Category: Book Reviews

A woman sits in a recliner that was bright blue in another house in another state. Her daughter has just filled two bin bags in a kitchen nothing has been cooked in for years, and she will not let them leave until she has been through both. She feels every corner. She lifts out an […]

A woman kneels in a dead garden on a cliff in winter and puts her bare hands into frozen mud. The vines have had years to dig in and they fight her; the thorns open her palms; the mud goes black under her nails. She has no gloves because she did not look hard for […]

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An elderly woman in Staten Island sits crocheting with five cats asleep on various parts of her body. Her grandson, a federal agent of forty who has not taken unplanned leave since a funeral eight years ago, paces her living room listing why nothing can happen with the man he has met. He is twenty-six. […]

Fifty feet up, in a city whose rulers would execute her for being inside it, a girl is inching along a branch that has started to creak. A spider crawls over her wrist and she cannot flick it away, because letting go means falling, and falling is the one thing she is genuinely afraid of. […]

Twice a day, an elderly woman walks from her neighbourhood down to the sea and back, and both times she passes a small stone house above a shuttered shopfront. For roughly twenty seconds she stops breathing. A longer route exists that would avoid the street altogether, and in fifty-four years she has never taken it. […]

A quirky, genre-bending meditation on communication in all its forms  The title of Frederick David’s The Memoir of a Student is, on the face of it, misleading. The work is a hodgepodge of genres that the word “memoir” fails to convey, and David, who returns to school following what he describes as years of “peripatetic” […]

A big-hearted fantasy adventure about belonging, self-acceptance, and what makes a home worth protecting Jeremy D. Scholz’s Magnus and the Last Dragon follows fourteen-year-old Magnus, a foster kid who’s never felt like he belongs. At six-foot-two, he’s nearly impossible to overlook, yet somehow, he still feels invisible. His foster family cares for him, but the […]

One winter morning in 1958, a woman walks out of a lodge on Mount Shasta carrying an axe. The sign over her own driveway bears the name of the character that made her rich, engraved on a placard she paid a fortune for, and she swings at the left post until the wood gives. Her […]

Three dishes wrapped in foil are sitting on the porch when she opens the door. Nobody is there. There are no footprints in the snow, no tyre marks, no sound of anyone hurrying away. She decides they must be shy neighbours, the quietly decent Midwestern sort who believe food says everything a person needs to, […]