henry

By a longtime book critic who has spent more years than he cares to admit reading fiction that most people keep hidden under their mattresses There is a particular kind of reading hunger that Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy creates and then refuses to satisfy on its own terms. I remember picking up the first book … Read more

There is a particular kind of dread that A.J. Finn engineered in The Woman in the Window that I haven’t been able to fully shake, even years after first reading it. It isn’t the dread of a monster in the dark, or the gut-punch of a twist ending (though the novel delivers that, too). It … Read more

There is a particular kind of literary pleasure that John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice delivers with unusual consistency across twelve novels: the satisfaction of watching a small, overlooked person become quietly extraordinary. Will Treaty, the scrawny orphan who learns to move through shadows and read a forest the way a scholar reads a page, is not … Read more

There is a particular kind of reader the Wheel of Time makes. You can identify them at parties by the faraway look in their eyes when someone casually mentions “a long series.” You can spot them in bookstores, instinctively reaching for the thickest spine on the shelf. I became one of them somewhere around book … Read more

There is a particular kind of intimacy that Jenny Han achieves in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before that most contemporary YA novelists only approximate. Published in 2014 and released on Netflix to 85 million viewers in 2018, the novel about Lara Jean Song Covey and her inadvertently mailed love letters accomplished something the … Read more

Let me be upfront with you: I came to Hush, Hush as a skeptic. When Becca Fitzpatrick’s debut landed on my desk back in the fall of 2009, the YA paranormal shelf was already sagging under the weight of brooding supernatural love interests. Fallen angels felt like the next stop on a predictable conveyor belt. … Read more

A curated guide for readers who can’t get enough of locked-room mysteries, unreliable narrators, and the particular dread of a secret about to explode There is a specific kind of pleasure in picking up The Guest List by Lucy Foley, and that pleasure has a name: dread. Not the cheap, jump-scare variety, but the slow, … Read more

A Literary Critic’s Carefully Curated Guide to Atmospheric, Spellbinding Fiction There’s a very particular kind of reader who finishes The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and immediately sits in silence, not because they have nothing to say, but because they are reluctant to fully return to the ordinary world. I know this reader well. I … Read more

Some books don’t just sit on your nightstand. They haunt you in the shower, follow you onto the subway, and occasionally make you seriously consider booking a one-way ticket to Bali. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love is one of those books, and if you’ve already read it, you already know what I mean. There’s a … Read more

Both The Hunger Games and Divergent did something that most genre fiction never manages: they made readers care about systems. Not just the characters, but the brutal machinery those characters were trapped inside. Suzanne Collins built Panem as a satire of televised suffering so precise it feels more relevant now than it did when the … Read more