When it comes to genres, our book reviews know no bounds: Kate Folk’s first novel features a protagonist who wants to marry an airplane. Claire Hoffman’s biography of Aimee Semple McPherson reveals new truths about an old subject. Susan Orleans’s memoir is every bit as effervescent, smart, and curious as the writer herself. Here are six reviews that stood out. (And if you don’t receive it already, make sure you sign up for our free Monday Book Review newsletter here.)
The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, by Alexis Madrigal, reviewed by William Deverell
(April 7)
“Fine-grained social history forms the base of the book. Madrigal weaves a contextual structure built atop the life and times of a single person. That structure is the story of modern global capitalism literally moving back and forth across the vastness of the Pacific Rim.”
Sky Daddy, by Kate Folk, reviewed by Anna E. Clark
(April 28)
“What, Sky Daddy asks, does being ‘in’ mean anyway, in a present more attuned to the needs of faceless corporate entities than actual people? What’s a reasonable desire when modest human comforts feel aspirational? Alongside its riveting depiction of obsession, Sky Daddy traces our corporation-exploited present’s fundamental strangeness.”
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman, reviewed by David L. Ulin
(May 12)
“McPherson was both huckster and true believer, which makes her narrative even more representative of Los Angeles. ‘I think it’s like a circle,’ Hoffman told me on a recent Zoom call. ‘When you think about an extreme believer and an extreme charlatan, they are actually right next to each other in her case.’”
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System, by Brando Simeo Starkey, reviewed by Walton Muyumba
(June 23)
“Starkey’s sharpest interventions come in his deconstruction of constitutional ‘intent’ and the Supreme Court’s garbled legalese. His critique redeems what Baldwin termed the ‘unwritten and despised’ history of Black resistance to judicial betrayal.’”
Joyride, by Susan Orlean, reviewed by Lauren LeBlanc
(October 20)
“Anyone with a writing career as impressive and glamorous as Orlean’s would be bound to attract some detractors, but encountering her enthusiasm and aplomb, it’s hard to be anything less than inspired.”
Lightbreakers, by Aja Gabel, reviewed by Jackie DesForges
(November 17)
“Gabel deals in what propels the minutiae of our lives as they already exist in the present: the science of our individuality and our memories, the fiction of grief as a single emotion with a concrete beginning and end. Here, memory is both science and fiction.”
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
