The Slippery Year
by Melanie Gideon
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“I was all set to dislike” Melanie Gideon when I first started reading about her married life, said Jane Juska in the San Francisco Chronicle. Gideon is a “champion worrier,” fretting about everything from the dangers of Pee Wee lacrosse to midlife’s seemingly ineluctable fading of passion. But The Slippery Year turns out to be “a funny book, often a wise book”—and a surprisingly happy one. Hers is a good life, and she “has the saving grace” to realize it.
The Big Rewind
by Nathan Rabin
(Scribner, $25)
Pop culture was Nathan Rabin’s life raft during a difficult adolescence, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. In his “mordant” and oddly affecting first book, the film critic uses Nirvana, Reservoir Dogs,
and various other youthful obsessions to “pry open” some of the tougher chapters of his teenage years. The Big Rewind “goes badly off the rails” by dwelling too long on career minutiae, but there is “something real and scuffed and quite winning at its core.”
Everything Sucks
by Hannah Friedman
(HCI Teens, $13)
Prep school isn’t what Gossip Girl makes it out to be, said Judy Berman in Salon.com. In this “impeccably honest” memoir for teenage readers, recent Yale grad Hannah Friedman recalls pressures that transformed her and her friends into “high-achieving anorexics, bulimics, and pharmaceutical addicts.” As Friedman details how senior year devolved into “a blur of binges, purges, and drug benders,” she also sustains “a self-aware wit that is all too rare” in young-adult fare.
The Impostor’s Daughter
by Laurie Sandell
(Little, Brown, $25)
Magazine writer Laurie Sandell had suspected since childhood that her professor father could not always be trusted, said Doree Shafrir in Jezebel.com. In her “amazing” new graphic memoir, she tells how he went so far as to steal her identity to run up credit card debt. Watching as she unravels his untruths and struggles to decide whether to expose them, “I couldn’t put her book down.” His deceptions nurtured her investigative instincts, and we’re allowed to watch the two forces collide.
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Keith McNally' 6 favorite books that have ambitious charactersFeature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”