Melanie Rehak

Bookforum

Hearing the name Eva Thorvald, you might expect to find the central character of J. Ryan Stradal’s first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest (Pamela Dorman Books, $28), smack in the middle of a multigenerational family saga as styled by Ingmar Bergman in full Fanny and Alexander mode: Scandinavian abundance with a dark existential underbelly, the kaleidoscopic shifting apart and coming back together of lovers, spouses,

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The Nation

"There were two worlds." So begins Dylan Ebdus, the boy hero who grows up in the pages of The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem's rich, dizzying new novel of Brooklyn, adolescence, comic books, crime, doo-wop, punk, fathers, sons and a thousand other phenomena, including supernatural powers.

The New York Times

In 1975, the children's author Natalie Babbitt published a slim, ruminative novel called ''Tuck Everlasting.'' From the moment it appeared, it has been fiercely loved by children and their parents for its honest, intelligent grappling with aging and death. It seems appropriate, then, that the novel's new film adaptation had its genesis (more than 10 years ago) not at a power meeting in a Hollywood studio but during a family discussion.

Salon

Through these classics of childhood, a kid could suffer the privations of starvation in the flashlight-lit privacy of her own imagination — and live to cherish the memory.