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★★★☆☆ Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers wants to help us more accurately interpret the intentions of strangers, but does so in a way that’s disjointed and impractical. A variety of observations appear throughout: For...
★★★★☆ A curiously timely novel set around an Arizona homestead in the late 1890s, Téa Obreht’s excellent Inland finds a vein of magical realism in the reliably fruitful ores of Western Literature. When Nora’s...
★★★★☆ Penelope Wright’s Time Bomb: Book 1 of The Collapse is a Waterworld-style dystopia with time travel, a sassy protagonist, and radiation. Typically, Rosarita Columbia only goes back in time to steal items necessary...
★★★★☆ In Everything Inside, with movement comes creation: characters go from Haiti, to Miami, to New York City, and back, building families and love. Like Danticat’s other works, the Haitian diaspora is the continuing...
★★★★☆ For many these days, it’s easier to recognize it as a feeling than it is to articulate its many layers. It’s not quite dread, and not quite a call to arms: politically and...
★★★★☆ The yellow-breasted chat had just arrived on my birding stomping grounds, calling out incessantly in an interesting conversation I wasn’t invited to, when I flipped to a chapter dedicated to this species in...
★★★★★ The disappearances started small. A certain type of candy, let’s say, was one morning gone — not gone from the stores but wiped from existence. Every resident of the unnamed island of The...
★☆☆☆☆ Miracle Creek is a courtroom drama mystery that kicks off with several plot points whose red herring status is plainly obvious. After slogging through a false narrative stretched far longer than necessary, it’s...
★★☆☆☆ A shadowy novel about espionage and emotional fidelity, Berta Isla follows a woman’s unrelenting commitment to her husband and his secrets. Tomás Nevinson and Berta Isla were teenage sweethearts and set on maintaining...
