration of the interplay between the micro and the macro, the human and the otherworldly … Leigh's connection to, and reverence for, the natural world is profoundly moving. MacInnes's descriptions are lush, almost devotional at times."
–Sophie Mackintosh (The New York Times Book Review)
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