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
For readers who finished Den of Vipers and immediately needed something to fill the void it left. There is a particular kind of fiction that the literary establishment doesn’t quite know what to do with, and Den of Vipers is one of its clearest examples. K.A. Knight’s novel operates on instinct rather than polish: raw, … Read more
There is a particular kind of YA novel that does something unusual: it uses physical confinement as a vehicle to ask genuinely large questions. What is a life fully lived? What do you owe the people who love you, and what do you owe yourself? Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon is that kind of book, … Read more
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a 2005 memoir published by Scribner, 288 pages. It documents Walls’ nomadic, poverty-marked childhood under a charismatic alcoholic father and a self-absorbed artist mother who rejected the conventions of domestic life. The book is structured in five parts, tracing the family’s journey across the American Southwest before settling … Read more
There is a specific kind of reader who does not sleep well after finishing a Sarah J. Maas book. Not because the book was bad. Because it was too good, and the world feels a little thin afterward, like something essential has been drained out of ordinary life. If you have been standing in that … Read more