Rediscovered Reviews: 6 Character Studies in Novel Form

February 21 2023
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We love when reading a book feels more like forming a lifelong friendship. And usually those type of bonds are due to excellent characters that feel real, both expanding your mind to new depths of human feeling and revealing elements of your own personality you hadn’t yet encountered. Filled with deep thought-provoking conversations and characters who are put through the wringer, these rediscovered book reviews are sure to reveal the depths of the human experience.

Faithful
by Alice Hoffman

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.

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Faithful
Alice Hoffman

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.

What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.

Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.

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Disobedience
by Naomi Alderman

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.

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Disobedience
Naomi Alderman

*NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING RACHEL WEISZ AND RACHEL MCADAMS

*AUTHOR OF ONE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA’S FAVORITE READS OF 2017

When a young photographer living in New York learns that her estranged father, a well-respected rabbi, has died, she can no longer run away from the truth, and soon sets out for the Orthodox Jewish community in London where she grew up.

Back for the first time in years, Ronit can feel the disapproving eyes of the community. Especially those of her beloved cousin, Dovid, her father’s favorite student and now an admired rabbi himself, and Esti, who was once her only ally in youthful rebelliousness. Now Esti is married to Dovid, and Ronit is shocked by how different they both seem, and how much greater the gulf between them is.

But when old flames reignite and the shocking truth about Ronit and Esti’s relationship is revealed, the past and present converge in this award-winning and critically acclaimed novel about the universality of love and faith, and the strength and sacrifice it takes to fight for what you believe in—even when it means disobedience.

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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
by Dominic Smith

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

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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith

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Unraveling Oliver
by Liz Nugent

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.

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Unraveling Oliver
Liz Nugent

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Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks

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.

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Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks

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A Particular Kind of Black Man
by Tope Folarin

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!

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A Particular Kind of Black Man
Tope Folarin

**One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer**

An NPR Best Book of 2019

An “electrifying” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uneasy assimilation to American life.

Living in small-town Utah has always been an uncomfortable fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues.

Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known.

But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection—to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known.

Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is “wild, vulnerable, lived…A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts” (The New York Times Book Review).

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