June’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Jess Walter’s So Far Gone, Susan Choi’s Flashlight, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Fox all feature among the best reviewed books of the month.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. So Far Gone by Jess Walter
(Harper)

12 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Jess Walter here

“Searing and sublime … Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken. He’s also invested his protagonist with a self-deprecating sense of humor that keeps his pessimism from veering into maudlin territory. If there’s hope to be found within this harsh landscape, it’s in our connection with one another.”

–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)

2. Flashlight by Susan Choi
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Susan Choi here

“Prickly, gorgeous … There are no moments of total illumination here, just a beam shining briefly on a target before scanning restlessly onward … One thing that hasn’t changed is what an outlandishly talented writer Choi is, her prose possessing an iron confidence in its own beauty. She favors complex, lightly punctuated sentences whose payoff comes late … Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking—about which the less said the better. Some things you can see coming from miles away. But life, we’re reminded, retains its ability to surprise.”

–Sam Worley (Vulture)

3. Endling by Maria Reva
(Doubleday)

9 Rave • 2 Positive

“Remarkable … In another author’s hands, these departures might be experienced as digressions, draining suspense and power from the story, but Reva they alchemizes them into something between imagination and reality, an original way to investigate the artifice of the novel—its limitations but also its expansiveness … Reva places her metaphorical arms around all of it—with the intention of using language to express the inexpressible: senseless violence, loneliness, extreme suffering and grief … Wildly inventive.”

–S. Kirk Walsh (The Washington Post)

4. Fox by Joyce Carol Oates
(Hogarth)

7 Rave • 1 Mixed

“The novel is a whodunit, but to reduce it entirely to that distinction would be inaccurate … Inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling … This is a chilling reminder that artistic mentors can be abusive in many different ways … Foxhauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art.”

–Heather Scott Partington (The Los Angeles Times)

5. Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
(Penguin Press)

6 Rave • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Michelle Huneven here

“Extraordinary candor and tenderness … The family that initially felt so shiny and self-contained gives way to individual stories that butt up against one another at skewed angles. It’s not confusing; it’s eye-opening … Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)