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

Javier Marías’ Tomás Nevinson, Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans, and Rachel Louise Snyder’s Women We Buried, Women We Burned all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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Fiction

1. Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías
(Knopf)

6 Rave • 2 Positive

“The narrative moves backward or spirals on the spot in a sequence of repetitions with variation, each return bringing us back to a slightly different present. This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music by Philip Glass … Readers may sometimes feel as impatient as Tupra does, longing for forward movement. But then Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose, flawlessly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and the circling currents of his thought.”

–Lucy Hughes-Hallett (The Guardian)

2. Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
(MCD)

5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Listen to an interview with Ivy Pochoda here

“Incendiary … A narcocorrido-infused crime tale that nods to westerns, Shakespeare, Greek tragedy and Joan Didion, among others … As palpably immersive as Pochoda makes prison life in the first part of the novel, her writing deepens when the action shifts to COVID-ravaged Los Angeles … Pochoda writes with insight and empathy about women pushing back on the violence perpetrated against them—and also, conversely, their shame at their inability to act … While the first part of the novel, depicting prison violence, may be tough going for some readers, Sing Her Down’s acknowledgment and dissection of women’s rage—how it can overwhelm or be tempered—makes it a watershed achievement in Pochoda’s expanding body of work.”

–Paula L. Woods (The Los Angeles Times)

3. The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
(Riverhead)

5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed • 3 Pan

“Brandon Taylor’s best book so far. More mature than his Booker-nominated debut, Real Life, more polished than Filthy Animals, his third is a novel about the anxieties and pieties of millennial grad students as they grapple with the art life and, more literally, each other. Taylor asks the big questions … Taylor’s characters, with their highly attuned political-structural constitutions, can be exhilarating or exhausting, depending on taste … Elegiac … Beautiful and wrenching.”

–Charles Arrowsmith (The Boston Globe)

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Nonfiction 

1. Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir by Rachel Louise Snyder
(Bloomsbury)

4 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Women We Buried, Women We Burned here

“Snyder’s memoir is as heartbreaking, wrenching and compelling as the stories of the victims in her eye-opening book on domestic violence … The violence and neglect of her adolescence sounds nearly unsurvivable. And yet she is here, proof that there can be healing, reconciliation and professional triumph. It’s my hope that the foreboding title won’t keep readers away from Snyder’s remarkable book.”

–Rochelle Olson (The Star Tribune)

2. Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny
(W. W. Norton & Company)

5 Rave
Read an excerpt from Brave the Wild River here

“As she brings both intriguing botanists vividly to life, Sevigny also captures the intensity of the expedition’s dangers and the seemingly miraculous ability of the scientists to collect and preserve 500 plant specimens, some new to science, under nearly impossible conditions while also doing all the cooking. A breath-catching, enlightening, and significant work of scientific, environmental, and women’s history.”

–Donna Seaman (Booklist)

3. An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created by Santi Elijah Holley
(Mariner Books)

4 Rave • 1 Positive

“Magnificent … Uniquely intimate … Writing as a historian and storyteller, Holley never lets us lose sight of the complex tapestry of movements that marked the era … Holley also, without any hint of hagiography, recasts familiar tales about Tupac’s troubled career by fitting them with the experiences of his radical predecessors, including their revolutionary actions but also their paranoia, suspicions of friends and fears of failure … The greatest triumph of An Amerikan Family is the way Holley expertly blends archival research—including court documents, congressional transcripts, FBI records and newspaper clippings—with oral history to tell human stories that are at once exceptional and recognizable.”

–Felicia Angeja Viator (The Los Angeles Times)