Book Reviews

There’s a particular thrill in watching a series find its footing on the second try, and Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is Matt Dinniman proving that the breakout success of Dungeon Crawler Carl was no fluke. The training wheels are off, the tutorial floors are a memory, and the real dungeon is

Picture the ordinary rituals of a marriage — deciding whose turn it is to cook, negotiating who gets the last word in an argument — then strip away every comfort of home and put that same relationship on a nine-foot rubber raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for

Seventeen years is a long time to keep readers waiting for a follow-up, especially when your debut became both a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod in the same breath. Kathryn Stockett’s “The Calamity Club” arrives carrying all of that weight, and for the most part, sets it down with

Some memoirs read like a public accounting of a private collapse, written because the alternative — staying silent — had stopped being possible. Belle Burden’s “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” is that kind of book: a clear-eyed retracing of a twenty-year marriage that quietly, then suddenly, stopped being one. Burden’s

Some reunions land like weather nobody forecast. Ann Patchett’s new novel “Whistler” opens with exactly that kind of collision — a chance meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that reopens a wound its two characters have spent forty-five years pretending had healed. Daphne Fuller is 53 now, a longtime

Few self-published books have traveled as far, or generated as much argument, as H.D. Carlton’s “Haunting Adeline.” Originally released in 2021 with little fanfare, it became a BookTok phenomenon almost entirely through word of mouth, and years later it’s still selling briskly enough to land on Amazon’s fiction charts alongside

Some books earn their staying power the loud way, with a splashy debut and a fading afterlife. “Circe,” Madeline Miller’s 2018 retelling of Greek mythology’s most famous witch, has done the opposite: nearly a decade after publication, it keeps climbing back onto sales charts, propelled now by a new generation

By now, readers of the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” saga know better than to expect a breather. Matt Dinniman’s seventh installment, “This Inevitable Ruin,” proves once again that the deeper this series digs into its alien game-show hellscape, the less anyone involved gets to rest, and the more addictive the whole

Dystopian sequels have a familiar trap: crack the world open too fast and the claustrophobic intimacy that made book one work evaporates. Us Deadly Few, Alexis Patton’s follow-up to Us Dark Few, largely avoids it by keeping the stakes personal even as the setting gets bigger, harsher, and considerably more

Picture books built around a single pun rarely have anywhere to go after the joke lands once. Mac & Cheese: The Origin Story, the launch title in Michael L. Benner’s new Delicious Duos series, is the exception — a book that keeps finding new ways to be funny about the