Pamela Anderson's Love, Pamela, Kevin Cook's Waco Rising, and Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand 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. Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree
(HarperVia)
7 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Tomb of Sand here
"Epic … An engrossing fable about an octogenarian's liberation from her decades-long roles as wife and mother … Shree scrupulously examines the demarcation between life and death, mother and daughter, past and present, and how grief and memory, when harnessed, have the power to cultivate long lost connections. The narrator's witty observations and lengthy humorous asides…add to the breadth and depth of this rich novel … For the reader who wades in Shree's luminous prose, the book's threads braid into a single, vivid tapestry."
–Anjali Enjeti (The Star Tribune)
2. My Father's House by Joseph O'Connor
(Europa Editions)
6 Rave
"A…magnanimity—though of a more ebullient kind—infuses the work of the Irish writer Joseph O'Connor … The overall tone of Mr. O'Connor's new novel, My Father's House, is, by contrast, more urgent than elegiac, and its suspenseful plot has little time for bittersweet rumination … Mr. O'Connor re-creates with consummate skill while painting a subtle portrait of an erudite scholar who was also a defiant and formidable man of action … For all its thrills, however, My Father's House is primarily—and triumphantly—an intimate drama that illuminates both the fragility and the wonder of unlikely human connections forged in adversity and, in some cases, enduring for a lifetime."
–Anna Mundow (The Wall Street Journal)
3. The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
(Tor Books)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
Watch an interview with Annalee Newitz here
"The reader of Annalee Newitz's third novel, The Terraformers, will surely walk away, stunned and bedazzled … This generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. But the reading experience is never clotted or tedious, never plagued by extraneous detours. The story…rollicks along at a brisk clip while allowing Newitz space to dig into characters and milieu, and pile on startling speculative elements … [Newitz has] indeed gifted us a vibrant, quirky vision of endless potential earned by heroism, love and wit."
–Paul Di Filippo (The Washington Post)
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Nonfiction
1. Love, Pamela by Pamela Anderson
(Dey Street Books)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
"The most disappointing thing about Love, Pamela is that it doesn't come in a form that can be injected directly into your veins … Anderson is a natural storyteller, which shouldn't come as a surprise; her ability to sustain a personal narrative is what's kept her in the public eye for going on four decades. Love, Pamela is a dazzling and occasionally dizzying ride through this period, in which vivid scenes of '80s and '90s decadence bump up against blind items about Russian oligarchs and brief but iconic celebrity cameos … Woven throughout are passages written in verse, which is not as annoying as it sounds: There's so much going on that you need the extra line breaks to catch your breath."
–Jessica Pressler (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara
(St. Martin's Press)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
"Cobalt Red takes the form of a righteous quest to expose injustice through a series of vignettes of exploitation and misery … Many of Kara's interviews are carried out under the gaze of armed guards and, although he describes in sharp detail the poverty and hazards faced by the miners, the limitations of his method are evident in places where the locals are flattened into brief figures of suffering … But the strength of the book lies in how Kara… analyzes the exploitation that extracts value from the miners' labor, then launders their tainted product into the global supply chain … The fervor of Kara's abolitionism contrasts with his proposal for reform, which prioritizes "accountability" from those who profit from the miners' labor."
–Matthieu Aikins (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook
(Henry Holt & Company)
1 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Waco Rising here
"A fresh, powerful account … In this engrossing resurrection… Cook digs deep to uncover the forgotten human side of these terrible events, and he offers a painstaking reconstruction of leader David Koresh's life and ascent … In describing the standoff with exquisite detail and care, Cook masterfully portrays the scope of the violence and heartbreak on all sides … A thorough, engaging work that reminds us of the humanity behind tragedy."
–Kirkus
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