Book Review: 'the Favorites' By Mary Yukari Waters

Philip and Erin Stead have completed the Twain story, 'The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine.' A 3.5-star book review.        

Penguin“The Western Star” by Craig Johnson By Craig Johnson, Special To The Washington Post People ask me why my protagonist, Walt Longmire, doesn’t carry a cellphone, and my immediate response is: Have you ever been to Wyoming? With more than 97,000 square miles, the state is divided into 23 counties, some of them as large as Maryland but none of them named Absaroka.

Penguin“Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng By Nicole Lee, Special to The Washington Post How many Chinese babies adopted into white families do you need to start a fire? In Celeste Ng’s second novel, “Little Fires Everywhere,” perhaps more than one. In the small-town community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, everything is carefully curated to reflect the values of the progressive but no longer existing sect that founded it. “Most communities just happen; the best are planned,” is the town’s motto, and indeed with their perfect lawns, these inhabitants seem to be living up to their vision of utopia.

Turtle, the 14-year-old heroine of Gabriel Tallent’s first novel, “My Absolute Darling,” is to be pitied, feared and loved. Pitied because she is ensnared in possibly the worst set of circumstances facing any young person. Growing up feral in a ramshackle home deep in the northern California coastal woods, Turtle is being emotionally and sexually abused by her widowed survivalist father. Feared because under her father’s training, she is an expert marksman who can strip and rebuild a weapon at a moment’s notice.

Hungry and crammed in a stuffy backseat on a long road trip through Mississippi, 13-year-old JoJo experiences the ghosts, both past and present, of America’s long and complicated history of race in Jesmyn Ward’s newest novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” JoJo is on a road trip with his drug-addicted mother and her similarly addicted friend as well as his toddler sister to Parchman Farm, a Mississippi state penitentiary, to pick up his father, a white man whose family has a dark history with JoJo’s.

One and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. 109 minutes. It is ironic that films about trailblazing artists are so often filled with cliches. Reclusive author J. D. Salinger (1919-2010) famously forbade anyone from adapting his 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye” for the big screen. Shane Salerno’s ridiculous 2013 documentary “Salinger” — based on Salerno’s even worse book — proved that Salinger was right to keep filmmakers away from him, and from a novel whose iconoclastic take on adolescent rebellion would become, paradoxically, iconic to the point of cliche. Based on Kenneth Slawenski’s 2010 book “J.