Weekend Features — Sunday Review of Reviews
No Such Thing As Monday Is the Book of the Week, Scrooge Splits the Critics in Half, and the Empress Takes Her Leave
The week's review lists were tallied, and the tally gave the desk a divided week. The book du jour is No Such Thing As Monday by Siân Hughes, published in the United States on November 10: first in the week's fiction tally with five rave reviews, two positive and one mixed, taken by its reviewers to be the life of Steffie Cartwright of working-class Birmingham—a woman who finds her father dead in his chair, removes stains at a dry cleaner's, and goes looking for the sister who ran away from home at 16. On screen the week belonged to division: Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, Ti West's telling of Dickens with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, opened November 13 with the critics split at 50 to 53 percent and the argument fixed on its leading man, while its ghosts and its design drew agreement from both camps; and The Empress, the German serial on Netflix, closed its third and final season with verdicts running from masterpiece to 3.5 of 10. A lone capsule, labeled Worth Watching, files John Wilson's documentary feature The History of Concrete. The desk states its position plainly at the head of each part: it has not read the book, and it has not watched the serial, the films, or the documentary. What follows is a review of reviews.
The Week in Brief: The Tally
In fiction, one book stood at the head of the list, and the list beneath it was crowded with clean verdicts. Book Marks' tally of the week, published November 13, ranks No Such Thing As Monday first with five rave reviews, two positive and one mixed. Behind it: Xita Rubert's The Key Biscayne Affair, three rave and two positive; Annie Proulx Stories: New & Selected, four rave and no other verdict recorded; Niall Williams's O Now!, three rave and one positive; and Gabriel Bump's Don't Stop Snowing, one rave and four positive. In nonfiction the tally's order and its arithmetic part company, and the desk prints both as filed: The Telephone: A New History by James Gleick stands first with four rave and three positive, while Nick Paumgarten's The Intangibles stands second with five rave and one positive—more raves, one place lower. Lauren Elkin's Vocal Break and Nancy Isenberg's Aristocracy, American Style share third at three rave and two positive each, and Mona Chalabi's Ten Lives closes the list at one rave and three positive.
The week's five selected single reviews point at a different shelf, and the desk files the difference. The quintet chosen this week—Hillary Kelly in The Atlantic on M. John Harrison's The End of Everything, Merve Emre in The New Yorker on Tom Overton's John Berger, Ed Park on Cleo Birdwell's Amazons, Ryan Ruby in Bookforum on Emily Ogden's Darkness Becomes Bright, and Josef Burton on Akbar Shahid Ahmed's Crossing the Red Line—contains no review of the book at the head of the tally. Last week the book du jour stood in both lists at once. This week it stands on the tally alone: eight reviews counted, seven of them favorable, from the papers and journals the tally tracks. The desk takes the tally as the week's verdict and the selected five as the week's reading, and prints the book the tally chose.
Part One — The Book: No Such Thing As Monday, by Siân Hughes
The desk has not read this book. It says so plainly, as the house rule requires: everything in this part is what the reviewers report, agree on, and dispute, and nothing in it is the desk's reading. No Such Thing As Monday is a novel. Siân Hughes is a British writer who began as a poet; her novel Pearl, published in 2023 and longlisted for the Booker Prize, was written in response to the medieval poem of the same name. This book was published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company on November 10, 2026: 224 pages, $26.99, ISBN 9781250459572.
On what the book is, the reviewers agree completely, and their agreement is the week's firmest fact. Stephanie Cartwright—Steffie—is a chain-smoking, prickly woman in middle age who works at a dry cleaner's in contemporary working-class England and tends to her father. The novel opens with Steffie finding that father, Stan, dead in his favorite chair. Stan dominated her childhood near Birmingham in the 1970s and 1980s: a violent bully who ran dogfights at the local pub, whose wife died before him, and whose favorite Steffie always was—a favoritism that left her carrying guilt for her older sister, Caroline, who fled home at 16 and has not been seen since. With Stan dead, Steffie sets out to find Caroline. The reviewers describe the same construction from every side: a life told in episodes across childhood to middle age, in no straight order, each chapter standing nearly on its own—in the Chicago Review of Books' account, each chapter a set of pages in a photo album, the picture widening as the album fills. And every reviewer who addresses the book's machinery names the same source under it: the medieval poem called Cleanness, or Purity, from the same 14th-century manuscript that holds Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which gives the novel its governing figure of the stain—the laundry Steffie cleans by day, and the past she cannot clean at all.
On what the book is taken to be, the reviewers also agree, in their own words, filed below. Leah Greenblatt of the New York Times calls it fractious and darkly funny: an ouroboros of ongoing traumas that somehow manages not to be head-smashingly bleak, because Steffie on the page is a pretty great hang—spiky, sharp-witted, blazingly self-aware—and because Hughes has a canny, lyrical ear for her misfits and underdogs, and a touch tender enough to nudge their fate toward better things. Kirkus, in its starred notice, credits an alchemy like Douglas Stuart's: Hughes transforms the dross of Steffie's life into literary gold. The Chicago Review of Books calls Steffie compelling—not always likeable, and certainly never unlikeable—and the novel a powerful story that unveils itself with every page. The Bookreporter review reaches the same resting place from the record of the plot: a profoundly sad novel, and a surprisingly hopeful one, whose message is that it is never too late to gain perspective, to make amends, or to try to start anew. The publisher's record places the book in the working-class British realist tradition of Douglas Stuart and Andrea Arnold, and the trade notices filed with it name Hughes an exceptional and compassionate chronicler of precarious and chaotic lives.
The split in the file is about the comedy, and how far it reaches into the childhood chapters. The Times of London, in the coolest review the week filed, grants the premise its full force—humour is how Steffie copes with loss, and how the reader copes with an otherwise harrowing tale of penury and hurt—and then records a falling off: as the novel dives into Steffie's violent childhood in the West Midlands, the dark comedy recedes, and Hughes could have gone further and funnier to wring the last drop of absurdity from each scene. Where the author excels, in that review's judgment, is in meandering through the slippages of memory to reveal what is gnawing at her narrator. Its verdict is measured: a decent follow-up to Pearl, even if by design it seems to position itself as the lesser work—a book that, like Steffie, cannot escape the taint of disappointment. The desk files the disagreement as it stands. Seven of the tally's eight counted verdicts are favorable, and the favorable reviews praise the humour as the book's engine; the one cool review praises the memory work and asks for more of the humour. No reviewer in the week's file faults the sentences, and no reviewer disputes Steffie herself.
Where to get it. No Such Thing As Monday by Siân Hughes is available at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, Objective Daily News earns from qualifying purchases made through that link.
Part Two — Screen: Scrooge, Split in Half, and the Empress Takes Her Leave
The desk has not watched any of the screen works in this part. It has not streamed The Empress, and it has not sat in a cinema for Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol or How to Rob a Bank. Their status here is the same as the book's: the reviews, reviewed.
The television pick of the week is The Empress, and it is German, and it is finished. The third and final season of the serial—Die Kaiserin in its own language, on Netflix—was released on November 12. The story it closes is the story the serial has told since 2022: Elisabeth of Austria, played by Devrim Lingnau Islamoğlu, the Bavarian duke's daughter who married Emperor Franz Joseph, played by Philip Froissant, for love and spent her reign fighting the walls of the Viennese court. The final season opens a few months after the second season's close, with Franz returned from commanding his army at the front, a changed, cold and distant man, and the imperial marriage on shaky ground; it carries the story through to the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. On the measure that is not a review, the serial's standing is a matter of record: its first season in September 2022 became, in the reports filed below, Netflix's second-most-watched series globally on its debut, and it stands in those reports as the service's most successful German original since Barbarians.
The reviewers agree on the season's materials, and on the bargain its ending strikes. Every review in the file records a darker and more politically tangled season; every review credits the same visible strengths—the chemistry of the two leads, the costumes, in the Absolute Geeks account the work of costume designer Gabriela Reumer standing among the best in streaming period drama, and production design that no reviewer faults. And every review that reaches the ending describes the same transaction: the finale blends fiction and fact, chooses the fairytale the serial has always carried over the history book, and leaves the harrowing later record of Elisabeth's life—the loss of her son Rudolf among it—outside the frame, her assassination handled, in one account, as onscreen text before the credits. The ending turns the founding of the dual monarchy into a fresh start for the marriage, grounded in the understanding that this empress needs the freedom to be herself.
The split is about whether that bargain is the season's achievement or its evasion, and the file runs the full width of the scale. At one end, ScreenRant's November 14 account calls the third season a true masterpiece and the serial a show with no bad season, each installment better than the last. Collider calls the ending a satisfying, poignant conclusion for one of Netflix's best hidden gems, and Absolute Geeks, at four of five, calls the season a strong, confident farewell that sticks the landing where it counts—while recording, in the same review, a rushed and underdeveloped Hungarian subplot and a life-changing relationship with Count Andrássy given too little room. At the other end stands the Midgard Times review, at 3.5 of 10: a rushed finale that turns history into bullet points, a season that never allows any moment, scene, feeling or action to linger, speedrunning its material until investment fails—filed by a reviewer who holds that the serial peaked in a first season that was itself not all that good. Between the poles, the audience record filed on IMDb runs warm: breathtaking, heart-wrenching, viewers who waited two years and binged the season in one go. The desk files the whole width: the materials are agreed, the farewell is contested, and the contest is between a romance that has earned its ending and a history that was owed more time.
In cinemas, the week's film is Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, and its reviewers agree on its ghosts and divide on its Scrooge. The film opened November 13, directed by Ti West and written by Nathaniel Halpern, rated PG-13 and running 116 minutes, with Johnny Depp as Scrooge in his first studio lead in eight years, Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley, Tramell Tillman, Andrea Riseborough and Daisy Ridley as the three ghosts, and Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit. The agreement in the file is exact: the production design and the photography—Eve Stewart's design and Checco Varese's dark, fogged London, credited by name in reviews that agree on little else—and the ghost work above all, Tillman's Ghost of Christmas Present named the film's diamond in TheWrap's account and the spirits given layers, in Empire's, that outclass the picture around them. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus, as the service prints it, holds the same two facts in one sentence: evocative production design, a Depp filled with the bah-humbug spirit, and a telling that plays too safe among its long line of remakes. The division is the lead. The Daily Telegraph's Robbie Collin gave the film four of five; the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw found Depp in fact rather good; Deadline recorded a man having a blast, and The Hollywood Reporter a creepily effective comeback vehicle. Against them: the Boston Globe's Odie Henderson, at one of four, called Depp easily the worst Scrooge he had ever seen; IndieWire's David Ehrlich found him unengaging in a film named for his character; the Associated Press, at one of four, called the whole a horror-tinged holiday slog. The counts print the division without ornament: 35 fresh and 34 rotten in one count of 69, and an audience mark, when it posted, of 89 percent against the critics' half.
The week's second film is filed in one paragraph, because its split runs between the critics and the audience rather than through either camp. How to Rob a Bank, David Leitch's heist picture, opened November 13: Nicholas Hoult leads a Pittsburgh crew that livestreams its bank robberies, with John C. Reilly as the veteran FBI agent on the digital trail, and Zoë Kravitz, Pete Davidson and Anna Sawai in the cast; it runs 122 minutes and is rated R. The critics' count stands at 31 to 33 percent across the weekend's tallies—the lowest mark of Leitch's career, in more than one account—under a consensus that calls it frenetic entertainment whose ideas never cohere into a satisfying message; the A.V. Club, at C+, found two or three movies smashed together, and Time Out, at three of five, found a fun, throwaway action-thriller. Verified audiences scored it 77 to 80 percent in the same counts, a gap of more than 45 points, with a B-minus CinemaScore between the two. The desk has not seen either film; it files the week's cinema record as two splits of different shapes—one film divided against itself at its centre, one divided between the people who review films and the people who bought tickets.
Worth Watching — The History of Concrete
The desk has not screened this film. The publisher has, and the publisher is the source of this item; it stands here on his tip, treated by the house method. The History of Concrete is John Wilson's documentary feature—his directorial debut in the form, after his HBO series How To with John Wilson—premiered at Sundance on January 22, 2026 and released by Magnolia Pictures on September 18, 2026, at 100 minutes in the reviews' count. It was reviewed by the New York Times, Time, and IndieWire, among others. The record the reviews converge on is this: a deadpan inquiry into concrete—its Roman endurance, its American crumbling, the oldest concrete street in the country at Bellefontaine, Ohio, a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway described to Wilson as a ticking time bomb—turns, in its final movement, into a portrait of Jack Macco, a Long Island rock musician Wilson meets handing out liquor samples, and of Macco's late fiancée Dorothy Chin Brandt, the first female Asian American judge in New York State, who died on January 27, 2025, at 78. On the film around that turn, the file agrees in its parts: IndieWire's David Ehrlich calls it consistently hilarious and sneakily profound, sustained by a tension between order and entropy—concrete as the material men scratch their names into as a bid for immortality, and use to build the burial vaults that hold them after. The New York Times' Alissa Wilkinson, in the praise carried with the film, records being left wondering how a movie about concrete could leave a lump in the throat; the Guardian's Adrian Horton calls it consistently laugh-out-loud funny, compelling and surprising; the New Yorker's Richard Brody finds it rich in an authentic sense of discovery, and pointedly, urgently political. RogerEbert.com's account files the reservation the favorable reviews concede in passing: the film is in substance a long episode of the HBO series, and the history of its title takes up only a small portion of its running time—and a college review filed November 13 files the cooler edge, a narration and a comic persona that reviewer found an acquired taste. The film took the Best Narration prize at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, in the November 14 account filed below. The peg on this paper is plain: Friday's Special Report, Concrete: What the Record Shows About the Most Consumed Material on Earth (November 13), covers the material; this item covers the film.
The Cocked Hat
Three bearings never give a point; they give a small triangle, and this paper prints the triangle. First, Scrooge's score: Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol stands at 51 percent from 59 reviews in its opening count, 50 percent from 70 in a second, 51 percent from 111 in the Friday weekend guide, and 53 percent from 116 in the count taken November 14, with Metacritic at 46 in one listing and 47 in another—a film whose measure moves because the review file is still arriving, printed here as a moving measure. Ehrlich's IndieWire grade likewise stands at C-minus in one roundup and C-plus in another; the desk prints both and adopts neither. Second, the Empress's war: Collider places Franz at the front lines of the Sardinian War, while the British reports describe his return from a war against Napoleon, and from conflict with Napoleon; the desk prints the attributions as filed. Third, the book's count: The Times calls No Such Thing As Monday Hughes's second novel, and the Chicago Review of Books calls it her third book; Hughes's bibliography carries a poetry collection ahead of the novels, and the desk prints both counts as their papers filed them. Against the triangle, the load-bearing facts are single-valued: No Such Thing As Monday was published in the United States on November 10, 2026, by Henry Holt, at 224 pages and $26.99, and stands first in the week's fiction tally; the third and final season of The Empress was released on Netflix on November 12; Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol and How to Rob a Bank both opened on November 13; and The History of Concrete premiered at Sundance on January 22, 2026, and was released by Magnolia Pictures on September 18, 2026. The desk has not read the book and has not watched the screen works. The log proceeds to Sunday's watches.