What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm 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. The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
(Harper)

10 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Flexes through an emotional range that most writers would never dare attempt … Humor and sorrow are fused together like twined tree trunks that keep each other standing … Erdrich is so good at romantic comedy, with her special blend of Austen sense and Ojibwe sensibility. As the funny scenes flow one after another, you may not even notice the stray drops of blood scattered along the novel’s margins … As usual when closing a book by Louise Erdrich, I’m left wondering, how can a novel be so funny and so moving? How can life?”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

2. The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard
(Penguin)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona … Knausgaard’s writerly self-discipline is formidable. Most novelists freely pump the gas and the brakes, zipping through the boring bits to get to the good ones, but his pacing is remorselessly steady … Mixed in with the everyday dross are a few sparkly flecks of strangeness, curious anomalies that might be clues to a larger mystery … Maddening but enthralling.”

–Lev Grossman (The Atlantic)

3. The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
(Celadon Books)

4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Cleverly meta, the title fits the sardonic mood that infuses the two books … Korelitz gives the novel what many sequels lack: a sense of newness. While the story grows more intricate, she remains in control. Her plot—ha!—is propulsive, her prose precise … It’s fascinating to spend time inside Anna’s head. Her determination knows few bounds. The story Korelitz has crafted means that we root for her, and fear her, in equal measure.”

–Clémence Michallon (The New York Times Book Review)

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Nonfiction 

1. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

5 Rave
Read Aaron Robertson on Black utopias here

“Elegant, vigorous … The author dodges the pitfalls of nostalgia and sentimentality; his anecdotes crackle with immediacy … His eye on pacing and detail, he charts the intellectual odysseys of his cast, upending our expectations … An extraordinary achievement in narrative nonfiction.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)

2. The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

3 Rave • 2 Positive

“I could wax enthusiastic about Levy’s writing, which is dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll … Levy does not do complication for complication’s sake. Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling, and with such economy … Like all of us, Levy is far from coherent or fixed, and if the goal were to emerge from this book with a cohesive portrait of its author—a gestalt exercise unto itself—then the reader would fail. Certainly, this reader did, and happily so.”

–Grace Linden (Los Angeles Review of Books)

3. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
(One World)

4 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual; it also marks a shift in his approach. Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad … Instead of being the singular voice or the incomparable expert, Coates offers himself as an ally.”