Book Reviews

There’s a particular kind of dread that settles over a household in late August, and it doesn’t belong to the five-year-old — it belongs to the parents. Tish Rabe’s On the First Day of Kindergarten was written for exactly that moment, and it does something surprisingly rare in the crowded

If Order of the Phoenix was the book where the wheels came off, Half-Blood Prince is where J.K. Rowling proves she was steering the whole time. It is the quietest of the seven Harry Potter novels in terms of plot mechanics and among the most devastating in terms of consequence,

The title alone does a lot of work. It reads like a dare, a joke that isn’t quite a joke, and, once you’ve actually read the book, a statement of fact delivered without an ounce of exaggeration. Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died is one of the more

There is no Hogwarts Express in this one. No sorting hat, no first-day feast, no comforting hum of a castle that always seems to know what its students need. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows opens with a boy hiding in a car boot and closes, seven books and one

Nearly two decades after it first showed up in stores, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” is still doing something most middle-grade franchises never manage: it hasn’t had to change to stay relevant. Jeff Kinney’s original entry in the series introduces Greg Heffley, a scheming, status-obsessed middle schooler who insists, in

Katherine Applegate has built a career on convincing readers that an animal’s inner life deserves the same narrative weight as a human’s, and “Wombat Waiting” is her latest, quietly devastating proof of concept. The book follows Wombat, a scruffy shelter dog named for a stuffed toy she refuses to let

Some books earn their place on best-seller lists through plot twists or shock value. “Wonder” has spent over a decade there by doing something much harder: asking readers to sit with discomfort until it turns into understanding. R.J. Palacio’s novel follows Auggie Pullman, a ten-year-old boy born with a rare

Some true-crime books lead with the crime. “London Falling” leads with a fall — a nineteen-year-old named Zac Brettler stepping out onto the balcony of a luxury Thames-side apartment in November 2019 and, moments later, going over the railing. Patrick Radden Keefe, who has built one of the more formidable

There is a particular kind of thriller that only works if its hero feels like he actually belongs to the ground he’s standing on, and “The Country Road Murders” gets that balance right from its opening pages. James Patterson and Mike Lupica, who have made a habit of pairing propulsive

Colson Whitehead has spent two novels teaching readers how to case a room the way his hero Ray Carney does: patiently, hungrily, with an eye for the exact seam where legitimate life gives way to the hustle underneath it. “Cool Machine” is where that education pays off. It is the