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FictionLiterary Fiction

Theft

Review by Alden Mudge

Theft is Tanzanian-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel and his first since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set mainly in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the story comes into focus slowly. Gurnah is an unhurried storyteller, interested in examining the quiet but complicated lives of ordinary people. His language is rarely flashy, and yet there is a submerged sense of urgency in Theft that bursts to the surface in its final section.

Theft centers on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule. Karim’s mother quickly divorces the much older husband she has been forced to marry, leaving Karim to be raised by his grandparents and, later, his older half brother. Karim longs for the father he does not know, but he is bright and charming, and soon on a path that will eventually lead to high government office.

While in school, Karim meets Fauzia, an education student whose parents worry that she is unmarriageable because of a childhood bout of “falling sickness.” But Fauzia is in the first blush of liberation and is vibrantly alive. The awkward, good-humored courtship between Fauzia and Karim is beautifully rendered, an emotional high point of the novel.

Like Karim, Badar also longs to know his father. As a child he learns the family raising him are distant, impoverished relatives who see him as a toxic obligation. At 13, he is taken to serve in a household whose elderly patriarch despises him for unknown reasons. The lady of the house turns out to be Karim’s mother, and when Badar is unjustly accused of theft, Karim takes Badar home to live in his household and helps find him work in a tourist hotel.

In the final section of the book, the close relationships among its characters fall apart. It’s not incidental that this coincides with the arrival of British nonprofit aid organizations and tourists, who’ve come to “help” the country and “experience” its people. As an empathic reader begins to wonder who are the real thieves, Theft reveals itself to be a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies.

Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel, Theft, is a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies, centering on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Paris Express

Review by Alice Cary

“Like a knife turning the world to butter, Engine 721 bursts through the wooden buffers.” That’s how Emma Donoghue describes a real-life railway disaster in her thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel, The Paris Express. Inspired by an iconic 1895 photo of a train engine dangling out of Paris’s Montparnasse Station, the multifaceted author (Room, The Wonder), artfully blends fact with her astute imagination to create a story representing a broad slice of social concerns, including innovation and technology, as well as art. As the train hurtles toward its fate, Donoghue examines the transportation mode as a metaphor—the train is “a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life.”

The action of the novel begins with an 8:30 a.m. stop in Granville and continues through the Paris crash that afternoon at 4:01. Chapters are organized like a train schedule, marking various station arrivals, departures and delays, while passengers arrive and occasionally move from carriage to carriage, each carriage “as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.”

And oh, what a dinner party this is! People of all ages, classes, races and nationalities interact, as Donoghue introduces characters based on passengers who were actually aboard that 1895 train, as well as other real-life personalities whom she “invites” aboard, and a few characters entirely of her invention. Amid the drama, Donoghue has plenty of fun, for instance, having her characters refer to the recently erected Eiffel Tower as “that monstrosity,” or writing that “Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his first Impression, Sunrise, Normandy’s been infested with painters.”

Tension builds from the start of the journey, when a radical young woman nicknamed Mado raises the suspicions of Russian emigree and social worker Elise Blonska. Donoghue explains the technology and handling of the locomotive in riveting scenes, bringing the crew to life amid descriptions of corporate greed. Only a writer as talented as Donoghue could have readers so immersed in fin de siecle Paris while also, perhaps, musing about the motivations and movements involved in the contemporary assassination of which Luigi Mangione has been accused.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, as Donoghue wonderfully illuminates the fleeting qualities of both life and art. As Henry Tanner notes: “That’s the paradox of trains. . . . They show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.”

Read our interview with Emma Donoghue about The Paris Express.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue’s thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel inspired by a real-life railway disaster.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The Martian Contingency

Review by Noah Fram

Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest exquisitely crafted and meticulously researched Lady Astronaut novel, The Martian Contingency, continues her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning series set in an alternate 20th century. It’s 1970, and Drs. Elma and Nathaniel York are among the second wave of spacefarers building a permanent home for humankind on Mars. Years earlier, a meteor strike obliterated Washington, D.C. and set off an extinction-level series of climate catastrophes. Like other writers documenting humanity’s often hubristic, Ozymandian response to such existential threats, Kowal contends with whether the disparate and all too dissonant components of Earthbound society will unite to survive. But in so doing, she probes more intimate questions: What would it be like to live your life on that precipice? And how would a society built in one reality adjust to a wholly unrecognizable one?

In The Martian Contingency, Kowal emphasizes this sense of alienation through the calendar. Our celebrations and rituals are so firmly tied to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth and the moon that it is surprisingly difficult to translate them offworld. How will the Jewish Elma and Nathaniel mark Rosh Hashanah on a planet with a year of a different length, two moons and no tidal cycles? When is Christmas, Diwali or Eid al-Fitr? What do those holidays mean, anyway? Watching the piecemeal emergence of a unique spacefaring culture is both fascinating and inspiring.

The moments when the old rules fail to translate drive Kowal’s plot, which revolves around Elma’s investigation into a cover-up of a horrible event during the first wave of Martian exploration. The Martian Contingency is no Roddenberry-esque utopia; rather, it is riddled with the brutal legacies of our worst demons. From the entrenched racism of apartheid-era South Africa or politicization of pregnancy and childbirth to the casual postwar sexism of phrases like “keep the home fires burning” or the connotations of referring to the Mars base as a colony or settlement, Kowal’s Martian pioneers cannot escape the myriad traumas we humans have inflicted on each other over the years. The result is a deeply personal novel about whether the human race will survive and, if it does, what it will be.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s fascinating, inspiring The Martian Contingency observes the emergence of a unique spacefaring culture.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

The House No One Sees

Review by Mariel Fechik

Once upon a time, there was a little doll who lived in a house perched on the corner of a busy street with bright lights. The road was so busy and the lights so bright that no one could see the house. The doll lived with a princess who slept and slept and almost never woke up. The doll tried to wake the sleeping princess, but once the princess opened her eyes, she called the little doll terrible names. The little doll ran from the house and found a new version of home. But some part of her remained, buried deep in the foundation of the house that no one saw.

The doll is really Penelope Ross, a 16-year-old girl trying to both outrun and unravel the memories of a childhood spent in the trenches of her mother’s drug addiction. On the night of her 16th birthday, surrounded by friends, Penny is finally feeling the sense of normalcy that the doll never could—until the sleeping princess sends a text, summoning her back home.

In the tradition of Carmen Maria Machado, whose acclaimed memoir, In the Dream House, details an abusive relationship through surrealist vignettes, Adina King’s debut novel The House No One Sees depicts a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief and must subsequently learn the art of both deconstructing and reconstructing her life. Machado’s memoir quotes the artist Louise Bourgeois: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”

Written in a hybrid form of verse and prose, Penny’s story comes in nonlinear pieces. In the present, Penny navigates her way through the house and a flood of memories, while the details of her past are filtered through poems. Though King’s metaphors occasionally become muddled, this figurative exploration of the effects of parental drug addiction is brilliant. After all, trauma and its aftermath is not usually a legible experience: It exists in the margins of a life, coloring everything contained in between. The House No One Sees is not a perfect book, but it is an important one that might offer a guiding light to countless other little dolls.

The House No One Sees offers a guiding light to readers through its depiction of a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

The Expert of Subtle Revisions

Review by Arlene McKanic

How does one review a book when discussing even the basics of the plot might spoil it? Such is the dilemma with Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s fascinating The Expert of Subtle Revisions. The novel reminded me of 1950s Russian puzzle book The Moscow Puzzles, not just because it’s about a group of mathematicians/philosophers/Wikipedia contributors, but because the solution to its main question is so devilishly clever.

The book opens in 2016, on the birthday of a strange woman named Hase (German for “Rabbit”). Her equally strange father lives on a rickety boat and is missing. Hase grows more and more anxious as the day goes on and he doesn’t show up; it’s not like this meticulous man to forget her birthday. 

Then, in its fourth chapter, the novel jumps backward to 1933 Austria, a most perilous time and place. You’ll wonder what this era has to do with Hase, an impoverished Wikipedia contributor who has neither birth certificate, Social Security number nor any of those other documents that lets the government know you exist. The answer is everything.  

Chapter 4 is narrated by a young man named Anton who has been named a Privatdozent, or an unpaid lecturer, at a university in Vienna. His part of the tale is fraught with nasty rivalries, secret loves, weird cults, blackmail, seances, political turmoil and even an assassination. Then, Anton comes into possession of a music box full of strange little gears and an especially haunting melody. Meanwhile, in 2016, Hase is on the lookout for a book her father wants her to find “in the event.” In the event of what, exactly?

The author’s cool writing style is deceptive, for her characters who so value their intellect are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions. These passions, and the one great problem that drives the book, have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds. It leads to an ending that’s surreal, impossible and a tad Lynchian. Menger-Anderson’s talent makes you believe in it.

In The Expert of Subtle Revisions, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s oddball intellectual characters are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions, which have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds.
FictionPopular FictionComic Fiction

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Clowns go in and out of fashion. Sometimes they are twisted killers skipping sinisterly in the streets, other times they are brave and bold antiheroes who laugh in the face of normalcy and sing duets with Lady Gaga. Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One shows clowns in a somewhat less dramatic and flattering light: In these pages, clowns are losers. Cherry is a 28-year-old lesbian stoner working at an aquarium store, but her true passion is clowning. While Cherry seems like someone this reviewer would be friends with, middle-class central Floridian society feels differently about her. Even her stage persona, Bunko, a rodeo-aspiring goofball with a fear of horses, is a loser (in the best way). But as Cherry narrates her tragicomic life, the dullness of Orlando takes on a whimsical and erotically charged atmosphere where the butt of the joke is as callipygian as rich housewives.

Though her clowning might make her seem a bit strange, Cherry’s incorrigible horniness makes her as relatable as any non-clown main character. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One opens with Cherry in a suburban bathroom, getting it on red nose-style with the mother of a birthday boy she just performed for. As things get steamy, Cherry plays into the mother’s clown fetish (don’t judge), pulling some tricks out of her sleeve. The two are quickly interrupted by an irate, door-busting husband, and Cherry has to flee the scene, leaving behind her tools of the trade. This initial assignation not only sets the tone for this comic romp, but also reveals Cherry’s weakness for MILFs. Enter Margot, an older lesbian magician who coolly and easily woos Cherry with her knowledge of performance, schooling her in the storied tradition of clowns and magicians. Margot has a lot more to offer Cherry than a chance to work through her mommy issues, as her industry connections give Cherry a tantalizing glimpse of success in entertainment. It seems like the perfect match, but Cherry’s baggage is as crammed as a clown car, and just as dangerous to unpack. As Cherry struggles to be a true artist and find love, Arnett’s prose perfectly blends the tragedy and humor of life, leaving readers alternately gut-punched with grief and bursting with laughter.

Kristen Arnett’s comic romp, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, centers a 28-year-old lesbian stoner with a passion for clowning rivalled only by her passion for MILFs.
NonfictionMemoirEducation

Spellbound

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Canadian comedian and former model Phil Hanley’s debut memoir, Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith, is refreshingly frank, disarmingly vulnerable and, yes, frequently hilarious.

Thanks to appearances on late-night talk shows, two comedy specials and regular gigs at Manhattan’s Comedy Cellar, Hanley’s known for his sharp wit and masterful crowd work. But he wasn’t always at ease in the spotlight. Years of frustrating, humiliating struggle in a school system not equipped nor inclined to support students like Hanley—diagnosed with severe dyslexia—ensured he shrank away. Reading aloud was excruciating: “Looking at a block of text was like trying to memorize an abstract painting,” he writes.

After his hard-won high school graduation, Hanley wondered, “What do you do when you’re eighteen years old and out of school and have no plans for the future?” Well, you say yes when your friend Shalom (Harlow, the 1990s supermodel) asks if you want to try modeling. Hanley posed for Armani and Dolce & Gabbana, but his heart wasn’t in it. No matter: “Modeling wasn’t my goal, but it was leading me somewhere,” he writes. “Being directionless is only a bad thing if you let it prevent you from moving.”

And move Hanley did, to the U.K. and Vancouver and New York City, his life populated with generous friends, devotion to the Grateful Dead and a burning desire to become a comedian. Self-doubt lingered: “How could I be a comedy writer when I struggled to read a takeout menu?” But Hanley developed his own systems. Most comics jot ideas in a tiny notebook; he uses giant canvases. Some comics meander to the punchline; a shorter attention span yielded “concise jokes that were precisely worded.”

And all comedians rehearse until their jokes are second nature and the stage feels like home. Readers will cheer for Hanley as he achieves that comfort level with his comedy craft and learning disability alike: “I now wear my dyslexia as a badge of honor.” Spellbound will resonate with fans of Simu Liu’s We Were Dreamers, James Tate Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Amy Schumer’s The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo: It’s an inspiring, well-written tale of overcoming adversity and self-doubt that’s plenty funny, too.

Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Stalactite & Stalagmite

Review by Alice Cary

Two charming anthropomorphic nubs of cave rock take center stage in Drew Beckmeyer’s Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave, a superbly funny and profound introduction to the history of the world thus far.

Beckmeyer is an elementary school teacher known for imaginative books like The First Week of School, and Stalactite & Stalagmite does not disappoint. His titular mineral formations are a pointy practical-minded fellow who hangs from the ceiling and a squat little dreamer-philosopher who rises from the cave floor. Together, the duo have amusing chats, host a variety of animal visitors and bear witness to millions of years of earthly transformation as viewed through their picture-window-esque cave entrance.

And oh, the changes they see! Inside the cave, an Ichthyostega (“kind of like a fish mixed with a frog”) with appealingly buggy eyes and bright green skin wraps the stalagmite in a friendly hug. It heralds the arrival of new creatures, too, being “one of the first animals that could walk on land and swim in the water.” Outside, the Cretaceous Extinction meteor shower creates a breathtaking backdrop for a poignant portrait of a red-dotted triceratops mesmerized by “dazzling lights flying across the sky.”

As the epochs and eras roll along, the dripping of the mineral-infused water that formed the nubs remains as steady and enduring as their friendship. Whether shooing away a bat that rudely hangs from the stalactite’s tip or asking each other, “If you had arms, what would you draw?” the chatty duo’s conversations punctuate the inexorable passage of time with humor and sweetness.

There is trepidation as the day they merge into a stalagnate (also known as a column) looms large. “I don’t know what I will be when we are us and I am not me anymore,” the stalagmite says. “Maybe becoming the us is where our story really starts,” the stalactite posits. It’s an affecting, thought-provoking exchange in a book filled with opportunities for readers to ponder the wonder and beauty of our world—and the loveliness of having a trusted companion through it all.

Stalactite & Stalagmite is filled with opportunities for readers to ponder the wonder and beauty of our world—and the loveliness of having a trusted companion through it all.
FictionPoetry

Scorched Earth

Review by Kelly Ann Graff

With Scorched Earth, Tiana Clark has sculpted a collection for those who love literature and who wrestle with what it means to love themselves.

From the outset of the collection, it becomes clear that we are exploring life after personal apocalypse. Her prologue introduces the post-divorce context of the book while laying out the thematic journey with the closing couplet, “There is still some residue, some proof of puncture, / some scars you graze to remember the risk.” We examine the wreckage of divorce, gather what has been left behind, and take brave steps into the unknown, carrying our histories with us.

While these poems are unquestionably personal and vulnerable, they force the reader to reckon with the role of biography in poetry. Where does the poet fall on the spectrum of truth between a novelist and memoirist? For those familiar with Clark’s oeuvre, there are references to not only her previous collections, but also how the public has responded to her work. In the titular poem, “Scorched Earth,” Clark writes, “I get so tired when people ask me about this one / poem that I wrote. The truth is: I lied. / Did I have to be there for it to still hurt me? / Am I allowed to conjure the possibility of pain / to protect myself from the pain?” “Scorched Earth” is a response to Kara Walker’s print Buzzard’s Roost Pass, and within it, these lines illustrate how readers and writers can identify with and explore our own traumas through images, texts and experiences that are not our own.

Clark’s role as a literary educator is evident throughout, as well. The allusions in a single poem, such as “Broken Ode for the Epigraph,” would make an engaging and exciting reading list. Her conversational language and anecdotes pull readers in as though she’s recounting a story to an old friend, but then she’ll pull out a literary term like “duende” or “monostich,” reminding you that you are in the presence of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing with her words.

Clark’s obsession with literature mirrors her investigation of beauty: What does it mean to be beautiful in a society dominated by white beauty standards? What does it mean to be a poet in a tradition dominated by a white canon? The final section of the collection answers these questions by finding joy and desire outside of white, heteronormative expectations. With poems like “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” and “Queer Miracle,” Clark repurposes traditional English poetic forms to suit her own dreams, adhering to her own rules.

This is a collection that laughs at “confessional” as a derogatory term and embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.

Read our Q&A with Tiana Clark about Scorched Earth.

Tiana Clark’s searching second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Rooms for Vanishing

Review by Michael Magras

What if the innocent dead of the Holocaust had gone on to live alternate lives? And what if each survivor didn’t know that others in their family existed elsewhere in the universe? That’s the central premise of Rooms for Vanishing, Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel. 

At the center of this grief-soaked, nonlinear narrative are the Altermans, a Jewish family originally from Vienna. In 1979 London, Sonja Alterman is looking for her missing husband, Franz, an orchestra conductor “successful enough that he occasionally appeared on television looking appropriately bewildered.” Before he departed, Franz left behind a curious artifact, “a photograph of a woman standing in the center of a church.” 

That woman, who appears to be about 18 years old, may or may not be Anya, their daughter. But Anya died a decade earlier at age 9 from a misdiagnosed illness. Adding to the mystery is another wrinkle: Sonja herself died years earlier after her father, Arnold, put her on a Kindertransport to London and warned her, “Do not under any circumstances say anything in Yiddish.” After Sonja’s departure, the Nazis killed her father, her mother, Fania, and her 6-month-old brother, Moses. 

Nadler shifts among the family members’ perspectives throughout this intricate novel. Readers meet Fania, who works as a masseuse in a Montreal hotel in 1966, where she suspects that one of her clients may be her doppelganger; Moses, who meets a man who says he was shot dead at the Prague train station years earlier; and Arnold, who celebrates his 99th birthday and receives a letter from a woman who claims to be Sonja.

Ghosts and doubles abound in Rooms for Vanishing. Like many stories involving alternate realities, Nadler’s novel can get needlessly complex, but it compensates with exceptionally powerful moments, as when Moses notes, regarding the young boys who were Nazi soldiers, “the face of mid-century evil, I discovered, was a cleanly shaven face.” One can’t erase the travesties of the past, but one can imagine a different future, as Nadler does in this emotionally resonant work.

Ghosts and doppelgangers abound in Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel, which shifts among the perspectives of members of a Jewish family originally from Vienna.
Photography

Picturing Black History

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

In this fascinating and important collection of previously unseen or underappreciated photographs, a team of art historians and archivists have created the definitive photographic account of the Civil Rights Movement. Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World features an expansive array of photography, from slice-of-life snapshots to photojournalism to portraits. Together, the multifaceted truth of Black American history—extending beyond the Civil Rights Movement to cover what came before as well as some of its outcomes—comes into focus. The product of an ongoing collaborative effort between Getty Images and Ohio State University’s online magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, it presents the argument that there is a symbiotic relationship between photography and Black history, because photography introduced a previously unavailable type of self-representation. The book’s photo-essays, like Alex Lichtenstein’s examination of the photographs Ben Shahn captured of Arkansas sharecroppers in 1935, contextualize the history with rich but accessible pocket narratives: “The relaxed and open pose of this family stands in notable contrast to the display of rural hardship and desperation one finds in many portraits of Southern Black life in the Depression era,” Lichtenstein writes. That kind of thoughtfully informed analysis refutes many misconceptions about Black history in America with a more layered vision. The stories told through the photographs of Picturing Black History run the gamut from joy and sorrow to ennui and perseverance, making this volume a necessary addition for library and personal bookshelves alike.

Containing slice-of-life snapshots, photojournalism and portraits, Picturing Black History is the definitive photographic account of the Civil Rights Movement.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

Bellamy Rose’s Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder pairs the perky, fashion-forward heart of Legally Blonde with the cozy wit of Only Murders in the Building as its riches-to-rags protagonist attempts to get to the bottom of her formidable grandmother’s untimely death.

At 28, Pomona Afton hasn’t accomplished much. Then again, she’s heiress to the storied Afton Hotel dynasty and has her own suite overlooking Central Park, with 24/7 service and glamorous friends to party with every night (at stuffy galas and hot clubs, thank you very much). But after Pomona’s grandma is murdered, a new clause in her will comes to light: If Grandmother Afton passes away from unnatural causes, all family assets are frozen. If the death remains unexplained, family assets stay frozen. Forced to work as a barista and move in with Gabe, her ex-nanny’s very handsome but rather grumpy son, Pomona vows to solve the case and return to her once-fabulous life. As she gets closer to finding answers, however, Pomona reckons with the idea of making her own way—and the irritating fact that Gabe is really, really cute.

Bellamy Rose—whose bio stipulates that she “has never solved an actual murder”—is the pseudonym of Amanda Elliot, a USA Today-bestselling romantic comedy author. Rose has created a hilarious, plucky heroine, who’s never before considered her own immense privilege. Besides a mystery that keeps the reader guessing, the book boasts a vibrant cast, from Pomona’s perpetually exasperated accountant brother, Nicholas, to fellow socialite Opal, whose own life has come apart (though her Instagram feed says otherwise). Strap on your Manolos and stay on your toes: Pomona Afton is on the case, and she always gets what she wants.

The hilarious, plucky titular character of Bellamy Rose’s Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder will win readers’ hearts while making them laugh out loud.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Our Beautiful Boys

Review by Thane Tierney

We obviously have good reason to be somewhat skeptical about parents’ biased assertions. How many times have we heard parents say, “But they’re a good kid!” when their little darlings are accused of behaving badly? In Sameer Pandya’s novel Our Beautiful Boys, though, the presumption of innocence seems, at first, eminently plausible. Vikram, Diego and MJ are three high school football players who seem to exemplify the concept of the student athlete. When the three are accused of assaulting a fellow student, their families’ concerns about how they will be treated break along ethnic and economic divides. 

The immediate penalty for the boys is an indefinite suspension until the school principal can figure out the truth of what happened the evening of the assault. As teens do, the boys clam up at first, then try to concoct a unified story that leaves them comparatively blameless. But the football season hangs in the balance, and the team won’t make the playoffs without its three stars, so the pressure is on to get this resolved, and quickly. In their absence, their fellow students begin to segregate into camps supporting or opposing the victim’s account of the events, which is the only version initially made public.

Meanwhile, the parents find themselves in an awkward position, occasionally working at cross-purposes with one another while trying to defend both their kids’ and their families’ reputations. And the high schoolers aren’t the only ones concealing valuable truths: The adults have secrets of their own, which complicates the interactions among all concerned. 

Investigating masculinity, ethnicity, education, privilege and social standing, Pandya has delivered an incisive and thoughtful novel that not only speaks to our contemporary culture, but also unearths some timeless truths about the good—and bad—kids inside us all.

Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys is an incisive and thoughtful novel that speaks to contemporary culture and unearths some timeless truths about the good—and bad—kids inside us all.

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