General Fiction
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Plot: Layered, poetic, and richly nuanced, Child of Gilead is worthy of multiple readings. The novel unfolds with a parable-like precision and grace.
Prose: Reed's prose is beautifully rendered and evocative.
Originality: Highly distinctive and unique, this work of literary fiction is rich in metaphorical layers--some of which may puzzle and confound readers.
Character/Execution: Whether child and mother, Old Man, and Boy, characters in Child of Gilead occupy a world of roads and choices, faith, and lurking danger. While they resonate as archetypal within the body of the novel, they are no less vivid and complete.
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Plot: Garvey’s vivid family chronicle centers on the circumstances of a Jamaican family from the 1930s until the 1960s. Told through beautifully interwoven narrative perspectives and the families’ experiences in Jamaica and the United States, Independence Blues provides an intimate, perceptive story of American life, relationships, and race relations.
Prose: Garvey’s prose is buoyant, lyrical, and layered. Moments of humor are laced throughout the narrative, along with keen observations about human behavior and the injustices of the Jim Crow era.
Originality: The novel is unique in its approach to storytelling, far more focused on character development and the work’s own internal cadences, than on chronological plot. This is a story of generational struggles; of seeking and hoping for change that does not come. Garvey does a masterful job of creating a fully engaging narrative through pitch-perfect prose and nuanced characterizations.
Character/Execution: The voices of Garvey’s protagonists are seamlessly intertwined, while remaining distinct and and never muddied.
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Plot: This excellent historical novel offers a vivid, multigenerational portrait of a Kenyan family. With literary prowess and great authenticity, the author explores both the triumphs and challenges faced by individuals who continue to carry the scars of colonialism.
Prose: Despite the author's occasional tendency to focus on minutia, Githaiga's prose is primarily polished, vivid, and engrossing. Readers will recognize that they are in the hands of a master storyteller.
Originality: Githaiga's novel is unique in its focus, breadth, and artful delivery. The historical Kenyan setting is as strikingly well-realized as the streets of modern Chicago.
Character/Execution: From self-possessed, courageous Wambũi to Eileen Atwood, whose idealism in no way compromises her integrity, the characters populating The People of Ostrich Mountain are multidimensional, various, and convincing. The impact of seismic historical and cultural events on central characters, is moving and palpable.
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Plot: This is a mature, wonderful, provocative and starkly memorable narrative that unfolds seamlessly.
Prose/Style: The prose is well-crafted and embellished in a high-literary style and flows smoothly throughout the book.
Originality: This wise novel is one of love, loss, seduction, and growth. While the complex circumstances of a third individual entering a marriage is a literary convention that has been explored before, the author is up to the task and does so in a manner that reflects an understanding of the many types of human love and the manifestations of grief.
Character Development: The characters are complex, truly human, and relatable. Readers may crave additional backstory for Sissy and other individuals, but the author shows great finesse in crafting a layered and charismatic cast.
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Plot: Humorous, witty, and lighthearted, the plot dives right in, reeling in readers with a vibrant setup and panache that continues to echo throughout. These pages provide a satisfying blend of comedy, drama, and romance that keeps readers engaged.
Prose/Style: The writing is economical and curt where it needs to be and, at the same time, doesn't shy away from a more expository style strategically peppered throughout. The author showcases excellent situational awareness and delivers a satisfying course of literature to the readers.
Originality: The book is original and effective in its delivery, avoiding clichés and formulaic outcomes. The plot, the setting, and the characters feel unique and vibrant.
Character Development: The characters are marvelously flawed and complex. They carry the story, pulling the readers in with interactions that feel earnest, raw, and realistic, making for an excellent and memorable read.
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Plot: This is an exquisitely-threaded, gripping, and satisfying coming-of-age novel, full of family, friendship, churches, charlatans, mentors, and mystical abilities. Readers will be engaged and enthralled from the first page until the last.
Prose/Style: The prose here is sophisticated, clear, and wholly memorable, and serves to enhance the exceptional narrative that the author has crafted.
Originality: The premise behind this wonderful novel is unique, effective, and entirely fresh.
Character/Execution: The characters are quite amazingly drawn, especially Theo and Frank. Theo, the sensitive young healer, is reminiscent of some of John Irving's young characters.
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Plot: Overall, the novel delivers a well-executed narrative that is easy to get lost in; transports readers to a different world; and allows the imagination to run wild. Readers can feel the Appalachian community culture through this page-turner of a novel. The plotline twists and turns are engaging, the tension is just right, and the unlikely hero provides a pleasant surprise.
Prose/Style: The author has a fun and entertaining style of writing that reads like a movie. It allows for readers to become entirely immersed and carried away by the protagonist's quest.
Originality: The author's experience with natural and cultural history shines through, lending credibility to the story. Although the account is a work of fiction, this type of personal narrative intimately welcomes audiences into a world they otherwise would never experience.
Character Development: The characters are memorable, showcasing a satisfying depth of internal conflict, personal development, motivation, nuance, and complexity. They provide spunk and fresh uniqueness that carry the story well.
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Plot: Whitewashed is a well-researched novel that masterfully weaves real historical circumstances with fictional events and characters, creating a compelling and captivating narrative. The book delivers a page-turning experience that propels readers through the darker side of history and feels transformative.
Prose/Style: The author delicately balances the pace of the plot, the tone of the characters, and her creative authority, creating a suspenseful reality that doesn't bog down readers with needless information or experiences.
Originality: There are minor clichés that pepper the narrative, but overall the book provides an original interpretation of plausible events. It is an appealing conspiratorial read that takes audiences into a new direction and resonates with the current conversations around race relations. Overall, this is a timely and original read.
Character/Execution: The characters provide an equal balance of ordinary and extraordinary attributes that let readers suspend their realities. There is a believable blend of hesitancy and adventure-seeking traits that work well with the narrative and provide dynamic and progressive personalities, without over-resourcing the supporting roles.
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Plot: This novel does not rely on traditional plot structure and does not provide a single climax. Instead, it executes compelling storytelling by opening a window into a fictional family's life during a real historical era. It is evident that the author has amply researched this very era as oft-overlooked, ambient details echo throughout the writing.
Prose/Style: The novel exemplifies great use of creative writing, including eye dialect, which is immersive and elevates both the presentation of the narrative and its characters. It doesn't feel forced and is convincing in its application. However, its use is noticeably inconsistent with the same characters using proper and colloquial spelling interchangeably, without much reason provided.
Originality: The book may remind readers of mildly similar famous works of fiction; however, the final execution, the divergent narrative, and the mood help the story stand out in its own right as a timeless read.
Character Development: The characters here are distinctive with well-written and clearly defined voices and personalities. They are complex, progressive, and emotive, with strengths and flaws that are convincing. Overall, the work delivers an excellent execution of individual personalities and motivations.
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Plot/Idea: With grace and vitality, Kind Eyes explores the inherent goodness of the human animal in full display, through the examination of the interconnected nature of seemingly disparate lives.
Prose: Reed’s skillfully applied prose reads like a well-crafted crescendo of ebbs and flows. Strikingly vivid characters engage the reader, making easy lifting for the imagination, even as the work carries significant emotional weight.
Originality: Mary Hutchings Reed is a master of craft and Kind Eyes excels at capturing and conjuring authentic human emotion. By focusing on the circumstances of mundane lives, the work is brilliant in its simplicity, and complex in its examination of the human condition.
Character/Execution: The interwoven characters within Kind Eyes are seamless. Reed expertly portrays their depth and individuality through engaging moments of quiet conflict, pain, and personal reflection.
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Plot: Charleston Green is a charming and clever novel, set in South Carolina in contemporary times. Tipsy, who has long been able to communicate with the deceased (including her chatty, opinioned grandmother) moves into a grand old house in the city following her divorce, hoping to be inspired to paint again. Tipsy’s search to rekindle her creativity also means cohabiting with—and learning from—the house’s ghostly residents. The ghost story element and the ensuing mystery that unravels, allows a familiar story of personal growth and rediscovery, to uniquely shine.
Prose: Alexander's novel features a wry, agile prose style that, while contemporary, carries an echo of a distant era. The author effectively captures the essence of an old, storied house whose troubled former tenants still exist within its walls.
Originality: As the protagonist navigates her life and career post-divorce, the ghosts inhabiting her living quarters provide a lightly spooky and darkly humorous element to the story. Eminently readable and quietly inventive, the novel’s unusual tone casts a lingering spell.
Character Development: Charleston Green is colorfully peopled by eccentric individuals, both living and deceased. Perhaps inevitably, the secondary characters and their tragic mystery can at times overshadow the protagonist and her own quest for independence and artistic fulfillment. Intriguingly, this is also a love story to Charleston and the surrounding Low Country, and the author richly establishes a distinctive sense of place.
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Plot: Buchanan's ‘David’ trilogy promises to dramatize all the seasons of the life of the most famous king of Israel. This first volume dashes through David's earliest years, including his showdown with Goliath, his marriage to the daughter of King Saul, and Saul's later efforts to kill the young hero anointed to wear the crown. Buchanan retells the stories with swiftness, clarity, and a poetic sensibility befitting a novel about the author of the Psalms. Supplementing these exciting chapters about David's youth are first-person reflections, from much later in life, from David and other key figures. These speculative glimpses into the minds of biblical figures are compelling, surprising, and revealing. The story of David's rise is one of heroics, violence, and outsize artistic brilliance; Buchanan's first-person chapters persuasively argue that it's also deeply, relatably human.
Prose/Style: Overall, the prose in ‘David: Rise’ is both fleet and arrestingly fragmented, with memorable details and descriptions broken up in short, staccato sentences. There are confusing grammatical patterns, a technique that creates an effect of focused intensity, where every line seems to be about David, even when the character is not actually in a scene. Buchanan is adept at quickly nailing a poetic image and then moving on to another, though once in a while they pile up and clash with each other.
Originality: The story of David has been the basis for countless books, from inspirational fiction to works from writers as renowned as Robert Pinsky and Joseph Heller. Buchanan's re-imagining is thoughtful, literary, and vivid in its retelling, honoring the complexity and the fundamental unknowability of its subject. He invigorates familiar material.
Character Development: In a foreword, Buchanan acknowledges to readers that his novel imagines the specifics of David's character. The book has been written in a spirit of novelistic inquiry; rather than declarative, it's humble in its speculations, imbuing a distant, fascinating figure with a touching humanity.
Blurb: With rare poetic power, Mark Buchanan's ‘David: Rise,’ the start of a trilogy, immerses readers in the world and mind of King David, not just retelling the familiar story but daring to summon the psalmist's very presence.
Plot: Greene's story of a Michigander who enlists, after a drunken brawl, in the Northern cavalry builds toward a lesser-known engagement at the Battle of Gettysburg, a fitting climax for a novel that focuses on everyday soldiers whose drills, marches, and skirmishes keep glancing up against history. "Northern Wolf" is part historical travelogue, part spirited Bildungsroman, and part battle novel, inviting readers to immerse themselves in what life as a Civil War soldier might actually have felt like. At times, though, the narrative's focus on the journey of Johannes Wolf comes second to appearances from historic figures, whose point-of-view chapters slow an otherwise compelling story.
Prose/Style: Greene's prose is crisp, inviting, memorable, and period-appropriate. The dialogue is especially strong, with characters' idiomatic speech revealing both the drift of mind of these individuals but also of an era now otherwise lost to us. Greene excels at capturing the rough wit and camaraderie of his soldiers, as well as the poetic flourishes in the speech of a population that has the cadences of the King James bible echoing in its blood.
Originality: Stories of enlisted men seeking adventure and then finding loss and glory on the battlefield are commonplace, as are Civil War stories that march end at Gettysburg. But Greene's trek over a well-trod past is fresh and vital, fully imagined and bursting with life.
Character Development: Greene's novel adeptly captures, in its own words, the "training, marching, gambling, and drinking" of Michigan's most raggedy recruits in the late war. Then those recruits find themselves tested, in rousing, vivid scenes of battle. Greene captures the feeling of military life, of waiting and parsing rumors, of pre-fight jitters and boredom interrupted by sudden terror. The book's final third loses some of its engaging power, however, as the perspectives of officers and considerations of the strategies of battle increasingly share the spotlight with the scrappy experiences of Greene's fictional Michigan 13th Cavalry.
Plot: Vedros's 'Fixer' is a whip-smart, unflinching look at the hyper-competitive culture of Silicon Valley and the pursuit of the grind. The bold, quick plotting drives the story, along with its convincing depictions of fraught personal and professional relationships.
Prose/Style: Vedros's prose is sharp and dynamic and helps to establish the energetic pace of the novel. Characters' voices are distinct enough to add individual texture to the narrative, while the language is unpretentious and easily accessible.
Originality: This witty story of misguided aspiration, modern social mores, and the quest for self actualization blends contemporary fiction with sci-fi elements. The artful integration of each genre's respective elements result in an unconventional and thoroughly enjoyable novel.
Character Development: Meghan is by far the standout figure in this novel. Her emotional journey drives the story as she and Diego navigate the growing tensions within their relationship. Kari and Kira succeed as the ambitious, uncompromising couple they're meant to be.
Plot: Petrie crafts a rich, suspenseful historical story that centers on the lives of two female friends. The author deftly explores the impact of emotional and physical abuse and the impact of war.
Prose: Towards the Vanishing Point features an even, polished, and descriptive prose style with dialogue, phrasings, and references that aptly capture the era.
Originality: The novel's focus on the subtleties of an enduring female friendship is an evergreen concept. Petrie offers a compelling blend of genre elements, successfully staging a story of relationships and abusive power dynamics in a vividly realized setting.
Character/Execution: Readers will come to deeply know the primary characters, as they grow from children to adults. The story's sinister yet nuanced antagonist injects chilling conflict and complexity into the well-researched, emotionally resonant narrative.
Plot: The Initiates is a polished, sharply observant, and philosophical novel about the growth that comes from knowledge, self-awareness, and under the guidance of a nurturing and conscientious educator.
Prose: Karis's prose is striking, layered, and poetic. The storytelling style is graceful, even, and displays the author's clear dedication to craft.
Originality: While readers may draw comparisons to other works of literature--notably, young adult novels that surround the topic of suicide--Karis's work stands apart through its literary sophistication and integration of philosophical ideas.
Character/Execution: Karis capably creates a cast of students whose actions, dialogue, and perceptions are authentic and moving. While the heroine may benefit from additional moral complexity, her devotion to her students and personal relationship struggles, are vividly conveyed.
