SPOILER ALERT: ANNE BOLEYN SHOULD NOT BUY ANY GREEN BANANAS: Linda Holmes laments that fiction by women does get reviewed, but women are rarely given the literary it-person superstar full monty.* I don't read enough book reviews to comment on that, but I will venture one prediction: the biggest literary it-person superstar full monties this year will go to Suzanne Collins (in the J.K. Rowling mass market lowbrow division for commercial domination) and Hillary Mantel (in the highbrow division).
As to the latter, consider this. Mantel's Wolf Hall, a sprawling, funny, sad novel about Thomas Cromwell's rise and Thomas More's decline, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The sequel, which presumably will cover the rest of Cromwell's life, is now due in May. I would say that Wolf Hall was the best book I read in the last five years, except that a few months ago, Amazon released A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel's incredible 2007 novel about the French Revolution, for the Kindle, and that may, may have been even better -- even funnier, sadder, and more sprawling than Wolf Hall.
Two swallows do not a summer make, I am told, and the 2012 results may not look, in the aggregate, much different from the 2011 numbers. All I'm saying is that my prediction is that the biggest it-person superstars this year are not going to be Brooklynites with ironic neck-beards.
*That's a verbatim quote, but the quotation marks are killing my HTML, so please don't accuse me of failing to quote and attribute.