Book Reviews

Frank Miller redrew the American superhero in ink so black it practically bled off the page — and now, at last, he’s turning that same unflinching eye on himself. “Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling” is billed as a memoir, but it reads more

Sequels to beloved series carry a particular kind of pressure: deliver the same electricity that hooked readers the first time, or risk becoming the book fans politely skip on reread. Tahereh Mafi’s “Release Me,” the second entry in her Shatter Me spinoff series The New Republic, arrives with exactly that

Every kid who has ever taken apart a toaster and regretted it needs this book on their shelf, and so, frankly, does every adult who still can’t explain how a zipper works. David Macaulay’s “The Way Things Work: Newly Revised Edition” has been quietly quizzing curious minds for decades, and

Some childhood promises are made to be broken, and some are just made to be misunderstood for a decade. Lynn Painter’s “Fake Skating” opens with exactly that kind of ache: two kids who swore they’d stay in touch, a stack of coded postcards that mysteriously stopped arriving, and a grudge

Emily Giffin has spent two decades writing about the moment a woman’s carefully built life collides with the one she almost had, and “Love You More” may be her sharpest treatment of that collision yet. Billie Baker is a reproductive endocrinologist in New York City, newly engaged to Dean and,

Romantasy has no shortage of enemies who fall in love, but Brigitte Knightley’s Dearly Beloathed series has built its reputation on making that premise hurt in the best possible way, and “The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy” delivers the sequel fans have been sharpening their knives for. Picking up

Sixteen years after “The Help” turned a quiet, complicated South into a publishing phenomenon, Kathryn Stockett returns with a novel that trades the 1960s for the Depression-era 1930s and swaps polite discomfort for outright audacity — and the wait, it turns out, was worth it. “The Calamity Club” opens in

There is a very specific kind of American reinvention story that starts with a layoff letter, and Stephen Starring Grant’s version begins about as badly as they get: laid off in March of 2020, fifty years old, in the middle of cancer treatment, with nowhere obvious to go. What he

Some rivalries are built on hatred. The one at the center of Rina Kent’s Tempting Venom is built on something messier: two men who have spent a lifetime trying to destroy each other because neither can figure out how else to want each other. It is the kind of premise

A dog with no owner shows up in the woods behind a crumbling English country house, and by the time its microchip is scanned, an entire buried life comes rattling back into daylight. That is the hook Lisa Jewell hangs her latest psychological thriller on, and it is a testament