Our favorite criticism of the week includes James Wood on Harriet Clark’s The Hill , Laura Miller on James Lasdun’s The Family Man , Sam Worley on Douglas Stuart’s John of John , Colin Grant on Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s Backtalker , and Adam Begley on Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say . Brought to you by  Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * “Harriet Clark’s superb first novel, The Hill … is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents in New York City. Nearly every weekend—first with her grandfather, then with a nun named Sister Claudine, and, finally, once she’s nearly a teen-ager, on her own—Suzanna makes a trip out of town to visit her mother in a hilltop prison. Only gradually does it emerge that her mother is serving a very long sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the death of a security guard. Clark’s novel is a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman. It has the form and emphasis of a coming-of-age story but is devoid of the usual content.…