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Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Daniel Mason’s Country People, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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Fiction
1. Country People by Daniel Mason
(Random House)
5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Country People here
“Mason adopts a pliant, quietly ironic voice that drifts between observation, anecdote, and reflection. The narrative approach feels playful, at times insistent, and expansive; it meanders, circles back, and folds in fragments that initially seem peripheral. The humor—dry, humane, and occasionally absurd—remains ever-present … The Vermont landscape—frugal and bracing—acts as a silent amplifier of these quirks, while Mason remains attuned to the natural world. Into this terrain he threads a sense of the uncanny, a local myth that hovers between conspiracy and genuine mystery.”
–Bill Kelly (Booklist)
2. The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders
(Henry Holt & Company)
5 Rave
“A remarkably gratifying debut novel … Sanders distributes essential details with care and control. The tale features four ghosts from the Lamb family … What might have seemed a whimsically playful gimmick actually works here, in part because these are richly drawn characters in their own right, not idealized phantoms but complex people who lived … Sanders keeps every thread of the narrative in motion, guiding the reader toward an ending that feels both surprising and inevitable, the hallmark of a truly strong finale.”
–Kate Tuttle (The Boston Globe)
3. The Simp by Roshan Sethi
(Simon & Schuster)
3 Rave • 1 Positive
“Beneath the novel’s dry, piercing depictions of this exclusive Hollywood milieu, The Simp also probes how race and colonial history collide with the fever dream of fame in ways that are sharp, funny, and occasionally bleak … The book shifts through a mix of cultural influences, yet what it ultimately conveys is that, until power leaves the hands of the wealthy and entitled, many readers will find themselves living to a certain degree in a state of simpitude.”
–Sam Lipsyte (The New York Times Book Review)
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Nonfiction
1. You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv
(Knopf)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“Aviv’s writing resists a single point of view. She glides between detailing events and entering the inner lives of her subjects, as if reading a short story told in third person … Anyone who finishes Aviv’s book will never approach Alice Munro in quite the same way again, yet they may end up reading her with a curious, almost transformative sense of wonder.”
–Thomas Beller (4Columns)
2. Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991 by Mark B. Smith
(W. W. Norton and Company)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“Mark B Smith, a Cambridge historian, has offered a compelling chronicle of the Soviet Union. No single volume can fully account for the collapse of the state, but Exit Stalin stands as a brave attempt. Smith paints a dense, collage-like portrait of how ordinary Soviet citizens endured repression and food shortages while clinging to the hope sparked by the 1917 revolution’s promise of a better life … It’s smoothly readable … While at times cluttered with information, Exit Stalin delivers an excellent history of both the ascent and the fall of a utopian project and its dangerously misguided ideology.”
–Ian Thompson (The Observer)
3. A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thompson
(Simon & Schuster)
4 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Too much film criticism relies on clichés or lacking ambition—this book tackles it with a whip, a magnifying glass, and a wry grin … Is this truly his final work? There’s a sense of closure and futility in how he ties things up, or rather unravels them … He still cares, and after finishing this you will care too.”
–Ed Potton (The Times)
