Also of interest…
In false prophets
Outside Looking In
by T.C. Boyle (Ecco, $28)
If Timothy Leary is watching from the great beyond, “he must be wondering what took T.C. Boyle so long to write a novel about him,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Boyle has skewered many of history’s hucksters, and he’s done it again here by focusing on a square, early-1960s recruit of the Harvard iconoclast who preached the mind-expanding power of LSD. Because the mentee makes the mistake of getting his family involved, this “superbly paced” novel becomes “a farce laced with tragedy.”
The Ash Family
by Molly Dektar (Simon & Schuster, $26)
Molly Dektar’s first book is “truly a novel for our climate-anxious age,” said Julia Scheeres in The New York Times. A college-bound teenager runs away to the Carolina mountains to join a cult-like group headed by a controlling former power-plant engineer. “For a novel about an eco-terrorist cell, there is very little action,” and even the young heroine doesn’t do much besides worry. But Dektar’s “gem-cut” sentences “kept me reading.” She “clearly loves the natural world and has a gift for describing it.”
After the Party
by Cressida Connolly (Pegasus, $26)
Cressida Connolly’s flawless third novel “gently infiltrates” a dark chapter of history, said Anna Mundow in The Wall Street Journal. Its narrator, the youngest sister in a wealthy family, is looking back in 1979 from prison on the pre–World War II years when she was a young mother and her sisters were enthralled with Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain’s Fascist party. As she paints that bygone era, “a seed of unease, planted early, grows stealthily.” The history becomes “freshly chilling.”
American Messiahs
by Adam Morris (Liveright, $29)
Author Adam Morris aims to present America’s long line of self-proclaimed prophets and demigods as more than kooks, and “in many ways, he succeeds,” said Tom Bissell in NewYorker.com. His examples, including the founder of the Shakers and 20th-century cult leader Jim Jones, all rejected capitalism, and many promoted race and gender equality. But cult leaders also exploit the vulnerable, and Morris’ attempt to treat such abuses as distractions mars an “otherwise fascinating” book. ■
