Memoirs have probably been criticized for just about as long as they’ve been written. They evoke two common questions: “Is it true?” and “Does it matter?” If "no" were the answer to both with regards to If Only You People Could Follow Directions…

Let's get the first, painful thing out of the way. Cindy: Please change your subtitle. I get it, I do. It’s quick, it’s snappy — it even rhymes! It’s a nice exclamation point to the title of your new book when it’s said all together: The Longest…

You might be familiar with Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With The Amber Eyes, but it’s his grandmother, Elisabeth, and her novel, The Exiles Return (Picador), who has been getting recent literary buzz. According to her grandson, Elisabeth de…

I was going to call Mark Haskell Smith's Raw: A Love Story (Grove) “Kafkaesque”, but according to Harriet, one of the novel’s protagonists: [Kafka] was an overused cliché when things got weird. […] Circumstances conspire, misunderstandings emerge,…

Elizabeth Speller's The First of July is not a political novel. Though it's set in World War I (and the tense year leading up to it), there are no chapters devoted to shifting alliances, or how the assassination of one Archduke lead to a war that…

Midway through Someone Else’s Love Story (William Morrow), astute readers may experience a sinking feeling, and that’s the realization that this seemingly charming, funny novel is passing the Bechdel test by the skin of its teeth. The Bechdel test,…

The domestic drama — a story of realistic, middle-class, ordinary, everyday lives with a family or home—has been around for a while (just look at all those Pride and Prejudice remakes and spinoffs). Allegedly, audiences are supposed to relate best…

Hold on to your wedding veils — in Ronald Frame’s Havisham (Picador), everybody’s favorite spinster gets a makeover. You may last remember seeing Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (probably in 9th grade English), but Frame has…

Here's a confession that I'm not exactly proud of: I absolutely cannot wait for my upcoming five-year high school reunion in New Jersey. Why? I'll get to introduce myself as "a freelance writer", and, even better, "a freelance writer living in New…

If a movie adaptation of A House In the Sky (Scribner) happens, its trailer probably won’t be set to an uplifting Florence Welch song. A House In The Sky by Amanda Lindhout, $7, Amazon Lindhout’s memoir does start off with a hundred pages of…

Picture this: a young black woman grows up back-breakingly impoverished with a there-and-gone father. She’s sponsored to go to a private Episcopalian school where the only other black students are basketball recruits. From there, she gets a college…

Fanfiction is having a moment. What used to be a source of embarrassment and Internet browser history-clearing has slowly — inch by inch — been rising in public consciousness. The surprising part, though, isn’t that it’s becoming popular (anyone who…

You should know upfront: A Beautiful Truth (Soho Press) is a book about chimpanzees, narrated by humans and a handful of chimps. That sentence probably makes a lot of prospective readers want to stop reading this review (and reconsider starting…

Banned Book Week should be one of those things that is well-established enough not to need an explanation, but here goes: this chunk of the calendar is one week a year during which books that were formerly banned in schools or libraries (or,…

As the author of The Assembler of Parts (Arcade), Raoul Wientzen draws on over thirty years of experience treating critically ill children. However, his story of a Jess, who dies at age eight, and her family, who must go on with out her, is neither…