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
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