Reviewed by Efsane Karayilanoglu Toka
“If you’re here, then I’m not.” (ix) This is how Julie Yip-Williams starts her book. She turns your emotions upside-down. Knowing that the person who wrote those lines is not alive anymore gives you a different perspective as you turn the pages. It’s raw, it’s honest, it’s true. It’s about starting a life and also ending one.
Continue reading
Reviewed by Tracy Vasquez
Rivers Solomon’s science-fiction novel An Unkindness of Ghosts is masked in a pain. The point of writing on the pain of others is to expose the reader to a point of view; in this instance, Solomon writes from the perspective of Aster, who identifies as gender fluid. Aster is searching for a consistent path in the uncertainty of the cosmos. “She craved clarity, transparency and answers.” (169) She longs for answers from her mother, who died when she was a baby; yet, a mapping of sorts leads her on a path set by her mother. Cutting out the contrivances, we see Aster through her history of loss and survival on the vessel Matilda.
Continue reading
Reviewed by Maayan D’Antonio
Ari, Merlin and their rainbow knights are back and are headed straight for the Camelot of the Middle Ages, where they must attempt to steal the Holy Grail from the King Arthur, in order to save the future from the evil Mercer Corporation that seeks galactic domination. But something is wrong, Merlin is in a…well? And where are his friends?
Continue reading
Reviewed by Lisa Slage Robinson
I’ve told everyone, I’ll tell you. I married Bridge because he’s thunder. That man right there is a pack of hungry wolves howlin’ at the moon.
Leesa Cross-Smith explores the complexities of modern love and rediscovers the bold frontier of feminine desire in the highly anticipated So We Can Glow (Grand Central Publishing, 2020) a collection of 42 short stories, flashes and meditations.
Continue reading
Reviewed by Angela Gualtieri
A book’s purpose is to inform, whether it paints a view of a fantastical world or provides a reflection of everyday life. Sometimes, these purposes indulge our curiosities naturally and slowly. Other times, the author forces our eyes wide open to take in harsh truths we weren’t prepared to face. Etaf Rum’s debut novel, A Woman Is No Man, displays the traditions, culture, and societal expectations of Arab families, but also shows the painful reality for its woman.
Continue reading
Reviewed by Maayan D’Antonio
Jackson’s debut novel tells the story of 17-year-old ballerina Savannah Rose—“Sparrow” to her friends and family. Sparrow has been chosen to dance the role of the Swan Queen, with her best friend and dance partner Lucas as the prince. But dancing isn’t Sparrow’s only talent. Her real talent is keeping secrets—a practice distilled into her by her long dead mother.
Continue reading
Reviewed by Rebecca Valley
“How carefully we preserve the dead and eat the living” (109)
How to write an elegy for animals? Not the ones closest to us, our dogs and cats, chickens, rabbits, the domesticated fauna we use to name and sustain ourselves. How do we write an elegy for the animals we did not save in time; the “endlings,” the final link between past and present? How do we write an elegy for the victims of a murder we won’t even admit we’ve committed?
Continue reading
Reviewed by Rebecca Valley
I wrote my first and only obituary in 2018, for my uncle. His name was Thom. He died quite suddenly, at 48, after decade-old cancer cells appeared again in his colon, took over his liver, swallowed him up.
Which is to say that I am no expert in the articulation of existence. And anyway, how do you go about writing a single document that might convey the precious, imperfect, complicated, wonderful nuances of an entire life? For Victoria Chang, the obituary is not just a death notice, but a mode. In her latest collection, OBIT, she asks: What continues to live when someone we love dies? What dies with them?
Continue reading“I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to a scent” (18)
Reviewed by Olivia Cyr
There is perhaps no better political climate in which to revel in a book that explores race in America than the one the country is in now. As both a self-proclaimed feminist with a background in black women’s studies, and a white woman, I find that I am both well-versed on current conversations about race and women and where those intertwine, and also, admittedly, still terribly conditioned to accept and lean on my own white privilege. While I do follow much of the debate on abortion, women’s rights in the workplace, intersectionality, police brutality, immigration, and the unfair treatment of black people, there is still so much I do not know. I wonder often if my own whiteness does not allow for me to see the whole picture. I think many white folks in this country try, as Claudia Rankine’s characters Virginia and Charles appear to do, and think we are doing as much as we can with the resources available. But Rankine makes it apparent that we aren’t, simply because we are white.
Continue reading