Inland by Téa Obreht
★★★★☆ 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...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
Time Bomb by Penelope Wright
★★★★☆ 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...
Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
★★★★☆ 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...
Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith
★★★★☆ 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...
How to Know the Birds by Ted Floyd
★★★★☆ 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 Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
★★★★★ 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 by Angie Kim
★☆☆☆☆ 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...
Berta Isla by Javier Marías
★★☆☆☆ 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...
Going Dutch by James Gregor
★★★★☆ Big city dating is quite the battlefield, and James Gregor’s Going Dutch is as current and insightful a portrait as one might find. At his worst, the story’s protagonist Richard treats social capital...
