Book Reviews

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'SuperMutant Magic Academy' Is Hogwarts With Nuts (And A Cherry)

7:03am April 29, 2015

by Etelka Lehoczky

Kurt Vonnegut once famously described book critics as donning armor to battle a hot fudge sundae. Jillian Tamaki takes on Harry Potter in SuperMutant Magic Academy, but she's tossing marshmallows.

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A Futuristic Private Eye Gets In Over Her Head In 'Depth'

6:17pm April 28, 2015

by Jason Heller

Lev AC Rosen's dystopian thriller, set in an underwater New York City, is an expert mix of the sci-fi and hardboiled genres. Reviewer Jason Heller calls it a nervy crime caper with hidden depths.

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What Luck! 'Early Warning' Continues Smiley's Farm Family Saga

3:43pm April 28, 2015

by Heller McAlpin

Readers eager to catch up with the Iowa farming family Jane Smiley introduced in Some Luck will enjoy the latest installment, which follows the five children off the farm and into the postwar era.

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A City Full Of Contradictions, And A Trilogy To Match In 'Nocturne'

7:03am April 26, 2015

by Etelka Lehoczky

The second volume of Anne Opotowsky's lavish trilogy about the Kowloon Walled City is like the city itself — vibrant and contradictory, its skilled atmospherics sometimes marred by sloppy art.

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Tiny Pages Reveal Big, Rodent-Related Worries In 'Devotion'

7:03am April 25, 2015

by Jason Sheehan

Don't be put off by the size of Devotion: A Rat Story by Maile Meloy. It's a small book, hardly larger than a pack of cigarettes, but the horror it delivers is real (and rat shaped).

Books

Book Review: 'The Language Of Paradise'

7:03pm April 23, 2015

by Alan Cheuse

NPR's Alan Cheuse reviews The Language of Paradise by Barbara Klein Moss.

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'Lovelace And Babbage' Is A Thrilling Adventure

1:10pm April 23, 2015

by Etelka Lehoczky

Sydney Padua's rollicking graphic novel about computing pioneers Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace transforms punch cards and little brass cogs into the stuff of legend, says critic Etelka Lehoczky.

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'Vermilion' Finds New Magic In The Old West

2:29pm April 22, 2015

by Jason Heller

Molly Tanzer's grit-and-ghosts adventure follows a young woman tasked with guiding troubled spirits in a colorfully diverse, alternate-history Wild West, full of talking animals and vampires.

Toni Morrison's novels include Beloved, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

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Arts

Toni Morrison's New Novel Is Best Read With Her Backlist In Mind

12:14pm April 22, 2015

by Saeed Jones

The Nobel Prize winner has become a giant in the literary world, but reviewer Saeed Jones says that her latest novel can only stand with confidence when it has the idea of the author as its spine.

Detail from cover of Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s

Books
Arts

Revisiting A Suburbia-Gone-Sour In Ross Macdonald's Crime Fiction

4:54pm April 21, 2015

by Maureen Corrigan

A reissue of four of the detective writer's 1950s novels excavates the dark depths of California's suburban decay. Maureen Corrigan praises Macdonald's "psychological depth" and "penetrating vision."

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