Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Reviews by M K. (Minneapolis, MN)

Order Reviews by:
Bad Animals: A Novel
by Sarah Braunstein
Bad Animals (1/11/2024)
You don't read this book, you devour it, and like an Ourobourus, it devours you in turn. The many layers of the book (accentuated by deceptions, lies, and betrayals) are like 'bad animals' that sink their claws into you until the very last page. A book almost impossible to put down.
Day: A Novel
by Michael Cunningham
Day (10/11/2023)
This is a a gorgeously written book using the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to talk about how we can figure out who we are in an ever changing world that infiltrates our lives with calamities that we can't control and those that we can. The novel is deliciously claustrophobic,more
Devil Makes Three: A Novel
by Ben Fountain
Devil Makes Three (9/5/2023)
Devil Makes Three is a riveting detective novel, a thriller with political intrigue, many interwoven love stories and rise and collapse of Haiti after the coup replacing Aristide, the first democratically leader of their country. It's a long involved saga with many layersmore
Young Man, Muddled: A Memoir
by Robert Kanigel
Muddled, for sure (5/4/2023)
I want to say one further thing about this book. It was very poorly written. It was an "I did this and this and this etc." without any literate flourishes of language.

After finishing the book, whew, I open the new novel, Complicities, by Stacey D'Erasmo, and in the firstmore
Young Man, Muddled: A Memoir
by Robert Kanigel
Muddled, for sure (5/4/2023)
Rabert Kanigel's memoir is more a diary than a memoir about a few years in the late 1960's. His audience seems to be himself, remembering times past without much reflection; it covers jobs he took to avoid the draft for fighting in Viet Nam while working for companiesmore
Iron Curtain: A Love Story
by Vesna Goldsworthy
Iron Curtain (1/7/2023)
This gorgeous well-written book will grab your attention from the first several pages and never let go. The compelling story takes you on a journey that you haven't been on before, from a young woman leaving the upper class of Russia to a life she hadn't really anticipatedmore
The God of Endings: A Novel
by Jacqueline Holland
The God of Endings (11/5/2022)
What popped into my head as I started getting into this book was the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." I had a lot of mixed feelings about this book. For a first novel this woman writes extremely well, but also like many first novels, it's twice as long asmore
Good Husbands: A Novel
by Cate Ray
Good Husbands (3/29/2022)
It was surprising to me that a book, whose premise is that three women who are complete strangers receive a letter in the mail claiming their husbands were involved in sexually assaulting a woman over twenty years ago, and is 400 pages long, could hold my attention. Truthmore
Two Storm Wood: A Novel
by Philip Gray
Two Storm Wood (12/8/2021)
From the very first pages, I loved every word. It's one of those moments when style and cadence competes with content, or it could be the other way around because the content grabbed me right away and then I noticed how the style complimented my immersion in the story. Thismore
Never Saw Me Coming: A Novel
by Vera Kurian
What do you think you know for sure? (6/8/2021)
This novel is about a college program that has given free tuition to seven students who are deemed to be psychopaths. They have smart watches which systematically chart their locations and moods. They don't know the other students in the study. The psychologist who hasmore
Palace of the Drowned
by Christine Mangan
Palace of the Drowned (3/4/2021)
This is a gripping novel that teases with knowing what happened but waiting to see if anyone else knows and what the consequences might be. British author Frankie Croy's first novel is met with unabashed success and her lucrative book contract for subsequent novels is notmore
Waiting for the Night Song
by Julie Carrick Dalton
Waiting for the Night Song (11/25/2020)
For a debut novel, it is beautifully written and a captivating story balancing climate change on one side and illegal immigration on the other, with the fulcrum a murder in which the perpetrator and the victim are inextricably bound. We think we know what happened and whomore
The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir
by Sara Seager
Smallest Lights (7/6/2020)
The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager is a wonderful book about navigation: navigating the dark places in the universe where there may be other planets, earth-like, that can support life, navigating the dark places in ourselves, navigating rivers in northernmore
Catherine House: A Novel
by Elisabeth Thomas
Catherine House (3/11/2020)
For a first novel it was engaging and readable but the story was not well developed and ultimately disappointing. There were too many loose ends and the star of the book, plasm, was never adequately flushed out, part mind control and part fantasy, to know exactly what the secret was.
The Mountains Sing
by Nguyen Phan Que Mai
The Vietnam War in Full View (2/6/2020)
This gorgeously written novel explores four generations of a Vietnamese family impacted by the Vietnam War. Mai focuses on all aspects of policy as well as repercussions of this war: Land Reform, the war, the destruction, death, anger, grief, loss of life and limb, loss ofmore
The Seine: The River that Made Paris
by Elaine Sciolino
The Seine: The River That Made Paris by Elaine Sciolino (10/2/2019)
The Seine, nearly five hundred miles long, showcases Paris in all its glory and winds its way to the English Channel and adventures outward to New York and elsewhere. It is a shallow dirty river with a history of novelists and artists, breweries and booksellers, andmore
Nothing to See Here
by Kevin Wilson
Nothing to See Here (6/15/2019)
Reading a book where you've heard that children burst into flames sounds like a zombie book for Gen-Xers, but it's not. This is a book for anyone who has ever felt like an underdog and knows, that no matter how much money you throw at a problem, it is never a substitute formore
Transcription
by Kate Atkinson
Opposites Attract (5/16/2019)
For me, the funny thing about Transcription is that I don't particularly like Kate Atkinson's style and yet the story is so fun and engaging with wonderful turns and twists that I simply could not put it down and enjoyed the book thoroughly to the very last word.
The Guest Book
by Sarah Blake
History Through Many Vantage Points (4/13/2019)
From the first paragraph on the first page I was hooked by how beautifully written this book is. The Guest Book by Sarah Blake is about the Miltons, starting in 1935, and their history is about wealth (including an island they bought off the coast of Maine), power, tragedy,more
The Last Romantics
by Tara Conklin
The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin (12/10/2018)
This book begins with an underground seismic event: the death of small town dentist Mr. Skinner, and the reverberations stretch onto every page all the way through this gorgeously written novel. Ostensibly this story is about the Skinner family: Antonia (mother, called Noni)more
  • Page
  • 1
  • 2

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Model Home
    Model Home
    by Rivers Solomon
    Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Book Jacket
The Rose Arbor
by Rhys Bowen
An investigation into a girl's disappearance uncovers a mystery dating back to World War II in a haunting novel of suspense.
Who Said...

A library is a temple unabridged with priceless treasure...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.