henry

There is a particular alchemy at work in Lynn Painter’s Better Than the Movies that I find genuinely difficult to explain without resorting to the kind of effusive praise I normally reserve for Austen or Nora Ephron at her peak. And yet here we are. Published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021, the novel … Read more

There is a particular kind of grief that comes at the end of a great fantasy series. Not the sharp, sudden kind, but something slower and more bewildering, like waking up in a house you know is no longer yours. I felt it when I closed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the first … Read more

If you have spent any time in the dark romance corner of BookTok, you already know that Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton is not a book that politely sits on your nightstand waiting to be read. It grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go until you have questioned your moral compass, rearranged … Read more

Powerless by Lauren Roberts arrived in 2023 with the kind of cultural force that critics like me are trained to treat with skepticism. A self-published novel that went viral on BookTok before Simon & Schuster came knocking, it carried all the hallmarks of a phenomenon built on social media energy rather than literary merit. And … Read more

I came to Icebreaker the way most readers did: sideways, through a recommendation algorithm and the evangelical enthusiasm of someone who would not stop sending me screenshots. I was skeptical. I have spent enough years in literary criticism to know that virality and quality share a complicated relationship, and BookTok has a particular talent for … Read more

There is a particular kind of reader hunger that Fourth Wing creates. I’ve reviewed fiction for a long time, and I rarely encounter a novel that manufactures such a specific, almost physiological craving in its audience. Rebecca Yarros published what started as a romantasy about dragon riders in May 2023, and it detonated across the … Read more

There is a particular kind of reading pleasure that The Last Mrs. Parrish delivers and that almost no other novel replicates with the same precision: the slow, delicious horror of watching someone methodically dismantle another person’s life, brick by brick, smile by smile. Liv Constantine, the pen name of sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine, published … Read more

I have spent the better part of three decades reading fiction about young people navigating the world in bodies and minds that society insists on misreading. And in all that time, few novels have hit me with the force of Sharon M. Draper’s Out of My Mind. Published in 2010, the book spent over eighteen … Read more

There is a particular kind of ache that Five Feet Apart deposits in your chest, and if you have felt it, you already know what I mean. Rachael Lippincott, working from a screenplay by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, handed us a love story that operates under the cruelest possible constraint: two people who want … Read more

I have spent the better part of three decades reading fantasy fiction, and I can count on one hand the series that fundamentally altered what I expected from the genre. Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher saga is on that hand. Not because it reinvented the wheel, but because it reminded us that the wheel was forged in … Read more