Kingsolver's 'Partita' Tops Weekly Reviews With 12 Raves

Barbara Kingsolver's Partita collected 12 rave reviews this week, the highest tally among new titles tracked by Book Marks, Lit Hub's review aggregator.

The novelist entered the fall list atop the fiction category. Critics praised her economy of expression. Heather Scott Partington wrote in The Los Angeles Times that "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."

What does the weekly tally actually measure?

Book Marks compiles reviews from major outlets and assigns each verdict one of four labels: rave, positive, mixed, or pan. A title with 12 raves and a single pan signals near-unanimous critical enthusiasm, and the rankings carry comparable weight across categories despite different field sizes.

Fiction runners-up:

• The Occidental Book of the Dead by T. Geronimo Johnson (William Morrow), 7 raves. Jason Mott wrote in The New York Times Book Review that the novel is "ambitious, creative and, most important of all, unapologetic."
• Fair Ones by Lydia Millet (W. W. Norton), 3 raves and 3 positives. Library Journal's Erin Galloway called the prose "sharp and quick" and the characters "deeply human."
• Every Story Is a Love Story by Imbolo Mbue (Random House), 3 raves and 1 positive.
• The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Scribner), 3 raves. Publishers Weekly described the story as "beguiling."

Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man led the nonfiction list with 7 raves. Amy Bloom reviewed the memoir in The New York Times Book Review and invoked Franz Kafka's image of a book as an ax for the frozen sea within us. Bloom wrote that "this book, and this author, are that ax," and called the account "a gift to the reader, grieving or not."

Other nonfiction standouts:

• Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin's Press), 5 raves and 1 mixed. Bill Heavy wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Daugherty "deftly separates the writer from the myth."
• The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking), 5 raves. Hamilton Cain wrote in The Boston Globe that Philbrick "conjures time and place in lush detail."
• Will and Attention: A Memoir by Meghan O'Gieblyn (Doubleday), 4 raves and 1 positive. Jennifer Szalai wrote in The New York Times that the book is "suffused with suffering and joy, ambivalence and insight."
• The Savage Mind: An American Legacy by David Treuer (Little Brown), 4 raves and 1 positive. Linford Fisher wrote in The Boston Globe that the work is "a magnificently honest and intensely personal extended letter to his children."

The November publishing calendar will now shape the next round of contenders. Readers weighing holiday purchases can use the Book Marks ledger to anchor their own picks, though the highest rave counts do not always translate into the strongest sales when critics diverge from the readers they serve.