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Book Review

At 17, she fell in love with a 47-year-old. now she questions the story..

Jill Ciment’s 1996 memoir “Half a Life” described her teenage affair with the man she eventually married. Her new memoir, “Consent,” dramatically revises some details.

  By Alexandra Alter

The Artist Is Present (and Pretentious) in Rachel Cusk’s Latest

Her new novel, “Parade,” considers the perplexity and solipsism of the creative life.

  By Dwight Garner

25 Years Ago, ‘Hannibal’ Marked the Rise of a New Kind of Blockbuster

Thomas Harris’s book came at a pivotal moment: One of the last smash hits of the ’90s, it was also one of the first big releases of the hyper-speed, hyper-opinionated internet era.

  By Brian Raftery

The Best Thrillers of the Year So Far

These twisty suspense novels will keep you on the edge of your seat.

  Sarah Lyall

Read Your Way Through New Orleans

New Orleans is a thriving hub for festivals, music and Creole cuisine. Here, the novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin shares books that capture its many cultural influences.

  By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

17 New Books Coming in June

A biography of Joni Mitchell, two hotly anticipated horror novels, a behind-the-scenes exposé about Donald Trump’s years on “The Apprentice” and more.

The Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000

Looking for your next great read? We’ve got 3,228. Explore the best fiction and nonfiction from 2000 - 2023 chosen by our editors.

  By The New York Times Books Staff

Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book

Reading picks from Book Review editors, guaranteed to suit any mood.

Best-Seller Lists: June 16, 2024

All the lists: print, e-books, fiction, nonfiction, children’s books and more.

Books of The Times

Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe

In his memoir “The Friday Afternoon Club,” the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” recounts his privileged upbringing.

  By Alexandra Jacobs

How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War

In a new book, the journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz shows how we have used narrative to manipulate and coerce.

  By Jennifer Szalai

They Revolutionized Shopping, With Tea Sandwiches on the Side

In “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue,” Julie Satow celebrates the savvy leaders who made Bonwit, Bendel’s and Lord & Taylor into retail meccas of their moment.

The Brilliant Comic Who Shined Brightest Out of the Spotlight

A new biography of the performer, writer and director Elaine May has the intensity to match its subject.

She Was More Than the Woman Who Made Julia Child Famous

In “The Editor,” Sara B. Franklin argues that Judith Jones was a “publishing legend,” transcending industry sexism to champion cookbooks — and Anne Frank.

The Rise of Bookstores With a Social Mission

The pandemic fueled a boom in social justice movements and indie bookstores. The two come together in these worker-owned shops.

By Claire Wang

Can You Find The 14 Book Titles Hidden in This Block of Text?

Try your hand at uncovering a reading list of thrillers in this Title Search puzzle.

By J. D. Biersdorfer

Strasbourg for Book Lovers

Bibliophiles will find plenty of centuries-old tomes, graphic novels, modern works and more in this French city, which also happens to be this year’s UNESCO World Book Capital.

By Seth Sherwood

A Friendship Forged by the Appeal of Being a ‘Bad Woman’

In Marcela Fuentes’s novel, “Malas,” a troubled teenager finds refuge in music and in a recluse with a dark history.

By Carribean Fragoza

Dogged by Bad Health and Bad Reviews, Darwin Needed Friends Like These

In a new book, the medical historian Howard Markel homes in on Darwin’s physical and emotional travails — and the colleagues who rallied to his cause.

By Sam Kean

Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, Is Dead at 98

He drew on his experiences as a German soldier during World War II to construct transformative ideas about God, Jesus and salvation.

By Clay Risen

What Makes Katie Ledecky Swim?

As she prepares for the Paris Games, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist talks about the doping accusations against her competitors and how she stays focused while swimming 1,900 miles a year.

By Andrew Trunsky

Scare Easily? These 2 Thrillers Are Worth It.

Complicated sisters; messy neighbors.

Shrink the Economy, Save the World?

Economic growth has been ecologically costly — and so a movement in favor of ‘degrowth’ is growing.

By Jennifer Szalai

A ‘Cursed Film’ Novel, Spiked With Venom and Fear

Lock the windows and bolt the doors before picking up Paul Tremblay’s “Horror Movie.”

By Emily C. Hughes

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In 'Consent,' an author asks: 'Me too? Did I have the agency to consent?'

June 10, 2024 • Jill Ciment wrote about a relationship she had with a teacher when she was very young – that turned into a marriage – in Half a Life . Now, eight years after his death at 93, she reconsiders their relationship in light of the #MToo movement.

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'Forgotten on Sunday' evokes the heartwarming whimsy of the movie 'Amélie'

June 8, 2024 • Like her other books, French writer Valérie Perrin's third novel to be translated into English, centers on the life-changing magic of friendships across generations.

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In 'Fire Exit,' a father grapples with connection and the meaning of belonging

June 6, 2024 • Morgan Talty's debut novel is a touching narrative about family in which the past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man's life, while also entertaining what that life could have been.

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'The Last Murder at the End of the World' is a story of survival and memory

May 24, 2024 • Stuart Turton’s bizarre whodunit also works as a science fiction allegory full of mystery that contemplates the end of the world and what it means to be human.

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'Rednecks' chronicles the largest labor uprising in American history

May 23, 2024 • Taylor Brown's Rednecks is a superb historical drama full of violence and larger-than-life characters that chronicles the events of leading to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

What's it like to live in a vacation spot when tourists leave? 'Wait' offers a window

May 22, 2024 • Set during a uniquely stressful summer for one Nantucket family, Gabriella Burnham's second novel highlights the strong bonds between a mom and her daughters.

Prize-winning Bulgarian writer brings 'The Physics of Sorrow' to U.S. readers

May 21, 2024 • Writer Georgi Gospodinov won the 2023 International Booker Prize for his book Time Shelter. The Physics of Sorrow , an earlier novel, now has an English translation by Angela Rodel.

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Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

May 21, 2024 • We asked our book critics what titles they are most looking forward to this summer. Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between.

'Whale Fall' centers the push-and-pull between dreams and responsibilities

May 16, 2024 • Elizabeth O'Connor's spare and bracing debut novel provides a stark reckoning with what it means to be seen from the outside, both as a person and as a people.

Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined

May 15, 2024 • Both of these novels, Pages of Mourning and The Cemetery of Untold Stories, from an emerging writer and a long-celebrated one, respectively, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate.

What are 'the kids' thinking these days? Honor Levy aims to tell in 'My First Book'

May 14, 2024 • Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, the 26-year-old writer's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z.

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Claire Messud's sweeping novel borrows from her own 'Strange Eventful History'

May 13, 2024 • Messud draws from her grandfather's handwritten memoir as she tells a cosmopolitan, multigenerational story about a family forced to move from Algeria to Europe to South and North America.

My Octopus Teacher's Craig Foster dives into the ocean again in 'Amphibious Soul'

May 13, 2024 • Nature's healing power is an immensely personal focus for Foster. He made his film after being burned out from long, grinding hours at work. After the release of the film, he suffered from insomnia.

'Women and Children First' is a tale about how actions and choices affect others

May 11, 2024 • The puzzle of a girl's death propels Alina Grabowski's debut novel but, really, it's less about the mystery and more about how our actions impact each other, especially when we think we lack agency.

A 19th-century bookbinder struggles with race and identity in 'The Library Thief'

May 10, 2024 • In her debut novel taking place in the Victorian era, Kuchenga Shenjé explores the expectations that arise when society demands that every group be neatly categorized.

Magic, secrets, and urban legend: 3 new YA fantasy novels to read this spring

May 8, 2024 • A heist with a social conscience, a father using magic for questionable work, an urban legend turned sleepover dare: These new releases explore protagonists embracing the magic within themselves.

'Long Island' renders bare the universality of longing

May 7, 2024 • In a heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín handles uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging through time to a devastating climax.

A poet searches for answers about the short life of a writer in 'Traces of Enayat'

May 1, 2024 • Poet Iman Mersal's book is a memoir of her search for knowledge about the writer Enayat al-Zayyat; it's a slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo — and through her own mind.

'Real Americans' asks: What could we change about our lives?

April 30, 2024 • Many philosophical ideas get an airing in Rachel Khong's latest novel, including the existence of free will and the ethics of altering genomes to select for "favorable" inheritable traits.

As National Poetry Month comes to a close, 2 new retrospectives to savor

April 29, 2024 • April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites — retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.

A new collection of Emily Dickinson's letters has been published by Harvard's Belknap Press, edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. Three Lions/Getty Images hide caption

This collection may be the closest we'll ever come to a Dickinson autobiography

April 25, 2024 • The Letters of Emily Dickinson collects 1,304 letters, starting with one she wrote at age 11. Her singular voice comes into its own in the letters of the 1860s, which often blur into poems.

Looking for new ways to appreciate nature? 2 new birding books may help

April 22, 2024 • Novelist Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles centers on an array of birds that visit her yard, as Trish O'Kane's Birding to Change the World recalls lessons from birds that galvanized her teaching.

'When I Think of You' could be a ripped-from-the-headlines Hollywood romance

April 18, 2024 • Myah Ariel's debut is like a fizzy, angsty mash-up of Bolu Babalola and Kennedy Ryan as the challenges of doing meaningful work in Hollywood threaten two young lovers' romantic reunion.

5 new mysteries and thrillers for your nightstand this spring

April 17, 2024 • These new books will take you from murder in present-day Texas to cryptography in Cold War Berlin to an online community that might hold the solution to a missing-person case.

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The Wings Upon Her Back

Faith is a delicate thing. At its best, it can offer peace in times of crisis. At its worst, it can be a factor in breeding dissension, causing wars, and ruining lives. In Samantha Mills' novel The ...

Beyond the Book

Religious Deconstruction

The heart of the story in The Wings Upon Her Back lies in Zenya's hard-fought battle with her faith. Indoctrinated into the service of the mecha god in her youth, she has only ever known faith without...

The premise of her second novel All Fours is simple enough but also as strange as one would expect from Miranda July. An unnamed 45-year-old woman who is a writer/artist of modest fame plans a solo ...

Miranda July: The Essential Works

Miranda July is an artist who works successfully in multiple mediums, perhaps equally well-known for her films and her fiction. Born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, and raised in Berkeley, California, ...

Long Island

Readers last encountered Eilis Lacey in Colm Tóibín's best-known work, Brooklyn (2009). In Long Island , the author returns to his enigmatic heroine in 1976, twenty years after events in the ...

Fish and Chip Shops

In Colm Tóibín's novel Long Island, one of the main characters owns a chip shop in Enniscorthy, Ireland – a carryout restaurant that sells fish and chips (french fries in the United ...

The Witches of Bellinas

To Tansy and her new husband Guy, both longtime New Yorkers, moving to the coastal California community of Bellinas feels like a dream come true. They're drawn to the small town for more than just its...

The coastal California setting of The Witches of Bellinas is often beset by fierce and powerful winds. As the strong gusts rage, Mia, Bellinas's unofficial matriarch, explains to main character ...

I Just Keep Talking

Nell Irvin Painter's ninth book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays , is a collection of previously published work. The essays bear witness to history, art, politics, and black culture. From her ...

Sojourner Truth Was Invisible — Or Was She?

It was May of 1851 when 54-year-old Sojourner Truth took the stage. Truth, who would become one of the most famous women of any race of the nineteenth century, spoke her personal testimony to the ...

The Alternatives

The four Flattery sisters have lived apart for many years, each the holder of a doctorate and passionately pursuing her own path. Olwen, the eldest, is a geologist in Galway; her lectures warn of the ...

Queens of Rock: Women in Geology

In Caoilinn Hughes' The Alternatives, Olwen is a geologist profoundly concerned with the effects of climate change. As in other sciences, women remain underrepresented in geology, even though they ...

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020

Adam morgan picks parul sehgal on raven leilani, merve emre on lewis carroll, and more.

The pandemic and the birth of my second daughter prevented me from reading most of the books I wanted to in 2020. But I was able to read vicariously  through book critics, whose writing was a true source of comfort and escape for me this year. I’ve long told my students that criticism is literature—a genre of nonfiction that can and should be as insightful, experimental, and compelling as the art it grapples with—and the following critics have beautifully proven my point. The word “best” is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020.

Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land ( Chicago Tribune )

A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams , but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review with a personal essay—a hybrid form that has become my favorite subgenre of criticism.

“The presidential memoir so often falls flat because it works against the strengths of the memoir form. Rather than take a slice of one’s life to lay bare and come to a revelation about the self or the world, the presidential memoir seeks to take the sum of a life to defend one’s actions. These sorts of memoirs are an attempt maybe not to rewrite history, but to situate history in the most rosy frame. It is by nature defensive and in this book, we see Obama’s primary defensive tool, his prodigious mind and proclivity toward over-considering every detail.”

Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( The Point )

I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds. And speaking of that hybrid form above, Merve Emre is one of its finest practitioners. This piece made me laugh out loud and changed the way I think about Lewis Carroll.

“I lie awake at night and concentrate on Alice,  on why my children have fixated on this book at this particular moment. Part of it must be that I have told them it ‘takes place’ in Oxford, and now Oxford—or more specifically, the college whose grounds grow into our garden—marks the physical limits of their world. Now that we can no longer move about freely, no longer go to new places to see new things, we are trying to find ways to estrange the places and objects that are already familiar to us.”

Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster ( The New York Times Book Review )

Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any  Sehgal review and stop there.

“You may know of the hemline theory—the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. Perhaps publishing has a parallel; call it the blurb theory. The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice.”

Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( Vox )

Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’ s place alongside Wuthering Heights  and Jane Eyre  in the Romantic canon.

“[T]he heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author.”

Ismail Muhammad on Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ( The Atlantic )

Muhammad is a philosophical critic, so it’s always fun to see him tackle a book with big ideas. Here, he makes an enlightened connection between Wiener’s Silicon Valley memoir and Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, Liar’s Poker.

“Like Lewis, Wiener found ‘a way out of unhappiness’ by writing her own gimlet-eyed generational portrait that doubles as a cautionary tale of systemic dysfunction. But if her chronicle acquires anything like the must-read status that Lewis’s antic tale of a Princeton art-history major’s stint at Salomon Brothers did, it will be for a different reason. For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society.”

Hermione Hoby on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ( 4 Columns )

Hoby’s thousand-word review is a great example of a critic reading beyond the book to place it in context.

“When Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs  was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked.’”

Taylor Moore on C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold ( The A.V. Club )

Describing Zhang’s wildly imaginative debut novel is hard, but Moore manages to convey the book’s shape and texture in less than 800 words, along with some critical analysis.

“Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives (buzzards circling prey, saloons filled with seedy strangers), the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism. According to local lore, tigers lurk in the shadows, despite having died out ‘decades ago’ with the buffalo. There also exists a profound sense of loss for an exploited land, ‘stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living.’”

Grace Ebert on Paul Christman’s Midwest Futures ( Chicago Review of Books )

I love how Ebert brings her lived experience as a Midwesterner into this review of Christman’s essay collection. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books five years ago, but handed over the keys in July 2019.)

“I have a deep and genuine love for Wisconsin, for rural supper clubs that always offer a choice between chicken soup or an iceberg lettuce salad, and for driving back, country roads that seemingly are endless. This love, though, is conflicting. How can I sing along to Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and Merle Haggard knowing that my current political views are in complete opposition to the lyrics I croon with a twang in my voice?”

Michael Schaub on Bryan Washington’s Memorial ( NPR )

How do you review a book you fall in love with? It’s one of the most challenging assignments a critic can tackle. But Schaub is a pro; he falls in love with a few books every year.

“Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing—spare, unadorned, but beautiful—reads like the work of a writer who’s been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial  is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.”

Mesha Maren on Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season ( Southern Review of Books )

Maren opens with an irresistible comparison between Melchor’s irreverent novel and medieval surrealist art. (Another Disclosure: I founded the Southern Review of Books in early 2020.)

“Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.”

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Darryl Pinckney, Oxford, 1991; photograph by Dominique Nabokov

This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review ’s contributors; read past ones here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

In our May 9 issue, Darryl Pinckney reviews an extensive survey of “the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “If anything,” he writes, “the exhibition liberates the individual African American artist. It says how eclectic the past is in its artistic practices and styles.” Pinckney’s review offers a tour of those styles: “splendid, delicate likenesses of Alain Locke and Langston Hughes” by Winold Reiss; a “hallucinatory male nude” by Beauford Delaney; the “stylized and angular” figures of Aaron Douglas; the “formally inventive genre scenes” of Archibald Motley.

Since his first contribution in 1977, Pinckney has written more than a hundred essays for the Review , including on a number of figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance— Hughes , Zora Neale Hurston , Claude McKay , Nella Larsen , Countee Cullen —and on the history of the neighborhood itself. “Harlem exported its tempo, its attitude,” he wrote in 1982 , “and helped make Manhattan the capital of the twentieth century.” Among his other subjects have been the election of Barack Obama , “ Princess Margaret and her scandals ,” Eighties novels “ written from the inside of youth ,” and the life and work of James Baldwin . He is the author of two novels and four books of nonfiction, most recently Come Back in September (2022), a memoir of his years working at the Review and his friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick.

We e-mailed about the Metropolitan exhibition, the centenary days of HBCUs, and why “Toni Morrison didn’t capitalize black.”

Daniel Drake: You open your review with a survey of contemporaneous writing about the Harlem Renaissance. Why do you think writers like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke were so “reserved,” as you put it, in their assessments of the visual art coming out of that period, when they were otherwise quite effusive about the literary, political, and cultural production in black New York?

Darryl Pinckney: Johnson and Locke were writing about African American art at what was the start of the careers of most of the artists in the Harlem Renaissance exhibition. There was not as yet much to see of their work. Artists like the sculptor Richmond Barthé went on working for decades, and he lived outside New York in those years. Meta Warrick Fuller belonged to an older generation, as did Augusta Savage. Then, too, the Harlem Renaissance itself was a brief period, little more than a decade, from 1919 to 1931. Was it David Levering Lewis and Jervis Anderson in their histories who date its beginning from James Reese Europe’s band and its first performances in France, with the black soldiers who were in no hurry to come back to the US? Someone else—I forget who—said that the New Negro movement began earlier, with the black boxer Jack Johnson. His victories got films of his bouts banned in the US under interstate commerce laws.

For Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance began with the new music, with the Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle musical of 1921, Shuffle Along . For him, the Harlem Renaissance ended after the stock market crash. He says the party stopped with the funeral of A’Lelia Walker in 1931. That was also the year black gangsters lost control of the numbers racket in Harlem. Gilbert Osofsky in his study from 1963, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto , tells the story of Harlem’s development that Johnson does not. It was overcrowded and poor from the get-go, which was why figures such as the poet Sterling Brown bitterly asserted that the Harlem Renaissance had little to do with or to offer most African Americans. Brown pointed out that more books by African American authors were published in the 1930s than in the 1920s—Zora Neale Hurston’s among them. But several writers of the Harlem Renaissance could not sustain careers during the Depression. George Wylie Henderson, for example, faded away after having published two novels.

For me, the exhibition took me back to tours of Historic Black Colleges and Universities I made with my parents in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the centenary days of many of these institutions, to the libraries, administration buildings, chapels, and galleries that had murals on themes of Negro histories and portrait after portrait of outstanding personalities. As a teenager I went around somewhat wearied by the duty of the visits. Seeing this kind of art again, gathered together, was like a reproach, but also yet another chance to appreciate what I’d failed to early on.

The whole thing was a discovery. Not all of it would be what anyone would call great art, but that is not the point here. However, an earlier Met exhibition that intended to give Juan de Pareja his due did him little favor. The aim was to show that he was more than a bondsman to Velázquez, which Velázquez clearly understood, given the training he afforded de Pareja. De Pareja was an accomplished painter; but Velázquez had genius, and placing their work side-by-side made the difference dramatic.

Were there any artists or works that you had to cut from your review, or couldn’t fit in the first place, that you think still merit some attention?

Of course there is too much for one exhibition to cover. Graphic art, posters, the music, and so on. It was primarily a literary movement, to start with anyway. By the way, I misattributed a still life in my notes, which led me to say, incorrectly, that Lois Mailou Jones was not included in the exhibition.

I was struck by your observation that representational art predominates over “the purely abstract” at the exhibition, and, perhaps by extension, in the Harlem Renaissance. Why do you think this was the case?

Much American art after the rise of the abstract expressionists was regarded as slightly old-fashioned and out of it, and I remember discussions in which the abstract was promoted as a way for African Americans to escape what were thought of as the burdens of the representational. As if African American history were a limitation. These days a black figure—don’t capitalize me; Toni Morrison didn’t capitalize black; to do so inscribes further the very otherness we’re supposed to be getting rid of—immediately dignifies a work or gives it a meaning it perhaps has not really earned. 

What writing are you working on currently?

I am trying to trace the history of my family during slavery and to write about this journey in the archives. One of the awful things about the Pinckneys of South Carolina is that they were such good businesspeople that they kept detailed records and ledgers, and so I have many clues because my ancestors were considered property. I read an article that ended with a chilling line about how those who declined to take the master’s name can no longer be traced. But two Easters ago I met in Beaufort, South Carolina, a white Pinckney for the first time and was disturbed that I was not disturbed by how much I liked her. My trainer said he would have slugged her. She was ninety-four years old at the time. Then someone I respect a great deal revealed that his mother is a Pinckney, so there you go.

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Darryl Pinckney’s most recent work is a memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan . (May 2024)

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The Post regularly compiles the best books released in the past month. In the meantime, take a look at  our favorite titles released in the last year.

This week’s best new books

The friday afternoon club: a family memoir.

Griffin Dunne  (Penguin Press) The actor/writer/director — and son of Vanity Fair crime reporter Dominick Dunne — recalls growing up in rarefied circles in Hollywood and Manhattan and getting kicked out of boarding school. Sean Connery rescued him from drowning when he was eight years old. In his early teens, he went to a launch party for Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” hosted by his aunt Joan Didion — in an attempt to hook up with Janis Joplin. In his twenties, he was roommates and best pals with Carrie Fisher while she was filming “Star Wars.” 

Godwin: A Novel

Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon) O’Neill’s first novel, 2008’s Pen/Faulkner-award winning “Netherland,” used cricket as a window into post-9/11 immigrant life in New York City. His latest employs soccer to examine global capitalism and the aftermath of colonialism. A British soccer agent convinces his half-brother, a writer based in Pittsburgh, to go with him to Africa to scout a talented teen whom he thinks could be the next big football phenom.

Soldier Sailor: A Novel

  Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water 

  Amorina Kingdon  (Crown) We assume the depths of the ocean to be quiet and peaceful, but they’re not. Kingdon, an award-winning science writer, examines the rich underwater soundscape, from whalesongs to aquatic volcanoes, and the unique way sound travels in the ocean, depending on the current, temperature and salinity.   

Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections

In the Shadows: True Stories of High-Stakes Negotiations to Free Americans Captured Abroad

Mickey Bergman and Ellis Henican (Center Street)  Bergman, who helped secure the release of Brittney Griner, shares tales of high-level hostage negotiations with foreign adversaries. 

Best new book releases from last week

Entrances and exits.

Michael Richards (Permuted Press) The “Seinfeld” actor, who played Kramer on the beloved sitcom, dishes on Jason Alexander almost quitting the show because he wanted more screentime and opens up about his prostate cancer diagnosis. He also gets into his anger issues and what led to his 2006 racist rant at a Los Angeles comedy club.

Michael Crichton and James Patterson (Little, Brown and Company) Crichton — the creator of “Jurassic Park,” “ER,” “Westworld” and “Twister” — was working on a new book when he passed away from cancer in 2008. His wife, Sherri Crichton, eventually enlisted the help of another blockbuster author, Patterson, to help finish the manuscript, which centers around a volcanic eruption that’s about to destroy the big island of Hawaii — and a military secret that’s even more explosive.

Life’s Too Short: A Memoir

Darius Rucker (Dey Street Books) Rucker shares his journey from being raised by a single mom in Charleston, SC, and co-founding Hootie and the Blowfish in college to wild times on the road and becoming a country star.

Millionaire Mission: A 9-Step System to Level Up Your Finances and Build Wealth

Brian Preston (Matt Holt) “The Money Guy” show founder and host offers up a practical, no-nonsense approach for getting your finances in order and planning for the future.

The Coast Road: A Novel

Alan Murrin (HarperVia) This debut is being hailed as a “perfect book club read” and drawing comparisons to “Big Little Lies” and Colm Tóibín. It’s 1994 in Ireland and divorce is illegal. A woman leaves her family to have an affair with a married man, and when she returns her husband won’t let her see her kids. She must rely on the kindness of a neighbor, who is also trapped in an unhappy marriage, to get access to her children. The arrangement will end up benefiting one woman while proving detrimental to the other.

A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

Kevin Fedarko (Scribner) Two friends attempt to hike from one end of the canyon to the other and soon realize it’s not a “walk in the park.” They end up taking more than a year to traverse the rugged, dangerous terrain racking up more than 750 miles.

Best new book releases from the week of May 26th

One perfect couple.

Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press) It’s Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” meets “Love Island.” Five couples are set to compete on a TV reality show in a tropical paradise called “Ever After Island.” But soon after they arrive at their remote, romantic destination, things start to go wrong, and the couples find themselves fighting to survive.

Mind Games: A Novel

Nora Roberts (St. Martin’s Press) A young woman named Thea has visions that predicted the murder of her parents when she was 12 and helped to send their killer to jail. But the man who destroyed her family is out for revenge — and he has similar psychic gifts.

Day Trading Attention

Gary Vaynerchuk (Harper Business) The entrepreneur and bestselling author posits that understanding “underpriced attention” on social media is crucial to effectively building a business or following.

Tom Clancy Act Of Defiance

Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) The 24th Jack Ryan novel finds President Ryan navigating the unexpected launch of Russia’s deadliest submarine. The circumstances are similar to those four decades earlier when Ryan, then a young CIA analyst, successfully dealt with a Soviet sub named Red October.

Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe

Sean Carroll (Dutton) The second book in “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe” series has the professor and “Mindscape” podcast host breaking down quantum physics and other big ideas for a general audience.

What a Fool Believes

Michael McDonald and Paul Reiser (Dey Street Books) The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan keyboardist and vocalist shares his journey from Missouri high school dropout to Rock ‘n’ Roll hall of famer. His buddy, actor-comedian Paul Reiser, comes along for the ride.

Best book releases from the week of May 19th

The ministry of time.

Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press) This spy romance thriller comedy is already set to be a six-part BBC series from top indie entertainment company A24. In the near future, a millennial civil servant takes on a new job that has her helping with a government time travel experiment — and falling in love with a Victorian explorer who initially died in 1845.

Think Twice

Harlan Coben (Grand Central Publishing) The latest Myron Bolitar novel finds the temperamental-but-lovable sports agent investigating a longtime client — a star basketball coach-turned-murder suspect who may have faked his own death.

Wives Like Us

Plum Sykes (Harper) The “Bergdorf Blondes” author sets her shrewd eyes on the wealthy set in the English countryside. An American divorcee, three wealthy wives and two tycoons mix and mingle in a sprawling Cotswold estate.

Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

Casey Means (Avery) Means, a medical doctor and the co-founder of the buzzy glucose-monitoring service Levels, posits that metabolic health is the key to feeling better and preventing disease.

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation

Victor David Hanson (Basic Books) The bestselling military historian and author of “The Case for Trump” looks at conquests through the ages — from Thebes to Tenochtitlán —that have ended in utter obliteration.

Very Bad Company: A Novel

Emma Rosenblum In this satire of corporate culture from the bestselling author of “Bad Summer People,” a group of employees from a buzzy startup head to Miami for a fancy retreat. But, after the first night, a high-level executive vanishes, and everyone scrambles to pretend it’s all OK.

Best book releases from the week of May 12th

Five broken blades.

Mai Corland (Red Tower Books) This epic fantasy is expected to be another blockbuster for the publisher behind Rebecca Yarros’s hit “Empyrean” series. The first book in a trilogy, it’s inspired by Korean legend and told from the point of view of six different characters — five of them are assassins all trying to kill the same king.

24th Hour: Is This the End?

James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (Little, Brown and Company) The latest “Women’s Murder Club” installment finds San Francisco police sergeant Lindsay Boxer and Co. investigating the murder of a prominent billionaire couple.

Shanghailanders: A Novel

Juli Min (Spiegel & Grau) This debut starts in 2040 and works backwards to 2014 to tell the story of a sophisticated Chinese family headed by a wealthy Shanghai businessman and an elegant Japanese-French woman.

Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

Michelle T. King (W. W. Norton & Company) Fu has been called “the Julia Child of Chinese food.” King traces her transformation from a Taiwanese housewife with only basic kitchen skills to global celebrity chef, whom many credit with bringing Chinese food to America.

Clive Cussler: The Heist

Jack Du Brul (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) The 14th Isaac Bell adventure book is set in 1914, as Detective Bell investigates the link between an attack on Woodrow Wilson’s yacht, a dead heiress in Newport and a plan to steal billions from the Federal Reserve.

I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv

Illia Ponomarenko (Bloomsbury) Ponomarenko, a reporter for the Kviv Independent, was on the front lines when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He gives a personal account of the attacks and how Ukrainians united to fight back.

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17 book review examples to help you write the perfect review.

It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?

As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. Goodreads and other review sites , in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view!

In this post, we compiled 17 prototypical book review examples in multiple genres to help you figure out how to write the perfect review . If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review.

Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out Reedsy Discovery , where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews! To register as a book reviewer, sign up here.

Pro-tip : But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz:

Should you become a book reviewer?

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What must a book review contain?

Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.)

In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our book review templates . These include:

• A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book. 
• A book review will offer an evaluation of the work. 
• A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience. 

If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and style with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves.

Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action.

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Book review examples for fiction books

Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on how well the story was told .

That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions of the book to produce a clear, informative, and concise review.

Note: Some of the book review examples run very long. If a book review is truncated in this post, we’ve indicated by including a […] at the end, but you can always read the entire review if you click on the link provided.

Examples of literary fiction book reviews

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man :

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.

His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.

This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Lyndsey reviews George Orwell’s 1984 on Goodreads:

YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good." Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully. […]

The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry :

Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.

The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.

Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. […]

Emily W. Thompson reviews Michael Doane's The Crossing on Reedsy Discovery :

In Doane’s debut novel, a young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results.

An unnamed protagonist (The Narrator) is dealing with heartbreak. His love, determined to see the world, sets out for Portland, Oregon. But he’s a small-town boy who hasn’t traveled much. So, the Narrator mourns her loss and hides from life, throwing himself into rehabbing an old motorcycle. Until one day, he takes a leap; he packs his bike and a few belongings and heads out to find the Girl.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, Doane offers a coming of age story about a man finding himself on the backroads of America. Doane’s a gifted writer with fluid prose and insightful observations, using The Narrator’s personal interactions to illuminate the diversity of the United States.

The Narrator initially sticks to the highways, trying to make it to the West Coast as quickly as possible. But a hitchhiker named Duke convinces him to get off the beaten path and enjoy the ride. “There’s not a place that’s like any other,” [39] Dukes contends, and The Narrator realizes he’s right. Suddenly, the trip is about the journey, not just the destination. The Narrator ditches his truck and traverses the deserts and mountains on his bike. He destroys his phone, cutting off ties with his past and living only in the moment.

As he crosses the country, The Narrator connects with several unique personalities whose experiences and views deeply impact his own. Duke, the complicated cowboy and drifter, who opens The Narrator’s eyes to a larger world. Zooey, the waitress in Colorado who opens his heart and reminds him that love can be found in this big world. And Rosie, The Narrator’s sweet landlady in Portland, who helps piece him back together both physically and emotionally.

This supporting cast of characters is excellent. Duke, in particular, is wonderfully nuanced and complicated. He’s a throwback to another time, a man without a cell phone who reads Sartre and sleeps under the stars. Yet he’s also a grifter with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude that harms those around him. It’s fascinating to watch The Narrator wrestle with Duke’s behavior, trying to determine which to model and which to discard.

Doane creates a relatable protagonist in The Narrator, whose personal growth doesn’t erase his faults. His willingness to hit the road with few resources is admirable, and he’s prescient enough to recognize the jealousy of those who cannot or will not take the leap. His encounters with new foods, places, and people broaden his horizons. Yet his immaturity and selfishness persist. He tells Rosie she’s been a good mother to him but chooses to ignore the continuing concern from his own parents as he effectively disappears from his old life.

Despite his flaws, it’s a pleasure to accompany The Narrator on his physical and emotional journey. The unexpected ending is a fitting denouement to an epic and memorable road trip.

The Book Smugglers review Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls :

I am still dipping my toes into the literally fiction pool, finding what works for me and what doesn’t. Books like The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray are definitely my cup of tea.

Althea and Proctor Cochran had been pillars of their economically disadvantaged community for years – with their local restaurant/small market and their charity drives. Until they are found guilty of fraud for stealing and keeping most of the money they raised and sent to jail. Now disgraced, their entire family is suffering the consequences, specially their twin teenage daughters Baby Vi and Kim.  To complicate matters even more: Kim was actually the one to call the police on her parents after yet another fight with her mother. […]

Examples of children’s and YA fiction book reviews

The Book Hookup reviews Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give :

♥ Quick Thoughts and Rating: 5 stars! I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to tackle the voice of a movement like Black Lives Matter, but I do know that Thomas did it with a finesse only a talented author like herself possibly could. With an unapologetically realistic delivery packed with emotion, The Hate U Give is a crucially important portrayal of the difficulties minorities face in our country every single day. I have no doubt that this book will be met with resistance by some (possibly many) and slapped with a “controversial” label, but if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to walk in a POC’s shoes, then I feel like this is an unflinchingly honest place to start.

In Angie Thomas’s debut novel, Starr Carter bursts on to the YA scene with both heart-wrecking and heartwarming sincerity. This author is definitely one to watch.

♥ Review: The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me both eager to get my hands on it and terrified to read it. I mean, what if I was to be the one person that didn’t love it as much as others? (That seems silly now because of how truly mesmerizing THUG was in the most heartbreakingly realistic way.) However, with the relevancy of its summary in regards to the unjust predicaments POC currently face in the US, I knew this one was a must-read, so I was ready to set my fears aside and dive in. That said, I had an altogether more personal, ulterior motive for wanting to read this book. […]

The New York Times reviews Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood :

Alice Crewe (a last name she’s chosen for herself) is a fairy tale legacy: the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, author of a collection of dark-as-night fairy tales called “Tales From the Hinterland.” The book has a cult following, and though Alice has never met her grandmother, she’s learned a little about her through internet research. She hasn’t read the stories, because her mother, Ella Proserpine, forbids it.

Alice and Ella have moved from place to place in an attempt to avoid the “bad luck” that seems to follow them. Weird things have happened. As a child, Alice was kidnapped by a man who took her on a road trip to find her grandmother; he was stopped by the police before they did so. When at 17 she sees that man again, unchanged despite the years, Alice panics. Then Ella goes missing, and Alice turns to Ellery Finch, a schoolmate who’s an Althea Proserpine superfan, for help in tracking down her mother. Not only has Finch read every fairy tale in the collection, but handily, he remembers them, sharing them with Alice as they journey to the mysterious Hazel Wood, the estate of her now-dead grandmother, where they hope to find Ella.

“The Hazel Wood” starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. (The fairy stories Finch relays, which Albert includes as their own chapters, are as creepy and evocative as you’d hope.) Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a very good book. It’s a captivating debut. […]

James reviews Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon on Goodreads:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the books that followers of my blog voted as a must-read for our Children's Book August 2018 Readathon. Come check it out and join the next few weeks!

This picture book was such a delight. I hadn't remembered reading it when I was a child, but it might have been read to me... either way, it was like a whole new experience! It's always so difficult to convince a child to fall asleep at night. I don't have kids, but I do have a 5-month-old puppy who whines for 5 minutes every night when he goes in his cage/crate (hopefully he'll be fully housebroken soon so he can roam around when he wants). I can only imagine! I babysat a lot as a teenager and I have tons of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, so I've been through it before, too. This was a believable experience, and it really helps show kids how to relax and just let go when it's time to sleep.

The bunny's are adorable. The rhymes are exquisite. I found it pretty fun, but possibly a little dated given many of those things aren't normal routines anymore. But the lessons to take from it are still powerful. Loved it! I want to sample some more books by this fine author and her illustrators.

Publishers Weekly reviews Elizabeth Lilly’s Geraldine :

This funny, thoroughly accomplished debut opens with two words: “I’m moving.” They’re spoken by the title character while she swoons across her family’s ottoman, and because Geraldine is a giraffe, her full-on melancholy mode is quite a spectacle. But while Geraldine may be a drama queen (even her mother says so), it won’t take readers long to warm up to her. The move takes Geraldine from Giraffe City, where everyone is like her, to a new school, where everyone else is human. Suddenly, the former extrovert becomes “That Giraffe Girl,” and all she wants to do is hide, which is pretty much impossible. “Even my voice tries to hide,” she says, in the book’s most poignant moment. “It’s gotten quiet and whispery.” Then she meets Cassie, who, though human, is also an outlier (“I’m that girl who wears glasses and likes MATH and always organizes her food”), and things begin to look up.

Lilly’s watercolor-and-ink drawings are as vividly comic and emotionally astute as her writing; just when readers think there are no more ways for Geraldine to contort her long neck, this highly promising talent comes up with something new.

Examples of genre fiction book reviews

Karlyn P reviews Nora Roberts’ Dark Witch , a paranormal romance novel , on Goodreads:

4 stars. Great world-building, weak romance, but still worth the read.

I hesitate to describe this book as a 'romance' novel simply because the book spent little time actually exploring the romance between Iona and Boyle. Sure, there IS a romance in this novel. Sprinkled throughout the book are a few scenes where Iona and Boyle meet, chat, wink at each, flirt some more, sleep together, have a misunderstanding, make up, and then profess their undying love. Very formulaic stuff, and all woven around the more important parts of this book.

The meat of this book is far more focused on the story of the Dark witch and her magically-gifted descendants living in Ireland. Despite being weak on the romance, I really enjoyed it. I think the book is probably better for it, because the romance itself was pretty lackluster stuff.

I absolutely plan to stick with this series as I enjoyed the world building, loved the Ireland setting, and was intrigued by all of the secondary characters. However, If you read Nora Roberts strictly for the romance scenes, this one might disappoint. But if you enjoy a solid background story with some dark magic and prophesies, you might enjoy it as much as I did.

I listened to this one on audio, and felt the narration was excellent.

Emily May reviews R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy Wars , an epic fantasy novel , on Goodreads:

“But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain.”

Holy hell, what did I just read??

➽ A fantasy military school

➽ A rich world based on modern Chinese history

➽ Shamans and gods

➽ Detailed characterization leading to unforgettable characters

➽ Adorable, opium-smoking mentors

That's a basic list, but this book is all of that and SO MUCH MORE. I know 100% that The Poppy War will be one of my best reads of 2018.

Isn't it just so great when you find one of those books that completely drags you in, makes you fall in love with the characters, and demands that you sit on the edge of your seat for every horrific, nail-biting moment of it? This is one of those books for me. And I must issue a serious content warning: this book explores some very dark themes. Proceed with caution (or not at all) if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of war, drug use and addiction, genocide, racism, sexism, ableism, self-harm, torture, and rape (off-page but extremely horrific).

Because, despite the fairly innocuous first 200 pages, the title speaks the truth: this is a book about war. All of its horrors and atrocities. It is not sugar-coated, and it is often graphic. The "poppy" aspect refers to opium, which is a big part of this book. It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking.

Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry’s Freefall , a crime novel:

In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it’s a more subtle process, and that’s OK too. So where does Freefall fit into the sliding scale?

In truth, it’s not clear. This is a novel with a thrilling concept at its core. A woman survives plane crash, then runs for her life. However, it is the subtleties at play that will draw you in like a spider beckoning to an unwitting fly.

Like the heroine in Sharon Bolton’s Dead Woman Walking, Allison is lucky to be alive. She was the only passenger in a private plane, belonging to her fiancé, Ben, who was piloting the expensive aircraft, when it came down in woodlands in the Colorado Rockies. Ally is also the only survivor, but rather than sitting back and waiting for rescue, she is soon pulling together items that may help her survive a little longer – first aid kit, energy bars, warm clothes, trainers – before fleeing the scene. If you’re hearing the faint sound of alarm bells ringing, get used to it. There’s much, much more to learn about Ally before this tale is over.

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel :

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three.

Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Book review examples for non-fiction books

Nonfiction books are generally written to inform readers about a certain topic. As such, the focus of a nonfiction book review will be on the clarity and effectiveness of this communication . In carrying this out, a book review may analyze the author’s source materials and assess the thesis in order to determine whether or not the book meets expectations.

Again, we’ve included abbreviated versions of long reviews here, so feel free to click on the link to read the entire piece!

The Washington Post reviews David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon :

The arc of David Grann’s career reminds one of a software whiz-kid or a latest-thing talk-show host — certainly not an investigative reporter, even if he is one of the best in the business. The newly released movie of his first book, “The Lost City of Z,” is generating all kinds of Oscar talk, and now comes the release of his second book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film rights to which have already been sold for $5 million in what one industry journal called the “biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory.”

Grann deserves the attention. He’s canny about the stories he chases, he’s willing to go anywhere to chase them, and he’s a maestro in his ability to parcel out information at just the right clip: a hint here, a shading of meaning there, a smartly paced buildup of multiple possibilities followed by an inevitable reversal of readerly expectations or, in some cases, by a thrilling and dislocating pull of the entire narrative rug.

All of these strengths are on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Around the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage lands in the Oklahoma Territory, lands that were soon to become part of the state of Oklahoma. Through foresight and legal maneuvering, the Osage found a way to permanently attach that oil to themselves and shield it from the prying hands of white interlopers; this mechanism was known as “headrights,” which forbade the outright sale of oil rights and granted each full member of the tribe — and, supposedly, no one else — a share in the proceeds from any lease arrangement. For a while, the fail-safes did their job, and the Osage got rich — diamond-ring and chauffeured-car and imported-French-fashion rich — following which quite a large group of white men started to work like devils to separate the Osage from their money. And soon enough, and predictably enough, this work involved murder. Here in Jazz Age America’s most isolated of locales, dozens or even hundreds of Osage in possession of great fortunes — and of the potential for even greater fortunes in the future — were dispatched by poison, by gunshot and by dynamite. […]

Stacked Books reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers :

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. Friends and co-workers tell me that his subjects are interesting and his writing style is easy to follow without talking down to the reader. I wasn’t disappointed with Outliers. In it, Gladwell tackles the subject of success – how people obtain it and what contributes to extraordinary success as opposed to everyday success.

The thesis – that our success depends much more on circumstances out of our control than any effort we put forth – isn’t exactly revolutionary. Most of us know it to be true. However, I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most of us also believe that we if we just try that much harder and develop our talent that much further, it will be enough to become wildly successful, despite bad or just mediocre beginnings. Not so, says Gladwell.

Most of the evidence Gladwell gives us is anecdotal, which is my favorite kind to read. I can’t really speak to how scientifically valid it is, but it sure makes for engrossing listening. For example, did you know that successful hockey players are almost all born in January, February, or March? Kids born during these months are older than the others kids when they start playing in the youth leagues, which means they’re already better at the game (because they’re bigger). Thus, they get more play time, which means their skill increases at a faster rate, and it compounds as time goes by. Within a few years, they’re much, much better than the kids born just a few months later in the year. Basically, these kids’ birthdates are a huge factor in their success as adults – and it’s nothing they can do anything about. If anyone could make hockey interesting to a Texan who only grudgingly admits the sport even exists, it’s Gladwell. […]

Quill and Quire reviews Rick Prashaw’s Soar, Adam, Soar :

Ten years ago, I read a book called Almost Perfect. The young-adult novel by Brian Katcher won some awards and was held up as a powerful, nuanced portrayal of a young trans person. But the reality did not live up to the book’s billing. Instead, it turned out to be a one-dimensional and highly fetishized portrait of a trans person’s life, one that was nevertheless repeatedly dubbed “realistic” and “affecting” by non-transgender readers possessing only a vague, mass-market understanding of trans experiences.

In the intervening decade, trans narratives have emerged further into the literary spotlight, but those authored by trans people ourselves – and by trans men in particular – have seemed to fall under the shadow of cisgender sensationalized imaginings. Two current Canadian releases – Soar, Adam, Soar and This One Looks Like a Boy – provide a pointed object lesson into why trans-authored work about transgender experiences remains critical.

To be fair, Soar, Adam, Soar isn’t just a story about a trans man. It’s also a story about epilepsy, the medical establishment, and coming of age as seen through a grieving father’s eyes. Adam, Prashaw’s trans son, died unexpectedly at age 22. Woven through the elder Prashaw’s narrative are excerpts from Adam’s social media posts, giving us glimpses into the young man’s interior life as he traverses his late teens and early 20s. […]

Book Geeks reviews Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love :

WRITING STYLE: 3.5/5

SUBJECT: 4/5

CANDIDNESS: 4.5/5

RELEVANCE: 3.5/5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 3.5/5

“Eat Pray Love” is so popular that it is almost impossible to not read it. Having felt ashamed many times on my not having read this book, I quietly ordered the book (before I saw the movie) from amazon.in and sat down to read it. I don’t remember what I expected it to be – maybe more like a chick lit thing but it turned out quite different. The book is a real story and is a short journal from the time when its writer went travelling to three different countries in pursuit of three different things – Italy (Pleasure), India (Spirituality), Bali (Balance) and this is what corresponds to the book’s name – EAT (in Italy), PRAY (in India) and LOVE (in Bali, Indonesia). These are also the three Is – ITALY, INDIA, INDONESIA.

Though she had everything a middle-aged American woman can aspire for – MONEY, CAREER, FRIENDS, HUSBAND; Elizabeth was not happy in her life, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. Having suffered a terrible divorce and terrible breakup soon after, Elizabeth was shattered. She didn’t know where to go and what to do – all she knew was that she wanted to run away. So she set out on a weird adventure – she will go to three countries in a year and see if she can find out what she was looking for in life. This book is about that life changing journey that she takes for one whole year. […]

Emily May reviews Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Goodreads:

Look, I'm not a happy crier. I might cry at songs about leaving and missing someone; I might cry at books where things don't work out; I might cry at movies where someone dies. I've just never really understood why people get all choked up over happy, inspirational things. But Michelle Obama's kindness and empathy changed that. This book had me in tears for all the right reasons.

This is not really a book about politics, though political experiences obviously do come into it. It's a shame that some will dismiss this book because of a difference in political opinion, when it is really about a woman's life. About growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago; about getting married and struggling to maintain that marriage; about motherhood; about being thrown into an amazing and terrifying position.

I hate words like "inspirational" because they've become so overdone and cheesy, but I just have to say it-- Michelle Obama is an inspiration. I had the privilege of seeing her speak at The Forum in Inglewood, and she is one of the warmest, funniest, smartest, down-to-earth people I have ever seen in this world.

And yes, I know we present what we want the world to see, but I truly do think it's genuine. I think she is someone who really cares about people - especially kids - and wants to give them better lives and opportunities.

She's obviously intelligent, but she also doesn't gussy up her words. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She's been one of the most powerful women in the world, she's been a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she's had her own successful career, and yet she has remained throughout that same girl - Michelle Robinson - from a working class family in Chicago.

I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better idea of how to write a book review. You might be wondering how to put all of this knowledge into action now! Many book reviewers start out by setting up a book blog. If you don’t have time to research the intricacies of HTML, check out Reedsy Discovery — where you can read indie books for free and review them without going through the hassle of creating a blog. To register as a book reviewer , go here .

And if you’d like to see even more book review examples, simply go to this directory of book review blogs and click on any one of them to see a wealth of good book reviews. Beyond that, it's up to you to pick up a book and pen — and start reviewing!

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A new ‘Hunger Games’ book — and movie — is coming

FILE - Suzanne Collins arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1" at the Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Nov. 17, 2014. Collins is returning to the ravaged, post-apocalyptic land of Panem for a new “The Hunger Games” novel. Scholastic announced Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping” will be published March 18, 2025. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Inspired by an 18th century Scottish philosopher and the modern scourge of misinformation, Suzanne Collins is returning to the ravaged, post-apocalyptic land of Panem for a new “The Hunger Games” novel.

Scholastic announced Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping,” the fifth volume of Collins’ blockbuster dystopian series, will be published March 18, 2025. The new book begins with the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, set 24 years before the original “Hunger Games” novel, which came out in 2008, and 40 years after Collins’ most recent book, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”

Lionsgate, which has released film adaptations of all four previous “Hunger Games” books, announced later on Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping” will open in theaters on Nov. 20, 2026. Francis Lawrence, who has worked on all but the first “Hunger Games” movie, will return as director.

The first four “Hunger Games” books have sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. Collins had seemingly ended the series after the 2010 publication of “Mockingjay,” writing in 2015 that it was “time to move on to other lands.” But four years later, she stunned readers and the publishing world when she revealed she was working on what became “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” released in 2020 and set 64 years before the first book.

Collins has drawn upon Greek mythology and the Roman gladiator games for her earlier “Hunger Games” books. But for the upcoming novel, she cites the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.

“With ‘Sunrise on the Reaping,’ I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’” Collins said in a statement. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

The “Hunger Games” movies are a multibillion dollar franchise for Lionsgate. Jennifer Lawrence portrayed heroine Katniss Everdeen in the film versions of “The Hunger Games,” “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay,” the last of which came out in two installments. Other featured actors have included Philip Seymour Hoffman, Josh Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland.

“Suzanne Collins is a master storyteller and our creative north star,” Lionsgate chair Adam Fogelson said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more fortunate than to be guided and trusted by a collaborator whose talent and imagination are so consistently brilliant.”

The film version of “Songbirds and Snakes,” starring Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler, came out last year. This fall, a “Hunger Games” stage production is scheduled to debut in London.

‘The Acolyte’ Joins ‘Andor’ as Another ‘Star Wars’ Success on Disney+: TV Review

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Yet “The Acolyte” is quick to explain the relationship between Stenberg’s two characters, both to the audience and Osha’s investigators. The show, it turns out, has more interesting topics to turn to, like the relationship between Osha and her onetime mentor Sol (“Squid Game” star Lee Jung-jae). Along with Indara, Sol was once stationed on Osha’s home planet, where a fire took the lives of her entire family — including, or so she thought, her twin sister, Mae. A then eight-year-old Osha went to Coruscant with Sol, who retains a guilt-inflected soft spot for his erstwhile student, while Mae trained with an anonymous master. No one says the words “dark side” or “Sith,” but the red lightsaber speaks for itself.

There are obvious echoes of Luke and Leia in the story of twins separated as young children, and Darth Vader in a villain who wears a mask and speaks with a distorted voice. But later episodes contain revelations that subvert, and even threaten to upend, our notions of the Jedi and binary conception of the Force.

The Jedi’s fallibility has long been one of the most interesting, and underexplored, “Star Wars” themes. In their pursuit of a chosen one, the warrior monks inadvertently planted the seeds of their own destruction; Luke Skywalker grew so disillusioned with his life’s work that he vowed the order would die with him. “Star Wars” has always, on some level, been a Greek tragedy disguised as a children’s blockbuster. But while a slew of spinoffs can dilute a brand’s cachet, as they have for corporate sibling Marvel, they can also allow for a narrow focus. When not forced to share (literal) space with armies and outlaws, the Jedi have never been as centered, nor as scrutinized, as they are in “The Acolyte.”

Lee’s Sol emerges as the empathetic face of this ambivalence. Viewers familiar with the actor’s work in South Korea won’t be surprised to see him as an action hero with a heart, but to Americans who know him solely from the Netflix sensation, the role is a show of range on one of the biggest stages in English-language media. Stenberg, of course, gets to embrace her dual role, developing Mae and Osha’s physicalities as well as their differing points of view on the Jedi. (Though it says something that even defender Osha chose not to join their ranks because she couldn’t let go of emotion in her unprocessed grief.) Manny Jacinto plays Mae’s accomplice, a performance that recalls his bumbling, goofy “The Good Place” character with more sinister undertones, and Dafne Keen of “His Dark Materials” conveys her sharply inquisitive young Padawan from under a mountain of makeup and CGI. Together, the ensemble riffs on established “Star Wars” types while making marks of their own.

The first two episodes of “The Acolyte” will launch on Disney+ on June 4 at 6 p.m. PT, with remaining episodes streaming weekly on Tuesdays.

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