Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book, Michelle Huneven’s Bug Hollow, and Jan Gradvall’s The Story of ABBA all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
(Penguin Press)
6 Rave • 1 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)
2. The Scrapbook by Heather Clark
(Pantheon)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Scrapbook here
“Phenomenal … Worthy of reading and rereading, serving up romance, history and political philosophy in ways that could hardly be more relevant … Unique blend of literary and historical fiction as well as a penetrating exploration of philosophy, art, historical responsibility and guilt in the context of war. It’s quite a combination, especially considering how immensely readable and compelling this book is … Several arresting chapters narrate the wartime experiences of the grandfathers, integrating them seamlessly into the larger narrative while heightening the connections that Anna and Christoph draw between past and present … Clark artfully addresses numerous weighty subjects.”
–Alice Cary (BookPage)
3. How to Dodge a Cannonball by Dennard Dayle
(Henry Holt & Company)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“Damn fools make great protagonists, particularly in satirical novels. Their naïveté allows the reader to gain experience alongside them, and their cluelessness ensures that said experience will be funny as hell, too … Refreshingly original. Here is an author capturing, with clarity, our current moment by flashing us back to the past. Dayle’s deft portrayal of American anti-Blackness, class exploitation and cultural uncertainty feels both accurate to the novel’s 19th-century setting and, soberingly, very contemporary.”
–Mat Johnson (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey*
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention … Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play … The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form … The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing.”
–Sarah Moss (The Guardian)
3. Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West by Kelly Ramsey
(Scribner)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Wildfire Days here
“Ramsey’s memoir covers a lot of ground, skillfully … What resonates instead is fire and all that it entails … Ramsey’s memoir is a moving, sometimes funny story about destruction, change and rebirth, told by a woman tempered by fire.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Los Angeles Times)
3. The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover by Jan Gradvall
(St. Martin’s)
1 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Story of ABBA here
“Gradvall, an award-winning Swedish music journalist and author, and an ardent ABBA fan, brings contagious enthusiasm to this written tribute, drawing on research and years of close journalistic work with the group … Gradvall masterfully recounts ABBA’s story and outsized influence over 50 years of popular music.”
–Kelly Fojtik (Booklist)
*The Möbius Book is also partially a work of fiction, though its nonfiction section is lengthier.
