Two new notable reviews

Two April 10 reviews in The New York Times landed on very different books, but they point at the same thing: critics are spending this week on books that reopen old stories rather than chase brand-new subjects. One is Harrison Hill’s account of a New Mexico cult; the other is Merlin Holland’s attempt to retell Oscar Wilde’s afterlife from inside the family. (nytimes.com 1) (nytimes.com 2) Hill’s book is called The Oracle’s Daughter, and despite the novel framing in some chatter around it, Scribner is publishing it as nonfiction under the subtitle The Rise and Fall of an American Cult. The book follows Sarah Green’s 1999 escape from the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious group that operated in the New Mexico desert. (simonandschuster.com) (publishersweekly.com) The setup is concrete and ugly: Sarah Green is fleeing a movement led by her mother, Deborah, and Hill builds the story through three women tied to the group’s rise and collapse. Simon & Schuster’s description says the book traces the organization from 1960s counterculture roots through conspiracy-heavy abuse in the 1990s and into the present. (simonandschuster.com) (simonandschuster.ca) That gives the review a wider target than one cult story. The book is being pitched as a history of how fringe belief leaks into mainstream American life, which helps explain why a newspaper review would treat it as more than true-crime material. (simonandschuster.com) (nytimes.com) The second review turns to a writer who has been dead since 1900 but never really left the argument. The New York Times describes Holland’s book as a reckoning by Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, a man who has spent decades trying to strip away myths that hardened around Wilde after the 1895 trials and prison sentence. (nytimes.com) (europaeditions.com) Holland is not a casual descendant cashing in on a famous name. Europa Editions says he has spent about forty years researching Wilde’s life and works, and earlier books include trial records and collected letters, so this new volume arrives as both family memoir and long-running correction project. (europaeditions.com) (europaeditions.co.uk) The family angle matters because Wilde’s scandal did not end with Wilde. Cambridge Independent notes that Constance Wilde changed the family name to Holland in 1895 after Oscar Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency, which shows how the punishment spread across generations and helps explain the title After Oscar. (cambridgeindependent.co.uk) (europaeditions.com) Put together, these two reviews show a familiar pattern in serious book coverage right now. The books getting attention are not just telling what happened; they are asking who got to control the story afterward, whether that means a cult leader shaping reality inside a desert compound or a scandal shaping a writer’s name for more than a century. (nytimes.com 1) (nytimes.com 2) If you are building a reading list from the week’s criticism, the split is clean. One book offers a reported American story published on April 7, 2026 by Scribner; the other offers a literary biography from Wilde’s grandson published by Europa Editions, and both entered the same New York Times review cycle on April 10, 2026. (bookscouter.com) (europaeditions.com) (nytimes.com 1) (nytimes.com 2)