BEA11

Review by Sarah Weinman “The most genuine happiness cannot be so pure, so deep, or so blind,” announces Ella Beene near the beginning of Sere Prince Halverson’s emotionally rich debut novel. For Ella, thirty-five and “not a physical beauty – not ugly, but nothing near what I’d look like if I’d had a say in the matter” – this is a hard-won conclusion, arrived at after a painful childhood and first marriage. But she’s spent the past three years in a blissful state, married to grocery store owner Joe Capozzi, stepmother to his two young children Annie and Zach, and […]

Review by Gwenda Bond The most surprising thing about Erin Morgenstern’s dazzling and rightfully anticipated debut novel, The Night Circus, is that it didn’t exist before now. Set at the turn of a nineteenth century recognizable but for the presence of magic, two shadowy rival magicians choose two contestants who will play out the latest incarnation of their long-running, ill-defined competition. Though Celia Bowen, daughter of Prospero the Enchanter, and Marco, adopted son of Mr. A.H.  — also known as the man in the grey suit — are trained in magic throughout their childhoods, neither of them knows the rules […]

Review by Jacob Silverman The campus novel, so synonymous with satire, seems a perfect fit with our age of severe ironic detachment. It’s more difficult, even risky, for the novelist to approach the college setting from a more earnest vantage point, as a place brimming with unlimited potential – along with its corollary, suffocating failure. In his first novel, The Art of Fielding, n+1 magazine co-founder Chad Harbach chooses the latter path. He takes his subject seriously, imbuing it with all the peril of life itself, and ups the degree of difficulty by focusing on the most classically romantic of […]

Review by Ellen Wernecke After their 13-year-old daughter Felice ran away from home, Brian and Avis Muir threw themselves into their jobs – his as a high-powered real estate lawyer, hers as an award-winning pastry chef. Five years later, they hardly say her name: Avis seeks advice from her next-door neighbor, a Haitian woman with a pet mynah, after her latest attempt to contact Felice ends in disappointment, while Brian indulges in fantasies about his striking new coworker and a sure-thing condo investment being passed around the office. Their son Stanley has followed in their workaholic footsteps, working day and […]