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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the September 17-24th special double issue include:

Room, by Emma Donoghue. Little, Brown and Company. Print length: 336 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "riveting...distills what it means to be a mother..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work." - Amazon.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, by Danielle Evans. Riverhead. Print length: 240 p. SHORT STORIES. EW's slant:"...striking debut collection offers rich slices of African-American life." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Young, intelligent African-Americans become vehicles for their own undoing in this collection of eight stories. Armed with no easy answers but plenty of bad choices, the talented, too-smart-for-their-own-good protagonists are painfully aware of the consequences of their actions, even when they think they have no better choice. The 15-year-old girl in 'Virgins' guiltily opts for the lesser of two evils after leaving her best friend in a precarious situation. A young mixed-race girl exiled to her white grandmother’s Tallahassee home for the summer learns a rough lesson in racial disparity - and the power of a lie. A traumatized Iraq War veteran who becomes a surrogate father to his ex’s little daughter sees his good intentions backfire, big time, over his poor judgment... A welcome new talent - with a funny and dark take on being black in America." - Kirkus Reviews (via pandeliterary.com/blog/).

Man in the Woods, by Scott Spencer. Harper Colliins. Print length: 320 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "Spencer is a master of description, but he seems uncertain of his own narrative..." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Spencer, a deft explorer of obsessive love and violence, confronts the consequences of doing wrong for all the right reasons in his exquisite latest. Paul Phillips, a master carpenter, is living in bucolic upstate New York with Kate Ellis, the woman Spencer first introduced, along with her beguiling daughter, Ruby, in A Ship Made of Paper. But Paul's life begins to implode after a chance encounter results in an irrevocable act that no one witnesses, save a mixed-breed dog he renames Shep. Paul suffers the burden of his terrible secret: the fear of discovery and punishment and the equally disturbing fear of getting away with his crime." - Publishers Weekly.

NEW IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS:

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropoitan Books. Print length: 256 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "brilliant and incisive..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (111 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Americans are a positive people - cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity. In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out 'negative' thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage." - Amazon.

The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter. Harper Collins. Print length: 304 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...edgy satire..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (35 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea - and his wife's eBay resale business - ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders... Following Matt in his weeklong quest to save his marriage, his sanity, and his dreams, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a hysterical, heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin - and how we can begin to make our way back." - Amazon.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, by Jeannette Walls. Scribner. Print length: 288 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...love letter to her flinty grandmother." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (235 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"'Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.' So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town - riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ('I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place') and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults..." - Amazon.

Skeleton Hill: An Inspector Peter Diamond Investigation, by Peter Lovesey. Soho Crime. Print length: 336 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...weaves in odd facts on everything from the English Civil War to racehorse pedigrees and Ukrainian customs." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). Kindle edition $9.49. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...Diamond remains one of the most realistic and human of fictional sleuths. During a recreation of an English Civil War battle outside Bath, Rupert Hope, an academic who's playing a cavalier, and another participant discover a human femur. Presented with this minor puzzle, the police eventually unearth the entire skeleton, minus the skull. After someone bludgeons Hope to death, Diamond wonders whether Hope's murder and the headless skeleton are connected, and his team redoubles their efforts to identify it. A zipper found near the skeleton may point to a link with London's Russian community..." - Publishers Weekly.


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