Review by New York Times Review
A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS, by Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $19.99.) Early in Oates's novel, Luther Dunphy, an evangelical, invokes the Lord just before shooting dead an abortion provider, Augustus Voorhees. The story chronicles the fallout of the killing for the Dunphy and Voorhees families, and even if it's soon clear whom Oates considers the martyrs to be, she examines the moral complexities of abortion from several sides. HIS FINAL BATTLE: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, by Joseph Lelyveld. (Vintage, $18.) Seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president, Roosevelt was far sicker than he let on, and perhaps knew he would not live long. Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The New York Times, reviews Roosevelt's last 16 months in office, including the Manhattan Project and the culmination of World War II. DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Roxane Gay. (Grove, $16.) For many of the characters across this collection, Gay's first book of short stories, love, sex, intimacy and violence are intertwined; in the opening tale, two sisters have forged an unbreakable bond in the hands of a predator. Our reviewer, Gemma Sieff, praised "the cryptic, claustrophobic relationships described in these pages and the strange detours that riddle Gay's imaginary landscapes." LOVE FOR SALE: Pop Music in America, by David Hajdú. (Picador, $17.) From vaudeville singers and the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem to present-day streaming services, Hajdú, a music critic for The Nation, traces the evolution of popular music over roughly the past hundred years. Weaving together his personal and critical reflections, Hajdú tries to answer a vexing set of questions: When we talk about pop music, what precisely do we mean? And does it still matter to American culture? VICTORIA, by Daisy Goodwin. (St. Martin's Griffin, $16.99) Soon after her 18th birthday, Victoria ascended to the throne. Goodwin, who adapted Victoria's biography for a PBS Masterpiece drama, focuses on the young queen's life before her marriage to Albert, as she reckons with her independence and power. As our reviewer, Priya Parmar, said, this depiction of Victoria sought out "the woman she actually was." THE BRIDGE TO BRILLIANCE: How One Woman and One Community Are Inspiring the World, by Nadia Lopez with Rebecca Paley. (Penguin, $17.) Lopez runs the Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, and rose to prominence when the Humans of New York photographer Brandon Stanton visited her. She looks at the challenges educators face in reaching the nation's poorest children.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 26, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
As the title of her new collection suggests, essayist (Bad Feminist, 2014) and novelist (An Untamed State, 2014) Gay tells intimate, deep, wry tales of jaggedly dimensional women. Gay sets her stories, which have all appeared previously in a variety of publications, in many corners of the U.S., with Upper Michigan the most frequent locale. In the brilliant North Country, a woman wonders if she can survive the frigid bleakness for the two years her postdoctoral fellowship requires, and in Bone Density, a writer turns a blind eye to her respected husband's many affairs while meeting her own lover in a cabin in the woods. Some stories approach fantasy, as in Requiem for a Glass Heart, when a man called only the stone thrower loves a woman made entirely of glass, and in Noble Things, in which a couple must choose sides for the sake of their son after the second Civil War and the secession of the American South. Be they writer, scientist, or stripper, Gay's women suffer grave abuses, mourn unfathomable losses, love hard, and work harder.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gay (Bad Feminist) pens a powerful collection of short stories about difficult, troubled, headstrong, and unconventional women. "I Will Follow You" tracks the bond of two adult sisters who refuse to live in fear after being kidnapped and assaulted as young girls. In "The Mark of Cain," a wife pretends not to know that her abusive husband has swapped places with his kinder identical twin, who doesn't beat her. The darkly humorous title story outlines the traits of different types of "difficult women" in flash-style vignettes. A jilted woman recovering from delivering a stillborn child finds love far from her home and past in "North Country." And in "Break All the Way Down," a couple learns to overcome their guilt and grief over the death of their son when they are handed a new child by a mother who can't care for her. Whether focusing on assault survivors, single mothers, or women who drown their guilt in wine and bad boyfriends, Gay's fantastic collection is challenging, quirky, and memorable. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Experienced narrator Robin Miles is the ideal proxy for Gay's difficult women, many of whom are not so much difficult as living lives that have been made difficult, onerous, or tragic by others. Embodying various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, Miles refreshes and adapts her rich voice with practiced ease from story to story. Some are complicated: identical twins who like to switch places in "The Mark of Cain"; a daughter who remembers her Saturday trips with her father "In the Event of My Father's Death." Others are horrific: a pair of preteen sisters enslaved for six weeks of sexual torture in "I Will Follow You"; the brutal gang rape of a young girl in "Strange Gods." Some resemble fairy tales-a waterlogged not-quite love story in "Water, All Its Weight-and some are numbingly tragic: the loss of a child by inciting violence in "Break All the Way Down"; silently falling victim to white privilege in "La Negra Blanca." Unrelenting, unrepentant, unflinching, Gay won't disappoint. VERDICT The bonus of Miles's vocal prowess should convince libraries to invest in these electrifying Women without delay. ["Refreshing yet intricate, in the vein of Clarence Major's Chicago Heat and Other Stories, this work will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction": LJ 12/16 starred review of the Grove hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of stories unified in themethe struggles of women claiming independence for themselvesbut wide-ranging in conception and form.The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in "North Country" who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of "Are you from Detroit?" to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle "I Will Follow You." Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: "Florida" is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who's misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in "La Negra Blanca." But again, Gay isn't given to uniform indictments: "Bad Priest" is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and "Break All the Way Down" is a nuanced study of a woman's urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in "I Am a Knife" evokes the narrator's sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as "loose," "frigid," and "crazy" with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: "Requiem for a Glass Heart" is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; "The Sacrifice of Darkness" is ersatz science fiction about the sun's disappearance; "Noble Things" provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it. Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women's lives and new ways to tell their stories. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
