Everyone love a good puzzle–but in this collection of mysterious microreviews, there’s more to the story than just a carefully woven plot. These four titles take the mystery genre and use it to explore class, gender, race, and revolution. From a man who is searching for the literal woman of his dreams to the subtle tensions between two families–one Black and one white–in apocalyptic Long Island, these stories make you reconsider what the mystery novel can do.
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April 2021 Reading Round-Up: Sense of Place
In our second round of micro-reviews, we are thinking about place – not just in terms of physical setting, but also the emotional and imagined places that books allow us to inhabit.
This collection includes poetry set on a rumbling train, a novella about a woman for whom time is as much as a place as the otherworldly rural setting in which she finds herself, and a mystery in which the real horror comes from inhabiting the mind of the troubled narrator. With books set from Cairo to the Oregon coast and everywhere in between, you are sure to find a book in this round-up that speaks to your desire to escape.
Continue readingReview: The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala
The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2020)
Reviewed by Megan Foster
A good man is hard to find, as they say. This is certainly the case in Cuban author Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral, a darkly comic novel that buzzes around the Stewart family’s fated arrival to Cienfuegos. Arturo Stewart moves with his wife Carmen and their three children – David King, Samuel Prince, and Johannes – with the express purpose of constructing a titular cathedral to outshine any temple in Cuba and make Cienfuegos the new Jerusalem. It doesn’t take long for the neighborhood to suspect that the Stewarts are not what they seem. Readers must determine whom to trust as the novel rapidly flits through everyone’s point of view but the Stewarts: town gossips, classmates, a school principal, an architect, a drag queen, ghosts, a serial killer. In a town spurred by greed and violence, no one is holier than thou.
Continue readingReview: Braised Pork by An Yu
Braised Pork by An Yu (Grove Press 2020)
Reviewed by Allison McCausland
It’s easy for the monotony of life to settle in. It lulls us into a false sense of security. It keeps us from recognizing how drained our happiness and sense of self has become. Both circumstances plague protagonist Jia Jia as she struggles to adjust to life in Beijing after her husband’s bizarre death.
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