Rediscovered Reviews: 6 Character Studies in Novel Form

Shelby Richmond is a high school senior who appears to have the world on her side. She is pretty and popular just like her best friend. But one winter night, the unthinkable happens: a car accident on an icy Long Island road. Shelby is driving but walks away unscathed; Helene winds up in a coma. The perfect future Shelby had planned is destroyed, and she finds herself unable to move forward with her life. 

Shelby begins to spiral into someone neither she nor her parents recognize. She escapes to New York City, where she begins a relationship, takes on odd jobs, and befriends people who would never have fit into her life before. Her new life is less secure and grittier. Suddenly the future she had expected and carefully planned is a distant dream and a new path is revealing itself, one made up of false starts and detours. It is these very detours that enable Shelby to live the passionate and fulfilled life she never dreamed possible for herself.

Hoffman waves her wand over the pages to cast a spell of love, loss, family, coming-of-age, forgiveness, and redemption. The extraordinary way in which she crafts character, her keen eye for detail around New York City, and her undeniable gift for modern-day fairy tales make her a surefire bet in the industry. You always know you will get a great story out of her.

Read more of Stu’s review.

In an Orthodox community in London, a beloved and well-respected rabbi has just passed away. His nephew Dovid is a reluctant successor whose wife, Esti, is not well regarded. Ronit, the late rabbi’s estranged daughter, returns from her life as a photographer in New York City. The three make up a group of outsiders in a community of belonging. But the relationship among these three is far more complicated: Esti and Ronit were once lovers, and Dovid is Ronit’s cousin.

For Ronit, coming home is filled with loss—of her mother, her father, her forbidden lover. Her return to the congregation is not warmly received. Ronit is intent on confronting Esti—why she made the choices she has, staying in the congregation and marrying a man. For Esti, Ronit’s return is filled with both joy and an underlying dread. Esti tries to protect Dovid from her past relationship with Ronit, while Ronit is tries to expose them and show Esti a different way of life. And Dovid is caught in the middle, trying to navigate between his role in the synagogue and the sudden upheaval in his marriage.

I loved this book. It shows the complexity of relationships, the societal pressure to conform, and the inner conflicts we face. It is a book of friendship and love, of community and acceptance, of faith. Alderman gently exposes the traditions of the Orthodox community and weaves prayers, blessings, and Torah passages throughout the story. It’s a compelling story about love in all its forms.

Read more of Aimee’s review.

THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS considers what happens on both sides of a theft, specifically how a person might gain from a loss and what a person who takes from others stands to lose.

Sara de Vos is a seventeenth-century Dutch painter and one of very few women admitted to the painters’ Guild of St. Luke. When Sara loses her seven-year-old daughter to an illness, she crafts At the Edge of a Wood, the painting that creates the conflict at the heart of the novel. More than 300 years later, patent lawyer Marty de Groot, who has been transfixed by the painting throughout his adult life, is now the owner. When he discovers that it’s been stolen and replaced with a forgery, he tracks down the forger: painting conservationist Ellie Shipley.

Smith builds his characters’ flaws and weaknesses with patience and detail, so when their mistakes start catching up to them, it’s easy to understand and even pity them. However, the unraveling happens slowly, and Smith gives no ground in terms of pacing; he makes you wait for it. The book reads as quiet and thoughtful, but I was biting my nails through the last third, waiting for the hammer to fall.

Read more of Kamaria’s review. 

In Nugent’s raucous and stirring debut novel, UNRAVELING OLIVER, she opens with “I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her. She just lay on the floor, holding her jaw. Staring at me. Silent. She didn’t even seem to be surprised”. And away we go. Nugent follows through on the promise in her title and thoughtfully unravels this character of Oliver, a seemingly wicked man with depths to his darkness that continue to unfold over the course of the book. Just when you think you have reached the bottom of his vileness, you will be surprised to find there is even more.

Like so many of my favorite books (Gregory Maguire’s WICKED comes to mind), Nugent explores the question: Is a person born evil or was evil put on them by society? It is a fascinating debate to explore in this finely tuned character study that will often leave you riveted and rarely frustrated.

Read more of Stu’s review.

While based in London, Australian-American journalist Geraldine Brooks often explored the English countryside. It was on one such journey that she came across a sign indicating the direction of the “Plague Village,” a discovery which led to her first novel, YEAR OF WONDERS, an intense, horrifying, and beautiful read.

The town in YEAR OF WONDERS is based on lore from a real seventeenth-century village in the English countryside called Eyam, which voluntarily quarantined itself to prevent plague from spreading beyond its borders. The narrator, Anna Frith, serves as a maid to the town’s minister, and accounts from Eyam mention their minister had a maid who survived the plague, indicating a real-life inspiration for Anna.

While this story encompasses lives and deaths throughout the village, it is all witnessed through Anna’s eyes, and it is her character development that truly moves the story. The plague outbreak coincides with the Reformation. The village is a combination of Puritan and Protestant faiths, including a strong belief in the existence of witches. Anna does not share all strict Puritan values, but her fear also keeps her from challenging them. She even refuses to learn from the apothecary, for fear of being branded a witch. As the story continues, though, and the situation becomes more dire, Anna takes on a leadership role within the society, becoming their healer and often the voice of reason, and standing up to her own demons.

Read more of Erin’s review.

There are some novels that stop you in your tracks when you realize they’re a debut. How can the writing be so nuanced, so concise, and yet equally packed with meaning? How does a first-time author capture a character’s emotional evolution as smoothly as they do larger themes about diaspora, mental illness, and family? The only clear answer is it takes an exceptional and atypical writer for their first foray into long-form fiction to be as accomplished—and as widely acclaimed—as Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man.

Many coming of age novels follow young men as they face feelings of disconnection and uncertainty in their adolescence. For Folarin’s hero, Tunde Akinola, these experiences are even more keenly felt as a Nigerian-American child of immigrants living in Utah.

Like his main character, Folarin is also the son of Nigerian immigrants who spent his childhood in Utah and graduated from Morehouse College. And like many debut novelists, he began by modeling a protagonist after his own life and experiences, here grappling with race in America and cultural identity, before letting Tunde’s world take on a life of its own. But whatever differences separate Folarin from his fictional creations, Folarin speaks in a 2019 NPR interview and elsewhere of his personal belief in the novel’s ultimate message, one that rings true from its core: everyone, regardless of who they are or who they think they should be, can write their own narrative.

Read more of Elizabeth's review!