All Book Reviews

Tana French’s newest, THE WITCH ELM, is an engrossing story about family, love, and loss, though it’s a book entirely unsuitable for the Hallmark channel. Some books haunt long after you shut the cover, walk away, vacuum, fold laundry and wash the dishes....

If you take Charles Dickens, add a good dose of magical realism, you’ll have a sense of THE MERMAID AND MRS. HANCOCK by Imogene Hermes Gowar. Gowar’s debut offers abundant pleasures—it is vibrantly imagined and lushly detailed, occasionally raunchy—yet...

In his fourth novel, Charles Frazier returns to familiar stomping grounds, the same ones he trod with such mastery in Cold Mountain—the South during the final days of the Civil War. VARINA centers on Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the...

Leave it to Michael Pollan, with his free-ranging curiosity, to take on the strange and troublesome history of psychedelic drugs. Playing to his strengths as an investigative reporter, Pollan draws on a solid body of research to create an impressive—and immersive—work...

You don’t see Diane Chamberlain coming; she sneaks up on you. By that I mean that Chamberlain isn’t praised as a prose stylist—you don’t find lyrical sentences that catch your breath, soaring imagery, or probing insights to give you pause. Her gifts...

Is there any American woman alive who does not have an issue or two about her weight? You get points if you still manage to feel good about yourself at least some of the time, right? In GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, we meet 3 women who meet as teens attending a weight-loss...

Kevin Kwan’s CRAZY RICH ASIANS TRILOGY focuses on a segment of the uber-rich many of us in the U.S. have rarely thought about—the extremely wealthy Chinese and Southeast Asians. But that’s all changed now: rich Asians are very much part of our public...

Comedy, tragedy, and magic join hands in HARRY’S TREES, a charming, if uneven, novel. Its appeal lies in the two main characters: Harry Crane, a middle-aged average-Joe kind of guy, and a cheeky, bossy nine-year-old named Oriana Jeffers. Both are in the throes...

Ackerman’s slender volume—more the size of a personal journal—packs a huge wallop. The full weight of the novel’s biggest questions—what does it mean to love someone, what does it mean to forgive, and what does it mean to be alive?—are carried by only...

When I think of Anne Tyler, I think of Baltimore, Maryland. That’s where so many of her books are set, and it’s also the city Tyler calls home. CLOCK DANCE, however, begins in Lark City, Pennsylvania, where we meet Willa Drake at the age of eleven. Later the...

If you have a poetic soul, or love Celtic literature and/or have a penchant for stories about orphans as I do, I hope you find time to settle down with GIRL ON THE LEESIDE by Kathleen Anne Kenney. Siobhan Doyle is the girl in question. Orphaned at the age of two under...

In her first two novels, Rachel Kushner does what a good writer is supposed to do: she transports readers into a richly created world and into the complex minds of her characters—so thoroughly that we mesh with both the world and its inhabitants. Ditto THE MARS ROOM,...