Weekend picks for book lovers
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN’s picks for book lovers include Heroes of the Frontier, a new novel by Dave Eggers.
Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers; Knopf, 384 pp.; fiction
Ah, to spend a few hundred pages in the mind of Dave Eggers. Whether he’s writing a memoir clogged with footnotes or a novel about war-torn Sudan, readers have learned they can count on Eggers for clear-eyed wisdom, a wry sense of humor and a tonal agility, bouncing effortlessly from humor to tragedy and back again.
The title of this book is already a bit of a dodge. Though Heroes of the Frontier is about a road trip in Alaska, the most hardscrabble frontier we have in the modern United States, our protagonist, Josie, is lacking in any traditional heroic qualities.
Without a plan, she’s secreted away her two children on an RV trip through the wilderness. In the name of adventure (and to avoid having to deliver the kids to her ex, Carl), Josie leaves her son and daughter in the company of strangers, drives straight into raging wildfires, breaks into abandoned properties, and keeps the kids on the road well after the school year has begun back home.
Paste BN says *** out of four stars. “Remarkably brave and resonant.”
Soho Sins by Richard Vine; Hard Case Crime, 382 pp.; fiction
Jack Wyeth, an art dealer, learns with horror that a friend and client has been murdered; her husband confesses, but given his recent mental decline that’s less decisive than it might appear.
Paste BN says ***½ stars. “Soho Sins is the perfect emblem of the excellence of its publisher, Hard Case Crime, which has carved out a leading place in the recent hardboiled revival.”
Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America by Calvin Trillin; Random House, 304 pp.; non-fiction
The range of experiences encompassed in this collection are as complicated and as exasperating as the 1969 effort to integrate Denver schools — and as peculiar as the attempt of a mixed-race Louisiana woman to use every legal means at her disposal to change her birth classification from “colored” to white.
Paste BN says **** stars. “Though most of the non-fiction pieces in Calvin Trillin’s collection of race-related reportage are at least 30 years old, there is something startlingly — and depressingly — up-to-the-minute about their content.”
Belgravia by Julian Fellowes; Grand Central, 402 pp.; fiction
In 1840s England, Anne Trenchard tells Lady Brockenhurst they share a bastard grandson; from the creator of Downton Abbey.
Paste BN says *** stars. “Entertaining…a juicy if lightweight tale of class snobbery, social climbing, lucky orphans and family secrets.”
Some Enchanted Evenings: The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin by David Kaufman; St. Martin's Press, 420 pp.; non-fiction
A biography of Mary Martin, who during musical theater's Golden Age became one of Broadway's biggest stars — reaching her greatest heights as the boy hero of Peter Pan.
Paste BN says ***½ out of four stars. “Probing, compassionate, revelatory."
Contributing reviewers: Eliot Schrefer, Charles Finch, Gene Seymour, Jocelyn McClurg, Elysa Gardner