PW’s 10 Most-Read Book Reviews of 2024

10. Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Shaped Medieval Europe

Vicious family feuds, destabilizing coups, and brutal violence were the reigning values of the ninth-century Frankish Empire, according to this intricate account. Historians Gabriele and Perry, coauthors of The Bright Ages, begin with Pepin the Short, who seized power in what they suggest, contrary to anodyne royal annals, was a bloody coup. They move on to Pepin’s storied son Charlemagne, who snuffed out another coup plot led by his son Pepin the Hunchback. Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious ruled next, and the bulk of the narrative deals with rebellions that his sons Lothar, Pepin of Aquitaine, and Louis the German launched over their status as subordinate kings and their antagonism toward their stepmother, Judith. Lothar inherited the throne after his father’s death but faced yet more family-backed rebellions (Louis the German again, plus a son of Judith’s), which eventually led to the breaking up of the empire. Through subtle readings of biased chronicles and documents, Gabriele and Perry dispel the romantic aura of the Carolingian era, depicting it as an entertaining but gruesome medieval picaresque of power-hungry plots, murders, and—stomach-churningly—blindings. The authors also shrewdly explore the Franks’ genuine belief in the sacredness of kingship—and especially of royal oaths—that kept such a violent system in motion. The result is an enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset. (Dec.)

9. Long Island Compromise

Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. In 1980, wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week until his wife, Ruth, paid the $250,000 ransom. Now, 40 years later, he’s still traumatized, and is dutifully tended to by the controlling but loyal Ruth. Their three children also continue to live under the shadow of the kidnapping. There’s Beamer, a moderately successful screenwriter with a secret drug and BDSM addiction; Nathan, a lawyer who’s too timid for the partner track at his firm; and Jenny, a union organizer whose chief pleasure in life is pissing off her mother. Beamer is excited about an idea for a new project starring Mandy Patinkin when Jenny texts with troubling news: due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they’ve all depended on is gone. How the Fletchers respond to the crisis and finally put their shared past to rest forms the core of this entertaining saga. Brodesser-Akner’s latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe’s novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. This is a comedic feast. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA. (July)

8. Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

The American progressive left has lost its mind, according to this thin debut. Bowles, staff writer for the Free Press, surveys the far left’s most criticized flash points and failures of the past four years, including violence in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, drug use in Los Angeles’s Echo Park Tent Community, and the rise and recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s anti–mass incarceration district attorney. Bowles concedes that “New Progressives” are well-meaning in their desire to battle bigotry and systemic violence, but criticizes their tactics, which she most successfully lampoons through personal recollections, like her mildly funny roast of an antiracist course she attended. Led by mostly white women instructors for mostly white women participants, the course serves as fodder for Bowles’s keen observation that critiques of “whiteness” have become just another outlet for white women’s “self-flagellation” over their bodies. Unfortunately, such perceptiveness is fleeting; by and large, the narrative has a feeling of incompleteness, as complicated subjects such as gender-affirming care for minors receive limited treatments so Bowles can quickly move on to easier, fringier targets, like nerdy Tumblr asexuals. Bowles glosses all these topics with the standard wokeness-gone-too-far veneer that originally made them go viral in right-wing media, while not adding much journalistic depth. The result is a toothless recap of anti-woke talking points. (May)

7. There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish

Sociologist Akbari (Startup Your Life) expands on her 2014 Observer article for this riveting account of deception and emotional abuse in the early days of online dating. It begins in March 2011, when Akbari connected with two other women who had been communicating with—and growing suspicious of—a man named Ethan Schuman, before flashing back to December 2010, when Akbari received her first OkCupid message from Ethan, initiating their protracted virtual courtship. “It was his cleverness, his openness, and... his eagerness to keep the conversation going” that Akbari says kept her hooked despite repeated delays to their IRL meeting (Ethan’s excuses escalated from a snowstorm to a cancer diagnosis). The narrative takes on a thriller-like quality as Ethan grows increasingly cagey and flies into rages. Eventually, the women discover that Ethan is actually medical student Emily Slutsky (now a practicing gynecologist), who, when caught, offers insincere apologies and murky justifications; she pleads boredom, talks about Ethan as the narrator of a novel, and calls catfishing “an addiction.” While they were corresponding, Akbari was ironically teaching a class at NYU about the construction of identity—a topic about which she and Ethan mind-bendingly engage in a lively debate early on—and Akbari concludes with a fascinating if brief discussion of the sociological implications of catfishing. Though Emily’s motivations remain somewhat opaque, there’s plenty in this internet horror story to hold readers’ attention. (June)

6. Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume Ten

Bussel (The Big Book of Quickies) serves up an eclectic bundle of 21 spicy shorts. An older woman discovers newfound sensuality in Garnell Wallace’s sensitive “Sunlight and Santino,” while Eireann Shells delivers an edgy BDSM scene in “The Afterlife with Red and White.” April Would explores the pleasures of exhibitionism in “The Alligator Jaw,” about encounters in an adult cinema, as does Rebecca Chase in “Stand Strong, Look Sexy,” which follows burlesque performers. Several stories leave the realm of reality all together, including Roberta Kelley’s sapphic vampire tale “Sometimes Lies Become Her” and Brynne Blackmoore’s “Steamy ’Squatch Watch,” in which things heat up at a meeting of the Gatlinburg Sasquatch Society. In Melanie Anton’s “Hawthorne’s Ghost” a graduate student obsessed with Nathaniel Hawthorne has a paranormal encounter with the man himself. Bussel never fails to bring together a diverse and titillating collection of bite-size erotica, and this is no exception. Though not every piece will work for every reader, there’s something here to please any erotica fan. (Dec.)

5. Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church

Abuse, enslavement, and financial schemes are the stock in trade of the shadowy Catholic sect Opus Dei, according to this chilling debut exposé. Journalist Gore stumbled onto the institution’s web of influence during the 2017 collapse of Banco Popular, when he discovered that the Spanish bank’s biggest shareholder, mysteriously named the Syndicate, could be traced to Opus Dei. Combing through the Syndicate’s sprawling network of foundations and nonprofits led Gore to uncover Opus Dei’s connections to offshore money-laundering schemes and a global web of vocational schools implicated in human trafficking of children. Delving into archives and conducting interviews with former members, Gore alleges that a mission to “serve God by striving for perfection even in the most everyday tasks” has masked abuse since Opus Dei’s 1928 founding by Josemaría Escrivá, whose recruitment methods rapidly turned cultlike, incorporating “listening devices” and “prescription drugs.” While Gore reports that today abuse permeates the entire hierarchy of the organization, he most harrowingly recounts the plight of its lowest rung: underage girls assigned to household work in Opus Dei residencies, where many later reported being held captive; others minors connected to Opus Dei have reported instances of sexual abuse. Gore’s most alarming line of inquiry is into Opus Dei’s political influence in Washington, D.C., via the Catholic Information Center and the Federalist Society. Readers will be disturbed. (Oct.)

This review has been updated.

4. Your Best Financial Life: Save Smart Now for the Future You Want

Lester, the former head of retirement solutions for JPMorgan Asset Management, debuts with a no-frills guide to personal finance. She encapsulates her advice in the five-step STASH program, which recommends readers set aside three to six months’ salary for emergencies, invest liberally in tax-advantaged savings plans, balance saving for retirement with paying off debt, stay the course during stock market volatility, and budget for large purchases by selecting financial options tailored to how soon one will need the money. (High-interest savings accounts are ideal for purchases in the near future, while bonds offer the surest bet for expenses several years away.) Lester’s overview of the advantages and disadvantages of balanced, exchange traded, index, and target-date funds tracks standard guidance on the subject (index funds are attractive for their low fees, and target-date funds “are the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ option”). Yet, this stands out for the clarity of Lester’s explanations (“Instead of owning part of a company, you can own some of its debt. These are called bonds”) and for her shrewd assessments of recent financial developments. For instance, she warns against investing in crypto and suggests that using robo-advisers to manage one’s portfolio can be a good way to save on the high fees charged by human advisers. It adds up to a sensible introduction to getting one’s finances in order. Agent: Michael Palgon, Palgon Co. (Mar.)

3. The Book That Broke the World

After the shocking ending to The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, Lawrence has a lot to answer for—and he doesn’t disappoint; there’s no trace of sophomore slump in this fast-paced sequel. The kaleidoscopic story of the vast and perilous athenaeum library continues, again jumping between different perspectives and points in time. Celcha and her brother Hellet, a pair of small, silky-furred ganars enslaved by the library, act on the instructions of the angels that Hellet sees. Meanwhile, siblings Evar, Clovis, and Kerrol, now free from the library chamber that trapped them since birth, are pursued by an insectoid race known as the skeer and a large mechanical monster that seems intent on killing Evar. Arpix and the other escaped librarians are now trapped in the wasteland called the Dust but protected from the skeer by a mysterious weapon. Meanwhile ghosts Livira and Malar search for a way to find solid form again. As these different perspectives weave together, the characters come closer to answers about who built the library, what future awaits it, who determines that future—and how the book Livira wrote affects them all. Lawrence makes the intertwining stories fascinating and propulsive, with enough scattered clues and shocking twists to keep the pages flying. This will keep readers up long past their bedtime. Agent: Ian Drury, Sheil Land Assoc. (Apr.)

2. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

In this twisty and cinematic account, bestseller Larson (The Splendid and the Vile) recreates the five-month period between Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 election and the outbreak of the Civil War, focusing on the intensifying showdown over Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C., where Maj. Robert Anderson, the U.S. Army commander, faced a swelling Confederate force with his outgunned garrison of 75 soldiers. Larson mirrors Anderson’s struggle to hold his post while avoiding provocations that might lead to war with Lincoln’s tight-rope-walk attempt to stand firm against secession without goading the South into it. As he traveled to Washington, D.C., to take office—arriving in disguise after dodging a rumored assassination plot in Baltimore—Lincoln vacillated over whether to resupply Fort Sumter or surrender it. In Larson’s telling, Anderson’s ordeal makes for a superb war story—his secret Christmastime redeployment from Charleston’s indefensible Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, for instance, emerges as a masterpiece of psychological deception. The author probes the Southern perspective as well—via acerbic diarist Mary Chesnut among others—and assesses the ideologies and errors that birthed the Civil War, including a violent pro-slavery mob’s efforts to stop Congress from certifying Lincoln’s Electoral College victory. The result is a mesmerizing and disconcerting look at an era when consensus dissolved into deadly polarization. Photos. (Apr.)

1. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

Ganz, author of the newsletter Unpopular Front, debuts with a lucid and propulsive narrative of the failed right-wing populism at the fringe of the 1992 U.S. presidential election. According to Ganz, the discontent exploited by bigoted Republican challengers Pat Buchanan and David Duke and the proto–“drain the swamp” rhetoric of independent candidate Ross Perot laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. The book profiles these and other figures—including New York City mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani and mob boss John Gotti—and it’s woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary (left-leaning historian Christopher Lasch critiqued liberalism as an “infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats,” Ganz writes, while hard-right economist Murray Rothbard hoped Buchanan would “break the clock of the New Deal” and “repeal the twentieth century”). Ganz’s dry wit is ever-present; describing how media coverage of the early-1990s culture wars eclipsed George H.W. Bush’s attempts to stoke the fight against Saddam Hussein, he writes, “Apparently the ‘New Hitler’ wasn’t as juicy a story as the incipient totalitarianism of literature professors.” The book’s highlight is a long chapter focused on New York City, which Ganz portrays as a breeding ground for strongman leadership by comparing Trump to Giuliani and Gotti as outer-borough “arriviste[s]” who celebrated personal liberty, but preyed on fear. This is a revelation. (June)