Book Reviews

Richard Powers published The Overstory in 2018, and it promptly won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. The novel runs 512 pages and follows nine Americans whose lives are shaped, redirected, and in some cases destroyed by their relationships with trees. That description makes it sound like a nature book with characters attached,…

Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half opens in 1968, when Desiree Vignes returns to Mallard, Louisiana, the small, insular community where she and her identical twin sister Stella grew up. She has been gone fourteen years. She brings with her a dark-skinned daughter named Jude and the wreckage of a marriage to a violent man. Her…

In 1972, construction workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania dig up a skeleton from the bottom of a well in a neighborhood called Chicken Hill. A few curious items sit near the bones, including a mezuzah. Before anyone can piece together what happened, Hurricane Agnes sweeps through and washes the evidence away. James McBride opens The Heaven…