Weekend picks for book lovers
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN’s picks for book lovers include a new novel about time travel, and a biography of George Washington's escaped slave, Ona Judge.
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai; Dutton, 369 pp.; fiction
We’ve all had that nagging feeling — the one that says: “This isn’t the way things should have turned out...” We wish we could go back and, you know, fix things. But we know we can’t fix them because we can’t go back.
But Tom Barren — the unlikely hero of All Our Wrong Todays— well, he can go back, though to say that nothing works out exactly as he might have imagined is an understatement of epic proportions.
In Elan Mastai’s debut novel, the world as we know it (or knew it in 2016) is the dystopian future that never happened. Tom Barren’s world is more like The Jetsons: “Flying cars, robot maids, food pills, teleportation, jet packs, moving sidewalks, ray guns, hover boards, space vacations and moon bases.”
You know that future everyone fantasized about in the 1950s? It all happened, says Tom. Until, that is, he kind of undid it. And he undid it, at least in part, for love. He also undid it out of resentment — a very messy way of lashing out at his imperious, “super-genius scientist” father who invented the time-travel machine that propels Tom and the story on a wild ride through the space-time continuum.
Paste BN says ***½ out of four stars. “Instantly engaging.”
Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar; 37Ink/Atria, 253 pp.; non-fiction
An account of how George Washington pursued Ona Judge, his wife Martha’s prized servant, after she stole away and found freedom in the North.
Paste BN says **** stars. “Throws considerable shade on America’s founding fathers for their slaveholding hypocrisy...compulsively readable.”
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 214 pp.; fiction
A video store clerk in rural Iowa discovers that some of the VHS tapes being returned have been spliced with disturbing footage of captives on a farm.
Paste BN says ***½ stars. “Eerie… Darnielle is rapidly becoming a writer to reckon with.”
A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming; St. Martin’s Press, 368 pp.; fiction
British secret agent Thomas Kell tracks a closeted Russian agent through his lover, and from there trips onto a homegrown British jihadist.
Paste BN says *** stars. “Smart, nuanced…almost too topical for comfort.”
Darling, I'm Going to Charlie by Maryse Wolinski; Atria/37 Ink, 144 pp.; non-fiction
The widow of cartoonist Georges Wolinski, among those murdered in Paris the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the sacrilegious French magazine, writes a memoir.
Paste BN says ***½ stars. “Poignant… clear-eyed.”
Contributing reviewers: James Endrst, Matt Damsker, Charles Finch, Ray Locker