Donna Seaman (Identity Unknown), who has dedicated her life to literary criticism--she's the adult books editor at Booklist and a veteran reviewer--turns her critical gaze on herself in the lovely little River of Books, a short-form autobiography offering a long-form answer to the question: How did you find your calling, Donna Seaman?
Seaman and her sister were raised to be readers in a middle-class secular Jewish household in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. A temperamental kid who "approved of Eeyore," Seaman discovered that when she was reading, "I was engrossed, not overwhelmed. The me I despised disappeared." Was her professional fate sealed when her father made her allowance contingent on writing about the books she adored? Maybe, but her path to reviewing wasn't linear, as this memoir makes entertainingly plain.
While River of Books covers the major plot points of Seaman's life leading to her career-making Booklist gig, her only romance along the way seems to have been with books. She moons over libraries ("I purred over the lined cards in the cardboard pockets pasted inside the books") and swoons over fiction writers ("What an endlessly strange and marvelous feat it is to so convincingly imagine a richly dimensional individual navigating complicated predicaments in a convincingly rendered world"). Seaman frequently interrupts her storytelling to reflect on her formative reading material, including two lifelong favorites: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. Her quick takes hint at the rewards that are already known to regular readers of her critiques. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer