Every weekday, we feature a different review on Booklist Online that highlights starred reviews, high-demand titles, and/or titles especially relevant to our current issue’s spotlight. We’ve collected the reviews from August 22 through August 26 below so that you can revisit the week’s best books.
Monday, August 22
Trump Revealed, by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher
Let’s start with the take away. Trump has always been Trump. What you see is what you get, what you have always gotten. This book shows readers the whys and the hows. It begins with family history and chronicles Trump’s early years, focusing on his time as a military-school cadet and his introduction to his father Fred’s construction business, which young Donald learned literally from the bottom up.
Tuesday, August 23
The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, by Amy Schumer
One of Schumer’s recurring bits as a comic and performer, who writes and stars in her own TV series, Inside Amy Schumer, is that she’s a consummate oversharer who leaves little to the imagination. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that her book, besides being laugh-out-loud funny, is also pretty daringly personal.
Wednesday, August 24
Vassa in the Night, by Sarah Porter
Spring is approaching, but the nights in Brooklyn keep lasting longer. For Vassa (mother dead, father gone, stepmother absent) and her two pseudo half stepsisters, this night-hour curse is just a nuisance, until all the lights in the house burn out.
Thursday, August 25
The Secret Horses of Briar Hill, by Megan Shepherd
In the midst of WWII England, Emmaline is sent to the countryside to live at Briar Hill Hospital, where all the children—Emmaline included—suffer from stillwaters (TB). Blackout curtains keep out the light; illness and nuns’ habits pervade the hospital; and her closest friend, Anna, is so sick that she cannot venture outside.
Friday, August 26
Falling Awake, by Alice Oswald
In an era in which most poetry is concerned with personality, prizewinning Oswald takes a different approach in her attention to phenomena. In the best known of her previous six collections, Memorial (2011), a brilliant, inimitable rendering of Homer’s Iliad, the similes are as vivid as the heroes. Here Oswald once again combines her concerns with Greek myth and phenomena.