1. Chris Rutledge’s review of Ordinary Monsters: A Novel by J.M. Miro (Flatiron Books). “Entrancing backstories and sufferings drive Ordinary Monsters. Marlowe, for one, has lost several parental figures; Komako has lost her sister; and even the villainous Jacob has lost his brother, a tragedy that ignites his own cycle of wrongdoing. Part of why the novel works is that these characters are fleshed out and have robust identities. Readers will care about them.”


2. Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s review of Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel by Anthony Marra (Hogarth). “As with Marra’s previous books, this one is built on hundreds of threads that weave through time and geography, often amid small moments and seemingly incidental events. Any character, however glancingly introduced, will show up again. Any item — a scale model, Frankenstein’s monster, a cat, the rowboat that connects four characters and becomes a leaky path to freedom — is necessary. We watch the warp and weft of the story build, sometimes wondering where the narrative is taking us. It isn’t until we step back at the end that we finally see a fully rendered tapestry.”


3. “The City Always/Never Changes” by Dan Brady. “There’s a benefit to being someone who stays. You start to take the long view. It’s easy to see how an idea or a style started in one group of writers — or even by a single writer — became something bigger to the community. You see the evolution of things. And yes, you see things fade away. But that’s part of life. Call it revision. When you take something out, you open a space for a new iteration, a new twist. That regular refreshing keeps the community going and growing.”


4. Mariko Hewer’s review of Book of Night by Holly Black (Tor Books). “Holly Black’s first foray into adult books won’t take you long to get through. The story is compulsively readable, and the characters, despite their significant flaws and failings — or perhaps because of them — are generally people you want to root for. Some editing deficiencies aside, Book of Night is a shining example of innovative fantasy writing.”


5. Samantha Rajaram’s review of The Island of Missing Trees: A Novel by Elif Shafak (Bloomsbury Publishing). “The reveal at the end was not entirely surprising, but I enjoyed it. Shafak bridges the disconnect so many of us feel in these times between our technology-glutted, hamster-wheel lives and the grounding comfort of the natural world by imbuing the fig tree with a humanity and grace we actual humans achieve only sporadically.”

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