Casey's Reviews

Lucille Ball once said, “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.” It is no surprise that two dynamic, influential women, Nina Totenberg and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found ways to show up for each other professionally and personally over the course of their busy lives. In this memoir, Totenberg shows us how female friendships are key to both making it through life’s challenges and to opening up the possibility for women to live the professional life that they desire. This is a powerful and heartfelt account of one extraordinary friendship that also changed the world.

—CASEY

Our ability to preserve the memories and lives of the Old World only exists if we listen to the history to be told. Stella Levi does just that by, over the course of one hundred Saturdays, recounting her remarkable life to author Michael Frank. Frank then shares her phenomenal story, of Levi’s life in the Juderia of Rhodes, an island housing Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Turks in harmony until World War II; through Auschwitz; and finally in America. Along with Maira Kalman’s poignant illustrations, One Hundred Saturdays reminds us of the vibrancy of the Jewish community and of the lifelong longing and fight to remember.

—CASEY

Celeste Ng creates a fictitious yet terrifyingly real future where economic and health crises lead to political violence and racial backlash. We meet a Chinese American family caught in the middle of all of this, one whose desire to stay under the radar is threatened when the mother’s poetry starts to speak for the resistance. Ng’s novel explores our deepest fears and our deepest humanity, and the role that art and books can play in centering our democracies. Booklist says in its starred review “As lyrical as it is chilling, as astonishing as it is empathic, Our Missing Hearts arguably achieves literary perfection.” Don’t miss this.   

—CASEY

Maggie O’Farrell, author of Hamnet and one of the best historical fiction writers of our time, is back with an immersive portrait of life at court in 1500’s Florence. When Lucrezia is married off to another court at an early age, she finds herself at the intersection of girlhood and womanhood, at the mercy of the men, power, and politics of the time. Thus begins a coming-of-age story unlike any other, one that not only illuminates the past but reckons with the emotional lives of women throughout time.

—CASEY

I am always excited by a new Barbara Kingsolver novel but even more so when she lays bare the heartbreak and heart-filled essence of our humanity. Demon Copperhead, the witty, smart and resourceful boy growing up in poverty and foster homes in Appalachia, brilliantly casts a light on an entire generation of forgotten kids damaged by opioid addiction. Kingsolver brings into the open communities who have been unraveled and bowed in so many ways but are also filled with family, ingenuity, and grit. This is the book that everyone will be talking about for years to come.

—CASEY

Five years ago, the world was introduced to our favorite gay curmudgeon, Arthur Less, when Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Less: A Novel. Now, we feel the joy once again as we join Arthur on a cross-country road trip that results in laugh-out-loud experiences while he reckons with his career, love life, upbringing, and the distinct existence that is America. It is a dramatic understatement to say that Arthur’s hapless adventures are exactly what we all need right now.

—CASEY

The Penningtons, five step-siblings from one brazen yet absent father and four different mothers, are not a typical family. So when they come back into each other’s lives in adulthood around a dramatic event, their work at building relationships is filled with challenges of communication, emotional baggage, and a whole lot of enticing drama. Carty-Williams’s authentic, witty, and tender voice is a breath of fresh air, as she lets us see what it means to be a family in all possible ways. 

—CASEY

Sidik Fofana, public school teacher turned breakaway debut author, shines a light on one apartment building in Harlem through a series of interconnected stories about the strength, hardship, and community built between those struggling to face the tide of gentrification. Each story carries a deep impact for the reader, and the lyrical and emotional storytelling is not something you'll soon forget.  —Casey

Anders, a white man, wakes up one morning to see that his skin is darkening. Soon, it starts happening to everyone and the social and political results confront our deepest conceptions of race, privilege, and fear. Born from his experience as a brown man who was treated differently after September 11th, Mohsin Hamid's novel matches this examination of identity with a deep exploration of our capacity for empathy and humanity—a powerful and important combination. —Casey

In the summer of 2020, poet Elizabeth Alexander penned an essay to her sons in The New Yorker, a powerful and moving portrait of a generation who are victim and witness to countless acts of racial brutality. This seminal essay, as much from a mother as a cultural critic, is now in book form and is accompanied by poetry, art, and reflection on the embedded racism of our institutions, people, and places and how “people make movements and history with the force of creativity” to survive. A slim but affecting statement of our times.  —Casey