Review: A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

| Rebecca Valley

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua (Ballantine Books 2019)

Reviewed by Amaya Hunsberger 

Vanessa Hua’s debut novel, A River of Stars, follows the path of Scarlett, a pregnant Chinese woman while the child’s father, Boss Yeung, wishes to do business in America. She is sent to Perfume Bay in San Francisco where she and other pregnant Chinese women will deliver their children in secret in order to ensure American citizenship for their babies. The whole operation is run by Mama Fang, a lucrative entrepreneur. After finding out that her unborn child is a girl, she escapes the facility with a teenager named Daisy, and together they make their way to San Francisco’s Chinatown. There, they rely on the generosity of a new community and their own ingenuity in order to survive. 

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Review: Bestiary by K-Ming Chang

| Rebecca Valley

Bestiary by K-Ming Chang (One World 2020)

Reviewed by A. Mana Nava

Bestiary is a nonlinear, multi-generational experiment exploring how stories are passed down from generation to generation. K-Ming Chang plays with narrative structure by blending the epistolary form, fables, oral storytelling, and close third-person narration. In the narrative, the character Mother tells Daughter a story about a hungry tiger who eats toes to explain why she cut hers off and keeps them in a tin. Then, one day Daughter wakes up with a tiger tail. This novel turns impossible tales of rivers impregnating women, flying crabs, and holes carrying letters across the country into a plausible reality. There is no line between fantasy and reality as the two are brilliantly woven together.

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Review: Fighting Words by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

| Rebecca Valley

Fighting words by kimberly brubaker bradley (Dial books 2020)

Reviewed by Megan Foster

Fighting Words is the newest middle grade novel by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, best known for her Newbery Honor-winning novel The War That Saved My Life. I’ve always attested that its sequel, The War I Finally Won, is even better, but Fighting Words is arguably her best novel by far. 

Delicious Nevaeh Roberts, or Della, is all I could ever ask for in a protagonist: tough and street smart, empathetic and kind, proud of her loud mouth and lobbed curses. She’s the kind of girl who’ll draw a mustache and devil horns on a princess, then defend her bullied friend. Della and her sixteen year old sister, Suki, have had to be tough after years of living with their mother’s boyfriend, Clifton, who finally did something so bad they had to get out quick. With their mother in jail states away, the two must navigate foster care while memories of Clifton continue to haunt them both. Della continually looks to Suki as her protector, but when Suki attempts suicide, Della has a terrible, earth-shattering revelation: who’s protecting Suki? 

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Review: The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang

| Rebecca Valley

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang (Graywolf Press 2019)

Reviewed by Claudine Mininni

Esmé Weijun Wang’s illuminating essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, details her tumultuous relationship with schizoaffective disorder. In her opening essay, “Diagnosis,” Wang writes:

Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months and weeks.

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Review: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

| Rebecca Valley

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Gallery/Saga Press 2020)

Reviewed by Robert Drinkwater

I was instantly drawn to the premise of Stephen Graham Jones’s book The Only Good Indians. It centered around four Blackfeet men who are haunted by a malevolent entity from an event ten years in the past. It is a story that is full of Blackfeet folklore, tradition, and plenty of blood and gore. 

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Review: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

| Rebecca Valley

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (Catapult Press 2020)

Reviewed by Isabella Scala-Natoli

In Zaina Arafat’s debut novel, You Exist Too Much—what some have called a bildungsroman, and a character study—an unnamed D.C. raised Palestinian-American narrator gets dumped by her girlfriend for her chronic infidelity and goes to rehab, then an MFA program. Across America, Europe, and The Middle East, she learns how to shape her life story into a love-story both shattering in impact and fractured in shape. Each place the narrator takes us to is tied to a person, and another manifestation of the same quest. That is, to find a mother—and in effect—a homeland. On this quest, as readers, we experience with the narrator what I can only describe as growing pains. What I got from reading YETM was the chance to bond with a character who by working out her own flaws, made me consequently realize my own. This sounds negative but it isn’t. It was a pleasant awakening. Like suddenly remembering where you know that person from, the one you saw on the bus earlier. You went to college together. Of course! Your dislike of others stems from your own insecurities. Of course!

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Review: Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

| Rebecca Valley

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (Counterpoint 2019) 

Reviewed by Yollotl Lopez 

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot is like balloons filled with paint exploding against a white canvas — c. Heart Berries is Mailhot’s debut memoir told in a cyclical narrative touching upon her experience as a writer, mother, mental health patient, and partner all informed by her identity as a First Nations Canadian living in the U.S. It is the story of love, and loss, but most of all it is a story about storytelling. Mailhot writes:

“Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers” (105). 

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Review: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

| Rebecca Valley

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Tramp Press, 2020)

Reviewed by Allison McCausland

If “cat got your tongue” is the euphemism for not finding your words, then “a ghost in the throat” is its opposite. Author Doireann Ni Ghiofa defines it best in her titular combo of auto-fiction and essay as she explores her need to write about Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill, the eighteenth-century noblewoman and poet of Ireland’s classical keen, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, or The Lament for Art O’Laoghaire, is Chonaill’s account of the romance and death of her husband, and is taught in Ireland’s literature curriculum as one of the greatest poems written in the country’s history. However, Ghiofa points out that this is one of the few texts written by Chonaill herself. How can someone so famous have little to no other accounts written about them? Ghiofa’s book chronicles her search for the story surrounding Chonaill’s life while intertwining her own experience of hardship and motherhood during her years of research. Her prose does its best to put into words the yearning need to give voice to the silenced artists of the past.

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Review: Rosewater by Tade Thompson

| Rebecca Valley

Rosewater by Tade Thompson (Orbit 2018)

Reviewed by Stephanie Chariton

British author and psychiatrist Tade Thompson’s stories and shorts have been critically acclaimed worldwide. His debut novel, Rosewater, won both the Nommo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the U.K. Originally published in 2016, the Wormwood trilogy’s first installment is a deep dive into a world of aliens, with a beautiful mix of psychic powers, detective work, and sci-fi at its best. 

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