Archives of "The BookBrowse Review": Reviews, previews, back-stories, news

Dear BookBrowsers,

Still need more fiction for your summer TBR? This issue will fix that. We cover Taylor Jenkins Reid's Atmosphere, bringing to life the early days of NASA's Space Shuttle program, and Susan Choi's Flashlight, which mixes contemporary and historical timelines between the United States, Japan, and Korea. Dennard Dayle's How to Dodge a Cannonball, another ambitious novel that takes on aspects of American history, is a soberingly hilarious satire featuring a scrappy, opportunistic Civil War flag bearer.

The Compound by Aisling Rawle dissects escapism and consumerism through a reality show whose participants live in a desert compound, having willingly left the world behind. Benedict Nguyễn's Hot Girls with Balls builds a universe in which pro volleyball is big, two Asian American trans women athletes play it, and internet fame is an additional ever-present game. UnWorld by Jayson Greene, set in a future where mind uploading is possible, explores questions about what makes us who we are.

For those seeking a pleasant intellectual diversion, Nell Stevens' The Original tells the tale of an aspiring art forger in turn-of-the-20th-century England. Our accompanying article studies a real-life painting that serves as the original to one of her fictional forgeries, Van Eyck's mysterious and alluring Arnolfini portrait. And lovers of thrillers won't want to miss The House on Buzzards Bay by Dwyer Murphy, about five friends sharing a house on the New England coast and the slow-burning strangeness that ensues.

Read other reviews and articles, get ahead of the rest of the year with our Most Anticipated Books for July through December 2025, see what's publishing later this month in handpicked previews, peruse recommendations for book clubs, and more. Plus, this issue is packed with reading guides for featured books, including some we've created ourselves (watch out for more of these to come).

Thank you for being a BookBrowse member!

— The BookBrowse Team

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Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we're pleased to bring you recent fiction gems, including standout debuts. Maria Reva's Endling offers a unique perspective on the war in Ukraine, combining the novel she was working on during the Russian invasion with her response to it. Our accompanying Beyond the Book article covers chernozem, the country's all-important and particularly fertile soil. Lucas Schaefer's ambitious The Slip follows the disappearance of a teenager in Texas, reflects on the broad appeal of boxing, and contemplates race, immigration, and American life. Susanna Kwan's Awake in the Floating City explores the artistic process, aging, and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.

We also catch up with Charlotte McConaghy's latest novel Wild Dark Shore, a suspenseful eco-thriller about a family on a vanishing island and an unexpected guest. Megan Giddings' Meet Me at the Crossroads focuses on teen twin sisters' encounters with a mysterious door to another realm. Jess Walter's So Far Gone tells the tale of a former journalist given the confounding task of rescuing his grandchildren from conservative extremists.

While many of these books portray a version of the present or future, Mia McKenzie's These Heathens delves into the past with the story of a 17-year-old seeking an abortion in 1960s Atlanta and her time in the Black community of Collier Heights. V.E. Schwab's Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil features three women at different points in time who are thrust into new, immortal lives. And So Many Stars, compiled by novelist Caro de Robertis, presents an invaluable oral history of trans and nonbinary elders of color, Nicky Calma among them.

Along with other reviews and articles, you can enjoy previews of upcoming books, our 2025 Summer Reading List, author interviews, and more.

Thanks for being a BookBrowse member!

— The BookBrowse Team

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Dear BookBrowsers,

This wedding season and Pride Month, we bring you When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris, an emotional contemporary story of marriage, queer identity, and childhood trauma. We also review The Dry Season by Melissa Febos, a reflective memoir about self-love, pleasure, and nurturing an artistic life that recounts a year-long experiment with celibacy.

We cover several additional titles in this issue that significantly feature love or longing, accompanied by literary "beyond the book" articles. In conjunction with Fredrik Backman's new release My Friends, a tale of teen friendship, we explore the work of poet Mary Oliver and her famous "The Summer Day." We examine the tradition of queer Irish writing around Open, Heaven, Seán Hewitt's quiet and intense debut of adolescent infatuation. Our coverage of Emily Henry's genre-mixing romance Great Big Beautiful Life includes a look at other romance novels with complex themes. And alongside The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel, a collection of slice-of-life stories that exhibit a sense of displacement and yearning, we consider the larger landscape of contemporary Mexican literature in translation.

Meanwhile, history lovers will be riveted by America, América, Greg Grandin's account of the relationship between Latin America and the United States, as well as Thomas Levenson's So Very Small, encompassing humans' efforts to fight infectious disease in the past and present.

Plus, check out other articles and reviews, previews of books publishing soon, June Books We're Excited About, and much more.

Thank you for subscribing to BookBrowse!

— The BookBrowse Team

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Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we feature two standout debut memoirs. This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson paints a picture of the author's late mother Sallie Carol, whose larger-than-life presence is rendered in a playful and multifaceted narrative. The True Happiness Company tells Veena Dinavahi's story of being swept into a self-help cult as a teenager, when she suffered from persistent depression and the group seemed to promise a brighter future.

Candace Fleming's Death in the Jungle, a YA nonfiction account of the Jonestown massacre, offers a different view of the insidious nature of cults, while other books we cover further explore the slippery notion of happiness. Lori Ostlund's Are You Happy? presents stories about primarily women and queer characters that interrogate the meaning behind this question. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, famous for the "Bechdel test," examines the role of community in life satisfaction in her new metafictional graphic novel Spent. Florence Knapp's The Names follows three separate plotlines that diverge based on one woman's decision of what to name her child, showing varying degrees of contentment for her family members and herself. K. Ancrum's latest young adult outing The Corruption of Hollis Brown is the story of a ghost and the boy he possesses finding love in a rundown Michigan town. Our accompanying "beyond the book" article looks at Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the 1906 novel that challenged the ideal of the American Dream.

Plus, we review Mark Whitaker's The Afterlife of Malcolm X, which traces the iconic leader's life, death, and legacy.

You can also see previews of upcoming releases, our latest survey results on Book Clubs' All-Time Favorite Books, recommendations for book clubs, and more.

Thank you for supporting BookBrowse as a member!

— The BookBrowse Team

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Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we cover fiction featuring various ages and stages of life. Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness, set in a Connecticut town of colorful characters, focuses on the unlikely bond between a 19-year-old boy from a Vietnamese immigrant family and an 82-year-old Lithuanian refugee, while Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis drops the reader into the mind of a middle-aged Mohawk man who returns to the reservation of his childhood to deal with a life-threatening illness.

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata gives us an alternate vision of Japan in which technological advancements have redefined relationships and reproduction. Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History also centers innovation and human connection, showcasing the experiences of a fusion scientist in present-day Scotland and her descendants in the future alongside environmental collapse on Earth and the colonization of Mars. Colum McCann's Twist follows a struggling Irish writer voyaging on a ship designated to repair the ocean's crucial submarine cable system that enables the functioning of the internet as we know it. And Liann Zhang's darkly humorous Julie Chan Is Dead tells the story of a woman who steals her dead influencer sister's identity.

Plus, we have an excellent selection of nonfiction recommendations. Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile links the history of American New Age cults and conspiracy theories to our current moment, Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert dissects misogyny in contemporary pop culture, and Women of War by Suzanne Cope looks at how Italian women fought the Nazis and homegrown fascism during World War II. Check out our accompanying reading list of books about women in revolutionary movements.

Along with these, explore additional reviews and articles, May Books We're Excited About, new First Impressions titles, previews of upcoming releases, and more.

Thank you for being a BookBrowse subscriber!

— The BookBrowse Team

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Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we bring you a fresh batch of historical fiction of many flavors, ranging from the weird and wonderful to the delectably detailed to the story drawn from tantalizingly little-known facts. And don't worry, we have some top-notch contemporary novels coming your way, too.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's The Creation of Half-Broken People, published as a paperback original, tells a strange tale of colonialism in Zimbabwe through historical women who appear to an unnamed protagonist as specters. Jo Harkin's The Pretender breathes new life into the Tudor genre with the story of Lambert Simnel, the son of a farmer who could have been king. Happy Land, a First Impressions feature and the latest from Dolen Perkins-Valdez, fictionalizes the history of the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a collective monarchical society started by formerly enslaved people in the Carolina mountains. Isola by Allegra Goodman, centering a 16th-century French noblewoman stranded on an island near New France (Canada) with her lover, is based in part on an account of a true story appearing in The Heptaméron by Queen Marguerite of Navarre. And the title novel of Torrey Peters' Stag Dance delves into queer and trans identity in the Wild West with lumberjacks and gender exploration in early 20th-century Montana.

Meanwhile, Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky follows a chance meeting between two couples from different social spheres in a wacky and delightful character-driven plot, and Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin offers a sharp takedown of modern work culture through the horrific story of a man-eating orchid.

In addition to other reviews and articles, you can check out the latest previews, The Most Popular Book Club Books of 2024 according to our subscribers, book club discussions, a new Wordplay, and more.

Thanks for subscribing to BookBrowse!

— The BookBrowse Team

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Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we review Binnie Kirshenbaum's Counting Backwards, a novel that puts a perceptive, witty spin on the difficult topic of dealing with illness in a marriage.

Author Katie Kitamura brings us her trademark suspense in Audition, another story about roles and relationships, here seen through the lens of performance. We include an accompanying Beyond the Book reading list of fiction featuring actors. The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes also employs theatre-based structures in its depiction of aging and generational differences within a family.

Danger and destruction emerge as additional themes in our coverage with Tilt by Emma Pattee, in which a character already anxious about her pregnancy is launched into a survival scenario when an earthquake hits as she's shopping at the Portland IKEA; our related article looks at what experts say about "The Big One," a massive seismic event predicted to affect the West Coast. Kate Folk's Sky Daddy focuses on a woman who is attracted to airplanes, an experience she compares and contrasts with objectum sexuality (OS), and preoccupied by her supposedly fated fiery death. The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan, the second book in the Dee and Lao mystery series, brings intrigue to 1920s London in an investigation that begins with the theft of a Chinese antique. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams is a personal account and self-avowed "cautionary tale" of one woman's fraught time working for Facebook.

Be sure to also check out our other reviews and articles, along with the latest previews of upcoming books, an exciting batch of new online book club discussions, First Impressions books, and more.

Thanks for being a BookBrowse subscriber!

— The BookBrowse Team

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