5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Jessamine Chan on Téa Obreht’s The Morningside, Carole V. Bell on Percival Everett’s James, Brock Colyar on Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Megan Garber on Christine Blasey Ford’s One Way Back, and Daniel Torday on Toby Lloyd’s Fervor

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“The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, The Morningside, begins with a map … Throughout, I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose … Though we eventually get allusions to real-life wars and war crimes, Sil could be any young refugee wondering what her parent survived, trying to make sense of buried trauma and forge a deeper connection …

Read in the context of today’s conflicts and injustices, climate emergencies, and political and racial divisions—together more dystopian than any dystopian novel—the book surprised me most with its undercurrent of hope. It flows from Obreht’s portrait of family and community, and the suggestion that stories and magic offer, if not a solution or a means of survival, then a way for a child to connect to her heritage and try to make sense of an impossible reality. By weaving in folklore and ample wonder, Obreht gives her climate fiction ancient roots, forcing us to reckon with the ruined world that future generations will inherit, while reminding us that even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.”

–Jessamine Chan on Téa Obreht’s The Morningside (The New York Times Book Review)

“The result is strangely new and familiar—an adrenaline-spiking adventure with absurdity and tragedy blended together … Re-imaginings of classic literature are challenging, often unnecessary endeavors. This one is different, a startling homage and a new classic in its own right. Readers may be surprised by how much of the original scaffolding remains and how well the turnabout works, swapping a young man’s moral awakening for something even more fraught …

Everett provides what Twain could not: Jim’s deep interior life. The entire story is narrated in his voice. Getting inside James’s head is a remarkable experience. Though they’re sometimes parted, James (as he prefers to be called in Everett’s novel) and Huck somehow always find each other again, and that creates a sense of surreality … Again and again. In true Everett fashion, the intertwined artifice of race and language is stretched to self-reflexive absurdity … Like James and Norman’s encounter, the novel is exquisitely multilayered. A brilliant, sometimes shocking mashup of various literary forms, James has the arc of an odyssey, with the quest for home, and an abundance of absurdly comical humor.”

–Carole V. Bell on Percival Everett’s James (NPR)

“If you begin Who’s Afraid of Gender? hoping the gender-neutral mother of queer theory has written a rousing polemic that rescues gender and sexuality from the culture wars…you might be disappointed … Who’s Afraid of Gender? is unexpectedly tepid, and—for a subject that is obviously quite personal for Butler, their fans, their foes, and really all of us—written at a strange remove from the ways both the left and the right think and talk about gender and queerness on an everyday basis, online and off …

Ultimately does little to either advance our understanding of what we’re up against or give us the tools to combat it … Prime real estate in the book, and much of Butler’s indignation, is reserved instead for the war in Ukraine and police violence and economic precarity and neoliberalism and, and, and… well, pretty much every other leftist concern. Again and again, Butler avoids taking hard stances on the specifics, and instead broadens out into a parodic level of existential worrying.”

–Brock Colyar on Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? (The Drift)

“Ford’s own story, in many ways, was an exception to #MeToo’s rule. She was listened to. She was, to a lesser extent, heard. Half a decade later, though, her claim rests in the same in-between space where the claims of many others do: It lingers, alleged but never litigated—its airing cut short when Kavanaugh was confirmed. One Way Back channels the frustrations of that abridgment. But the book also details Ford’s life after the confirmation: the death threats, the upheaval, the backlash. As her story goes on, its testimony comes to read as an indictment—not of one person, but of a form of politics that sees stories as weapons in an endless war. For her, the personal unexpectedly became political, and then the political proved to be inescapable. Ford, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, is used to making sense of her experience by naming it. The intervening years, though, have resisted that kind of therapeutic clarity. So does, to its credit, the memoir itself. Closure, in Ford’s story as in so many others, is a relief that never comes.”

–Megan Garber on Christine Blasey Ford’s One Way Back (The Atlantic)

“In one of the most perceptive of her late essays, ‘God’s Language,’ Toni Morrison sets out her objective as a novelist: ‘to construct a work in which religious belief is central to the narrative itself.’ How, she asks, can the writer use the language religion has handed us in a way that the 21st-century reader can hear? Not an easy task—but one that Toby Lloyd, in his magnificent, indelible debut novel, Fervor, takes on with confidence, and with resounding success …

Magnificent, indelible … This might all sound hopelessly complicated. And it might be in the hands of a lesser talent. For a writer as gifted as Lloyd, even potential missteps come to bear fruit … Lyrical and moving … Lloyd has a remarkably light touch, bringing across complicated ideas with concision and precision … The book models the entropy that sets in when we forget why fragile harmonies are fashioned, however imperfectly, out of chaos. Enriching his story with detail and above all heart, Lloyd has crafted a lasting allegory of our dark historical time.”

–Daniel Torday on Toby Lloyd’s Fervor (The New York Times Book Review)