↓ Mark Rylance as
Thomas Cromwell
in the Wolf Hall
adaptation, which
aired on Master-
piece in 2015humors”—but her storytelling tends
to lean less blood-and-breasts
premium cable than PBS (which is
where, in fact, the miniseries adap-
tation aired Stateside in 2015).
Mirror’s focus, if it strictly has
one, is on the continued power
struggle between papal loyalists and
Protestant reformers, and an
increasingly addled king ’s quest
for a male heir. Mostly, though, it’s
an almost diaristic chronicle of
Cromwell’s day-to-day world. At
784 pages, it’s also easily the longest
of the three novels, which Mantel
seems compelled to fill with more
of everything: not just people,
history, and policy, but poetry,
too. Sometimes her deluge of facts
overwhelms: a pantalooned slew of
dukes and earls—some confusingly
referred to by multiple names, if
they are not already a Thomas or
Henry or George—come and go diz-
zyingly; events are episodic and
often nonlinear; paragraphs pivot
from an arcane act of Parliament to
the taste of plums in midsummer.
Even with reams of research, of
course, many details of that distant
past are dust now, if they were ever
tallied at all; what Mantel does, often
brilliantly, is put movement and
muscle on the bare bones of what’s
known. Henry is a shrewd, stormy
presence, but preening sovereigns
and scheming bishops largely fade
against the pinpoint humanity of
Cromwell himself. His bundled
contradictions—a polyglot scholar
with bruised knuckles, as ruthless
in business as he was benevolent at
home—are more than mirror and
light; they’re real, indelible life. B+THE PRETTIEST STARAUTHOR CARTER SICKELS
PAGES 288Death isn’t a distant
rumor for the young
in New York’s queer
scene circa 1986, and
particularly not for
Brian, a 24-year-old
grieving the loss of his
partner and friends.
Dying of AIDS himself,
he decides to return
to Chester, Ohio, the
place he fled just six
years earlier, to be with
the family that has
never accepted him.
A brutally fresh kind of
homecoming novel, The
Prettiest Star weaves
between resentment
and redemption in its
unvarnished portrait
of ignorance and cru-
elty. Brian is, indeed,
hardly welcomed
back with open arms;
he is scorned by his
community, banned
from public pools, and
threatened in forms
both visceral and
ominous. But Carter
Sickels (The Evening
Hour), often writing
in the voices of Brian’s
tormented mother
and sister, searches
for a softer story, too,
and a kind of dignity in
death that’s not pretty,
maybe, but is surely
human. A– —D CSTARLING DAYSAUTHOR ROWAN HISAYO
BUCHANAN
PAGES 304
Everyone could use
a change of scenery—
and nobody more
than Oscar and Mina,
a married couple
who leave New York
for London after
Mina’s second suicide
attempt. After trekking
across the pond,
where businessman
Oscar keeps working
and classicist Mina
attempts to write
about the women of
ancient myth, a new
friend and some old
baggage threaten the
fragile balance of their
relationship. Rowan
Hisayo Buchanan’s
writing is crisp, but the
story she tells can be
muddled, as unsure
of how best to address
Mina’s illness as her
husband is. Starling
Days is most striking
in the erudite passages
wherein Mina reflects
on her area of study;
the poetic plights
of goddesses and
heroines speak to
the highs and lows
of human experience
with a profundity that
the rest of the narra-
tive, hard as it tries,
can never quite match.
B– —MARY SOLLOSITHE GLASS HOTELAUTHOR EMILY ST. JOHN
MANDEL
PAGES 320
Endings and begin-
nings, disaster and
survival—in Emily St.
John Mandel’s fiction,
there’s a before and
an after, but the action
never feels less than
rivetingly current. The
author of 2014’s Sta-
tion Eleven returns
with a new novel, and
it’s just as good if not
better than her post-
apocalyptic triumph:
a story of greed and
guilt that bends the laws
of time, jumps from
Vancouver to Wall Street
to ships on the open
water, conjures ghosts,
and confronts parallel
universes. The Glass
Hotel’s inciting catas-
trophe—the collapse
of a Bernie Madoff-size
con—departs from the
speculative intrigue of
Eleven’s flu pandemic,
but Mandel’s elegiac,
playful rendering of the
fallout remains singular,
delicately threading
characters and stories
and worlds into an epic
tapestry. The plotting
marks a master in her
prime, gradual before
breathless; a marvel
of intricacy from begin-
ning to end—and back
again. A– —DCFICTION
REVIEWSEW ● COM APRIL 2020 87WOLF HALL: GILES KEYTE/PLAYGROUND & COMPANY PICTURES FOR MASTERPIECE/BBCAPRIL2020.BOOKS1.LO.A.indd 87 FINAL 3/3/20 8:35 AM