Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, and Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
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1. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
(Pantheon)
7 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Dream Hotel here
“Powerful, richly conceived … Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters … Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, The Dream Hotel is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction.”
–Anita Felicelli (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Knopf)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 2 Pan
“Rich, complicated … Language that feels entirely natural and yet instinctively poetic … Adichie makes no effort to snap these four stories together neatly … All benefit equally from Adichie’s ability to plumb their particular desires, their hopes and anxieties. You can hear that in the way she hones her style to reflect each woman’s education and experience.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
(Flatiron)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“McConaghy’s descriptions of nature’s glory and terror are galvanic, the psychological struggles wrenching, the suspenseful action spectacularly choreographed. McConaghy has attained new heights of intensity and lacerating ecological conviction in this complexly plotted, tragic, and all-consuming tale of the battle to survive in a catastrophically changing world.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
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1. Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton
(Pantheon)
8 Rave
“There is something both wonderfully archaic and utterly contemporary about Chloe Dalton’s memoir of finding and raising a baby hare … One of the great glories of the book, beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor, is the way in which Ms. Dalton records the appearance, movement and behavior of the growing leveret … Dalton has given us a portrait, both ephemeral and real.”
–Karin Altenberg (The Wall Street Journal)
2. No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene
(Tin House Books)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“A magical, mind-expanding selection of observations … Astonishingly imaginative, wise, and weird, the essays in this illustrated collection—featuring natural phenomena, children, death, and costuming–have the power to reshape the way one sees the world.”
–Julia Kastner (Shelf Awareness)
3. The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir by Martha S. Jones
(Basic Books)
3 Rave
“…a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples’ histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past … Although she never says so explicitly, Jones’s compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves … Jones has done more than honor her family’s history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination.”
–Kerri R. Greenidge (The New York Times Book Review)
