Kingsolver's Partita Leads October's Best Reviewed Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver's Partita tops October's best reviewed fiction list from Book Marks, Lit Hub's book-review aggregator, with 14 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed and 1 Pan review. Harper published the novel, and the critical field behind it wasn't close.

The monthly ranking tallies coverage from major outlets and grades each review on a scale from Rave to Pan. Here's how October shook out, and what the reviews actually said.

Who made the top five?

• 1. Partita by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper) — 14 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed, 1 Pan
• 2. Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — 9 Rave, 1 Positive, 2 Mixed
• 3. Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus (Scribner) — 5 Rave, 5 Positive, 2 Mixed
• 4. The Occidental Book of the Dead by T. Geronimo Johnson (William Morrow and Company) — 8 Rave, nothing lower
• 5. Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer (Knopf) — 6 Rave, 2 Positive

The structure of the list matters. Kingsolver's 14 Raves give her a wide margin over Li's 9, but Johnson's clean sheet — 8 Raves with no Positive, Mixed or Pan grades at all — is arguably the month's most uniform critical verdict.

What did the critics say about Partita?

Heather Scott Partington, reviewing in the Los Angeles Times, captured the book's appeal: "A hallmark of the decorated novelist's work is her flair for pithy sentences that illuminate the human experience, giving voice to our private longings and secret vulnerabilities."

She went further, arguing that the novel breaks new ground even for a familiar author: "Kingsolver brings the full weight of her experience and her other work to the page in this entirely new story. It hits the same chords, but it is full of discovery and insight. She's different, and we're different too."

How did the challengers fare?

Yiyun Li's Music Against the Night, about young virtuosos, drew an unusually strong formulation from Cory Oldweiler in the Boston Globe: "Wonderful and bewitching … Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here … It's the kind of sui generis novel that doesn't come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores."

Bonnie Garmus, following up Lessons in Chemistry, took third place with Peck & Peck. Claire Clark wrote in the Guardian: "It is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus's irrepressible humor and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count."

T. Geronimo Johnson's The Occidental Book of the Dead got its strongest endorsement from Jason Mott in the New York Times Book Review: "The book is doing a lot, but for good reason … Even with occasional misfires, The Occidental Book of the Dead just might be something the literary world needs to see more of: It's ambitious, creative and, most important of all, unapologetic."

Mott added a caveat worth noting: "It will not be a novel for everyone. It doesn't want to be. And that's a large part of why it succeeds."

Julie Orringer closed the list at five with Luna, Phoenix, Queen, reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Meg Wolitzer, who called it "Astonishing" and praised the way it "brilliantly emphasizes the agony of isolation in its various forms, and the relief that can only come in telling a story for oneself."

What does this change for readers?

Practically, it's a shortlist. If you follow critical consensus, Kingsolver is the month's safest bet and Johnson the boldest one. Li sits between them: near-universal praise with a couple of dissenters. With Lessons in Chemistry author Garmus back on shelves and two New York Times-reviewed titles in the top five, October's list suggests the fall fiction season is already crowding year-end awards conversations — and Kingsolver, a decorated novelist, has positioned Partita as the book to beat.