BOOKLOVES

Journey to the Heartland thoughtfully merges the Chinese immigrant experience with the struggle to accept one’s sexual identity and find belonging. “‘Mom, if the Earth is round, what about the people in the southern hemisphere? How could they not fall off the Earth?’” Hanwei Zhou grows up in a Chinese factory town during the industrial […]

A touching, everyday love story and the past that shaped it When Michael meets Andrea in a cafe, he can’t help but reach out. Literally. Trying to sit at a nearby table, Andrea is greeted by a helping hand she didn’t ask for. And while it might be awkward and at least a little bit […]

A thoughtful, intertextual memoir about learning to survive a grey world that always seemed written for someone else “I had already understood the only purpose of education was to fit me for adulthood in a mad world.” People often move through the world assuming that social rules and rituals are universal and intuitive. Yet much […]

Stories bouncing between reality and unreality, paired with abstract artworks, result in a unified, surprisingly accessible collection. This slim but consistently satisfying volume contains just five stories, making it viable to include a few words on each.  It begins with a dignified alderman obliging an odd request that puts him in what might be deemed […]

“In the Wake of the Ruined” begins with its heroine crawling out of the sea on all fours, dragging a dead king’s sword and a dead king’s crown, with a hole in her middle packed with kelp and blood-soaked sand. She has kept herself alive by paying a price she does not fully understand yet. […]

There is a particular kind of romance heroine we have all met before. She comes home from something terrible, she flinches, she whispers, and she waits for a good man to coax her back into the world. Into the Fading Twilight by Catherine Cowles takes that woman, hands her a mountain bike, and shoves her […]