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 […]
Category: Book Reviews
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 […]
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The Final Score by Lana Ferguson
There is a scene early on where a hockey player, sitting on a hospital bed ninety seconds after a doctor tells him his career might be over, makes a crude joke about his own anatomy. The woman in the corner of the room, who barely tolerates him, calls him on it. She tells him he […]
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The Power of Four – Editorial Review
Title: The Power of Four: Elements, Humors, Temperaments, Types Author: W. Nikola-Lisa Genre: Self-Help / Philosophy In The Power of Four, Nikola-Lisa examines the historical, philosophical, and scientific significance of the number four through the disciplines of the elements, humors, temperaments, and types. He transports the reader from the ancient Greeks through the… […]
A compelling exploration of enlightenment as both liberation and an insidious form of erasure The Great Awakening by Blake Anderson is a speculative novel about a global phenomenon in which entire populations experience what appears to be a shared near-death or spiritual awakening. After this event, many people wake up transformed by a new sense […]
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Country People by Daniel Mason
Some novels talk to you quietly at first, the way a good neighbor does over a fence, and then, before you have noticed, have walked you all the way into the woods. That is the trick Country People by Daniel Mason pulls off. It opens with a family crossing the country in a station wagon […]
The beauty of humanity and the brutality of tech oligarchy clash in this thrilling global race to contain a deadly virus and its viral hate-campaigns. C. T. Clark’s Phoenix Elite series follows super-powered clones of iconic historical figures, named for the classified project that created them. Thought-provoking and globe-trotting, it’s most powerful when the clones […]
Loads of fun! A magical coming of age story about a girl in search of her father who finds much, much more Matt is having a normal shift at the grocery store when a strange girl in a mask approaches him. It’s not uncommon to have a mask of course; it is the pandemic. But […]