NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Guest Post by Chuck Augello.

In the opening story in Gwen Goodkin’s debut collection A Place Remote, a character references Bruce Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch,” but the Springsteen song that best captures the spirit of these stories is “The Ties That Bind.” In “Winnie,” an ambitious scholarship student at an elite college is drawn to a childhood friend, a construction worker chasing jobs across the country and over the Mexican border. Goodkin is a sharp observer of class distinctions; her working-class narrator has a comfortable sense of where he belongs while Winnie struggles for acceptance among her affluent peers. Describing Winnie’s reaction to her classmates’ wealth, the narrator observes, “I could tell she liked it in a way, being around all these people. Maybe she thought their money was going to rub off on her.” The story’s ending is sad yet hopeful, Winnie’s life bringing her to unexpected places.

Goodkin’s dialogue is witty, earthy, and real, and her first-person narrators are unique and memorable.  The tension between staying and leaving is woven throughout the book.  In “A Boy with Sense,” a mother celebrates escaping her rural roots: “‘Best day of my life,’ Mom says with a cigarette between her lips, ‘was the day I left that shithole . . . .'”  Yet her son sees the beauty in what his mother has forced him to leave: “Farming’s what I love. What I’m best at. Mom can think what she wants. I’d stay at the farm for good.”

Over the past five years there’s been a near obsession with the “Red State-Blue State” divide.  A Place Remote is set firmly in the “Red,” but what matters most is the grace and dignity afforded these characters. Fiction allows readers to see into the lives of others and Goodkin makes an excellent tour guide into the remote places where her characters live, love, and dream.

A Place Remote by Gwen Goodkin. West Virginia University Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chuck Augello is the author of the novel The Revolving Heart and the story collection The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love.

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Guest Post by Kimberly Diaz.

I stumbled upon amazing author Lucie Britsch via “Murder me Nicely,” a witty story in The Sun literary magazine. It charmed and delighted me so much that immediately after consuming it, I went looking for more. I found her on Twitter and great news—she had a novel coming out. I sent her a few highly complimentary tweets, ordered the book, and patiently reread my complete collection of Stephen McCauley novels as I waited for it to arrive.

Sad Janet is about a youngish woman who is depressed yet resisting constant pleas from family and coworkers to go on medication for it. She feels her depression is just the logical result of being aware. Every day she forces herself out of bed, laces up her Doc Martens and heads off to her job in a dog kennel in the woods “like a goddamned hero.” She has mixed feelings about the guy she lives with referring to him only as “the boyfriend” and admits that when he wants sex, sometimes she would really just rather have a sandwich.

With the holidays coming, the pressure to be happy is growing. Big Pharma has come out with a drug trial for a pill that will let you have a happy Christmas and Janet reluctantly signs up. You’ll have to read the book to find out how that goes. The novel is filled with Janet’s thoughts which are dark and hilarious. They’re already playing Christmas tunes in the mall, so Britsch’s brilliant debut novel, Sad Janet, is the perfect choice for gift-giving or your next book club meeting.

Sad Janet by Lucie Britsch. Penguin Random House, June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kimberly Diaz studied creative writing at Eckerd College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Montana Mouthful, Eckerd Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction. Read her most recent publication: https://entropymag.org/the-fish/

Guest Post by Samantha Kolber.

This is the second novel I have read by Melanie Finn, and I am simply in love with her writing! It is smart and atmospheric, with the pull of a literary thriller but with meat and heart.

In her new novel The Hare (available now for pre-order), Rosie is an amazingly complex character, and Finn captures her porous self so well. In the beginning, we are coming-of-age with Rosie as she struggles to find her voice, her artistic vision, and her Self in a world dominated by men—men’s desires and needs have always come first, and Rosie is no stranger to that sublimation. But as the book moves through time, we see Rosie gaining strength, getting strong in the woods where she hunts and forages to keep herself and her infant daughter alive after they are left by the wealthy castaway boyfriend, Bennett.

The book takes some twists and turns, and Rosie grows older, hardened, yet still a loving soul, just like Finn writes of the trees on the barbed wire fence line in the forest: “The trees absorbed the cruel wire, grew straight and tall, regardless.” What an apt metaphor for women in this world: we absorb the traumas, the violence, the sleights to our sex, and grow strong, regardless.

I felt so close to the setting, too, I could often hear the fallen leaves crunching underfoot, or smell the woodstove smoke on a crisp winter evening. The complicated relationship between mother and daughter, cocooned together in a life of survival and secrets in a cabin in Vermont, is also captured well here.

Finn is a master of complication made visible through taut and beautiful words. I highly recommend this book.

The Hare by Melanie Finn. Two Dollar Radio, January 2021.

Reviewer bio: Samantha Kolber of Montpelier, Vermont, is a poet, editor, and author of a poetry chapbook, Birth of a Daughter (Kelsay Books, 2020). Learn more at www.samanthakolber.com.

Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise

If you’re hunting for some fresh fiction from a small press, check out Gilbert Allen’s newest book, The Beasts of Belladonna. This book features fifteen linked tales of quirky characters in a South Carolina foothills community. Expect the unexpected in these unsettling yet often hilarious stories, in which characters rub up against their own failures, yearnings, and secrets.

A minister nails a bird to a couple’s front door; a woman accidentally kills her cat and finds an unconventional way to grieve its loss; a man’s foxy neighbor goes to outrageous lengths to destroy his marriage. Domestic animals have a hefty influence on these people’s lives, sometimes comical and sometimes tragic; the same could be said about church as we’re introduced to the Mosquito Ministry, the Faster Pastor Challenge, and couples who pass witty notes during sermons. We meet “treenappers,” a Grandfather Against Garbage, and a character known as the Jesus of Malibu, and in these encounters are powerful flashes of raw humanity in all its complexity.

The Beasts of Belladonna by Gilbert Allen. Slant Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

Guest Post by Robert Lamb

It was Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman who said, “War is hell.” If you have any doubt that the general was dead right, run and get a copy of The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. You’ll see war up close and personal in his excellent account of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Hamilton, a Richmond, VA writer and former Peace Corps volunteer, shows us through the eyes of a young Christian girl in Armenia how war unleashes unspeakable human savagery in the name of ethnic cleansing.

It is April 1915 and the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, which has lasted for centuries, is on the verge of defeat by the allied forces of Great Britain and the Arabs. In the novel’s first few pages, the heroine, Valia, a teenager, sees her parents, siblings, and neighbors, all Christians, murdered by Turkish “police soldiers,” and flees for her life.

Thus begins an odyssey the reader won’t soon forget. The author’s account of Valia’s struggle to stay alive and hopeful is a hymn to the human spirit, and the story is nothing short of realistic and gripping.

Adding a nice touch of realism, even Lawrence of Arabia and Arab Prince Faisal make cameo appearances near the story’s end.

OK, film producers; you can’t say I didn’t give you a heads up on this novel.

The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. Winter Goose Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Robert Lamb is the author of four novels and a book of short stories; he review books for the New York Review of Books; and he has a website at www.robertlamb.net.

Guest Post by Jack Graham.

It’s incredibly rare that a novel can leave you feeling as ecstatically powerless as Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being, a strikingly well-crafted novel following the tribulations of both Naoko Yasutani, an early 2000’s teenager and of the more contemporary character of Ruth—an uninspired author reading the diary of the aforementioned Japanese teen.

Ozeki’s texts demonstrate a handshake between two separate periods within time, misting and tearing apart any conceptions of what it means to be ‘contemporary.’ The reader is simultaneously inundated with early references to popular and zany Japanese Maid Cafès and Hello Kitty merchandise (a Japanophile’s dream) in the form on Nao’s diary whilst Ruth provides a far more grounded account of modern normality—one of mundane and domesticated living.

When reading from the perspective of Nao, a readership is forcefully delved into an environment mostly motivated by suicidal thoughts. Being a Western reader, it became increasingly intriguing to be given some understanding into a Japanese mindset in regards to the romantic sentiments surrounding self-killing, one very foreign to my own.

On the other side of the coin, however, Ruth is a character who lives a decade or so after Nao’s accounts, the physical embodiment of dramatic irony. As a reader of Nao’s diary, she can locate Nao within time, using the internet as a tool to fixate her somewhere after 2001 but prior to the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Incident of 2011—she’s a literary archaeologist of sorts. It is through Ruth that I, the reader, was stripped of all control. It is at Ruth’s pace of reading that we unveil the life of Nao, it is only at the will of her determination that I found myself turning the page, heavy with anticipation.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Penguin Random House, 2013.

Reviewer bio: I’m Jack Graham, currently studying my Masters in English Literary Studies at Durham University.

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Guest Post by Eric P. Mueller 

Rarely, if ever, is the narrator of a novel so personal that it’s like they’ve invited you for tea. Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Francisca does that and more, balancing colloquialisms and two languages with stage-speaking authority. Readers learn a lot and a little of Francisca—she is at least in her mid-20s while telling her story, but we mostly stay locked in on one special summer.

Fiebre Tropical reminds readers of monotony that can ensue during long breaks in high school. Living in Miami with little freedom and resources to explore her surroundings, Francisca is limited to watching her neighbor play computer games, watching telenovelas with her abuela, and interacting with the faith-based community her mother almost forcefully wants her to join.

Christian communities are ubiquitous and highly accessible for youths. This novel explores what happens to identity when one joins these spaces. Will Francesca the all-black wearing “heathen” be transformed by God and his followers, or will followers of Christ find themselves shadowed in Francisca’s queer darkness?

Lopera alternates languages almost seamlessly, creating an authentic intimacy that makes the novel’s tone fresh and inviting as opposed to alienating. The distinct voice keeps the novel consistent; as the reader traverses through the plot, they learn more about Francisca’s mother’s and grandmother’s histories, explored in a way that’s not far off from a Junot Diaz or Toni Morrison book.

The novel explores the relationship between mother and daughter, generational trauma, immigrant experience, coming of age as queer, and queerness repression. The book is also about heartbreak. With the pandemic quarantine reminding us of what it means to be powerless and stuck at home, Fiebre Tropical is a reminder of the vulnerable yet necessary act of connection, of it’s rewards and consequences.

Fiebre Tropical by Juli Delgado Lopera. Amethyst Editions, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Eric P. Mueller is an essayist based in Alameda, CA. His work has appeared in Foglifter, Thought Erotic, and elsewhere. He reads for Longleaf Review. Follow him and his two dogs @realericmueller on Twitter or Instagram.

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Guest Post by Manasi Patil

Marybeth, Hollister and Jane is a fictional story set in the rural area of  Callicoon, New York.  The book has a very realistic vibe to it and all the characters seem believable. It follows the journey of a handful of people trying to locate the Eagle Diamond, stolen in the 1960’s. At the start, most of them are from the same organization, LVAJ, whose job is to locate stolen arts, artifacts, etc. and then pass them to someone else. But as the story unfolds, the head of the organization, Peter Reece, is too weak to manage the organization, and eventually all the members separate and begin the search on their own.

All through the journey of reading this book, I was on a rollercoaster. The scenes are sketched out in a way that makes the words leap off the page. All the characters too, are perfect for their roles. Author Vera Jane Cook has done an exceptional job. I particularly like Brock Stanley with his wise, witty, and caring nature (for Jane).The unexpected twist of The Sisters and Jane was my favorite scene from this novel.

The ending could have been much better, though. It winded up too simple and easy and I felt that the story had promised a different sort of end. Nonetheless, Marybeth, Hollister and Jane is a great read, and I will certainly be reading more from this author.

Marybeth, Hollister and Jane by Vera Jane Cook. Chatter Creek Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Manasi Patil is a young author with a passion for writing.

Guest Post by Amy Ballard

Which is more important, the clan or the individual? In Jean Auel’s 500-page series opener, Cro-Magnon Ayla navigates the customs of her adoptive Neanderthal people while pondering what it means that she is “Other.” To assimilate, she must comply with clan rules with which she disagrees. Sometimes she chooses defiance. When her practice of hunting with a sling (a man’s privilege) is discovered, she is placed under a death curse. Ayla isolates in a secret cave, an apt metaphor for the forced solitudes of today’s coronavirus pandemic. As clan political dynamics shift, she must determine whether she can live under the rule of a leader who, despite her valued status as a medicine woman, systematically abuses her.

Since its publication in 1980, the novel and its five sequels in the Earth’s Children series have generated a body of criticism, favorable and unfavorable, around its historicity, feminism, and treatment of race, among other topics. For the quarantined in 2020, though, The Clan of the Cave Bear does what it emphatically must: transport the reader to another world.

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. Penguin Random House, June 2002.

Reviewer bio: Amy Ballard writes and teaches in southern Idaho. Her fiction has appeared in Barely South Review and elsewhere. Find Amy at www.amyballard.com.

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Guest Post by Jacqueline Williams

Given to me as a birthday gift, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a manifesto on shared solitude and the different ways in which we try to overcome grief. One of the intriguing things about the book is the author’s choice to leave the narrator unnamed along with most of the characters. However, at no point does that choice prove as an obstacle to the reading experience; instead, it renders visible particular details about the personality of the characters thereby allowing the reader to connect more deeply with them.

The book is a fairly easy read about the narrator’s journey of simultaneously losing and gaining someone and the idea of collective grief. As literary fiction, the book is peppered with trivia on various literary writers such as Adrienne Rich, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka among many others. The characters too draw from the similar flavor of what it means to be a writer and the conflicts attached to the profession of writing.

My favorite part of the book is the bond shared between the narrator and Apollo the Great Dane. Nunez’s take on the human-dog relationship is unlike any other. She is spot-on in her representation of the contemporary nature of company that of being alone, together. She writes, “What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and greet each other?”

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books, February 2019.

Reviewer bio: My name is Jacqueline Williams and I’m currently pursuing M.A in English. My field of interests includes Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Medical Humanities.

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Guest Post by Kristín M Hreinsdóttir

The End of the Ocean is a novel by Maja Lunde who is a Norwegian author. I started to read this book because it was due to be the next book to read in my book club. When I started reading, I was not sure what I was going to find. I had not at that point read something written by Maja Lunde and was not sure I was going to like it—before my reading, I was told it was about some environmental tragedy and also set in the future. Maybe it is my inner fear or some underlying knowledge about a tragedy like that which makes me dislike the subject, as well as my long-lasting dislike for books or stories set in the future. Why don’t I like stories like that? It is because I think it can be so often overdramatic and superficial and not real. Maja Lunde does the opposite and did hold my attention from beginning to almost the end.

Yes, it is about an environmental tragedy in the future, but it can also be in our time when the water is beginning to be the most important thing, though most of us are not willing to accept that. The novel is also about how the individual handles crises and difficult times, and is a protest against our greedy action against nature. Greed is something we have seriously to think about.

I liked how the book is written but sometimes it lacked flow, but it did not spoil the story so much. The characters are interesting and so well set up that you start to have some strong opinion on them, growing to like or dislike them very much. The weakest part of the story is the end; it almost ended so suddenly that the reader gets the feeling that there is something missing. You are left wanting to know what happens next. But that is maybe a plus that you start to wonder about the end and make your own.

The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde. HarperVia, January 2020.

Reviewer bio: My name is Kristín M Hreinsdóttir. I live in Iceland and have always like books and literature. I hold B.Ed. in information technology and media and an MA in museum study.

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Guest Post by Nick D’Onofrio

The whole Covid-19 pandemic got me into reading World War Z by Max Brooks. Published in 2007, the novel follows characters around the world as they struggle to survive a zombie outbreak that overtakes the globe. It takes place before, during, and after the zombie outbreak.

The narrator interviews a new survivor from a different part of the world for each chapter. Some chapters can be two pages long, while others can be twenty pages depending on what is being covered. From clearing the catacombs beneath Paris to managing satellites in space, the novel describes interesting scenarios that I would have never thought of when dealing with the undead.

All this being said, it does have a fair share of gore, which is expected in the zombie genre. So it is not for the faint of heart. What really drew me into picking up World War Z were the parallels people online were pointing out between the book and what has happened with the coronavirus. In the novel, the zombie outbreak starts in China and the government there tries to cover it up but it spreads. The United States is overconfident in its ability to contain the threat and promotes a fake drug, Phalanx, which supposedly cures the new disease. I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil too much.

I bought both the book itself and the audiobook. I follow along as it is being read, because that is how I absorb the information best due to my dyslexia. Even the audiobook has a different voice actor for each chapter. There were even some voices I recognized such as Nathan Fillion, Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, and Martin Scorsese. However, I noticed the audiobook did have a few paragraphs and chapters missing in the beginning but that didn’t bother me that much.

World War Z by Max Brooks. Penguin Random House, October 2007.

Reviewer bio: I grew up in South Carolina but have lived in Switzerland. My traveling experiences have sparked my creativity and inspired me to write.

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Guest Post by Gerty Haas

In my several decades of reading, I have never encountered the likes of Zero Mirrors.

The narrator is a sentient dress worn by the main character, a woman living in a city of boredom. Her companion is a kidult: an adult who had his body modified so he’s the size of a child, because that’s the only time of his life when he was truly happy. The dress is a WAD (Wearable Assistive Data-integrator) worn by Melony, who is a Sashayer in EasyLiving City (not a dancer, because dancing is illegal). Her dearest friend is Robben, the original pilot of the Tree, the area’s greatest building and a grounded spaceship.

Abetted by her companions, Melony’s goal is to sashay through time to save her land from a Plant Plague arriving from the future. Along with being thoughtful and hilarious, this time travel story deals with gender identity, ageism, and family leadership. A key theme is the nature of human movement, from dancing to fleeing to slipping through time.

I’m not going to delineate the story except to say it has three endings: past, present, and future. I’m not able to tell you how often I had to stop reading because the book was making my brain rattle from astonishment or my stomach churn from hilarity or my eyes tear from a poignancy beyond the reality we’re stuck with. A word I hate to see in the description of any artwork is “visionary,” but the word is appropriate here. H. C. Turk has a vision of the future that makes our present seem insubstantial and ignorant, a timeframe that should be left behind. With this book, the reader can abandon that mediocrity for an enthralling experience beyond the norm, exactly equal to the book’s unique, stylish energy.

“You can’t imagine how heartsick you can be when you don’t have a heart.”

Zero Mirrors by H. C. Turk. September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Recently retired from the construction industry, Gerty Haas is an avid reader and art lover living in Florida, which thankfully is not part of The South.

Guest Post by Judith Pratt

Susanna Clarke’s new novel is much shorter than her wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but even more challenging to read. It’s completely worth the trouble. Some novels I give away, but some are keepers. This is a keeper.

The man writing the story lives in a huge House of Halls, Vestibules, and Staircases. The House provides him with everything he needs—fish from the Tides that sweep the House, seaweed for food and fuel, and the Kindness of the many Statues that fill the House.

He writes daily journals in these capital letters, and creates directories of the entries. He feels blessed by the beauty of the House. The man knows only one human, whom he calls The Other. The Other has named him Piranesi, but the man knows that is not his name.

Once you have these basics, things begin to seem strange. Piranesi lives like an early tribal person, but analyzes things like a scholar. How would this Piranesi know that some statues are minotaurs? Why does he know what a crisp packet is? The book wasn’t making sense. For a chapter or two, I found that intriguing, but frustrating.

Don’t give up. The answers are more fantastical than the questions. And the answers create more questions. Would you rather be along in a world of mysterious beauty, or live an ordinary life with family and friends? How can we learn to see the beauty and magic in the world? What does it mean to be lost?

In retrospect, I’m glad that I knew nothing about this novel when I began to read it. I suggest you ignore the reviews—some of which are beautifully written—and go on the adventure as alone as Piranesi.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Bloomsbury Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Judith Pratt has acted, directed, and taught theatre. Her plays have been produced internationally. Her novel, Siljeea Magic, was published in 2019. She lives in Ithaca, NY with a husband and three cockatiels.

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Guest Post by Claudia Gollini

The Shunned House falls into the supernatural and folk genres. It is a horror fiction novelette by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in October 1924 and first published in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft links, at the story’s beginning, the tale to his idol Edgar Allan Poe. The unnamed narrator finds it ironic that during Edgar Allan Poe’s Providence sojourn, the master of the macabre many times passed a certain house on Benefit Street without recognizing the site of real horrors.

The Shunned House is a house on Benefit Street where a large number of people passed away. With the amount of fungus present in the house, it was declared to simply have “unhealthy” conditions. At worst, the house was deemed “unlucky.” No one suspected anything supernatural was going on.

However, the narrator’s uncle, physician and antiquarian Elihu Whipple, has a shivery fascination for the house. The house was built in 1763 by William Harris. Shortly after the Harrises moved in, his wife Rhoby delivered a stillborn son. For the next 150 years, no child would be born alive in the house. Once the narrator learns of his uncle’s suspicions, they decide to investigate the house.

The story’s narrator suspects that the family is connected to Jacques Roulet of Caude, who was condemned to death for lycanthropy in 1598 before being confined to an asylum.

Jacques Roulet was a real person, whom Lovecraft had read about in John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers. “The family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity—dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror.”

The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, still standing at 135 Benefit Street and the novelette carries the perfect Halloween mood.

The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft.

Reviewer bio: Claudia Gollini is a makeup artist, fashion/beauty blogger and journalist, editor and writer, and body painter of events and TV shows.

Guest Post by Preksha Bothra

“Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.”

There were a lot of oh-I-wanna-read-this-again moments in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Nothing, literally nothing, in this book went the way I expected. A couple of times I was completely surprised with what happened. I didn’t even fully get it until I read the novel twice. Not many books have had that effect.

This book will definitely not bore you, because it’s never slow. The chapters skip from one husband to another quickly but without leaving any important details behind. The only one time that I didn’t like what I was reading was somewhere in the middle of the book, where I became a little tired with Evelyn and her marriages, but that is my only complaint. Highly recommended.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Washington Square Press, May 2018.

Reviewer bio: Find Preksha Bothra at on Instagram.

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Guest Post by Hilary King

I’ve been on a reading tear lately, thanks to the pandemic plus a heat wave and wildfire smoke. So what is the best thing to read in what feels like an apocalypse? How about a spooky Gothic novel? As a reader, I’ll admit I have a sweet tooth. Mysteries are my book dessert, the reading I end the day with, and a Gothic novel with its hints of fantasy, magical realism, and menace is the ultimate decadent dessert.

Daisy Johnson’s new novel, Sisters, was a delightful way to spend a 108-degree day. Two teenage sisters, named July and September, escape to a crumbling cottage on the coast of England to recover from Events. What were those Events is the heart of the mystery.  Hints are dropped, the past is visited, nature is wild, and there’s even a mother who takes to her bed. What’s real and what’s not is always the question a Gothic novel asks, and never wants to answer.

What’s fresh about Sisters is how it feels timeless yet doesn’t fear the tacky conveniences of modern life. When is this happening, I wondered at the beginning of the book, so classic were the scenes and characters. But Daisy Johnson weaves in cell phones, the internet, and chat rooms, and gives them a twist. The sisters do some haunting of their own on the World Wide Web.

If you need to spend a day away but can’t get out, let Sisters take you away.

Sisters by Daisy Johnson. Riverhead Books, August 2020.

Reviewer bio: Hilary King is a poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, where she is reading and writing out the pandemic and wildfires.

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Guest Post by Samantha Kolber

At its core, Fruit Rot by James R. Gapinski is a sweet story. Not sweet like saccharine, or Hallmark, but sweet like the meager couple in the book, with their ailments and traumas, artistic talents and impoverished lodgings; sweet like fairytales read aloud next to a hearth at bedtime; and sweet like love and the magic of imagination.

The story begins with a narrator, one half of a couple, telling the reader, “Lacey and I need money.” He tells us Lacey is depressed, with a history of abuse from her father, and since they can’t afford health insurance, she relies on St. John’s Wort from Walgreens. “It doesn’t work,” says our narrator. “She says she needs real drugs, but that takes real money.”

Gapinski is a sparse writer, yet spares no details. I love the bottle of herbs from Walgreens. I love how the narrator shuffles around the hole in the stairs. Though I don’t read comics, so may have missed some comic book references, I still love the descriptions of the narrator’s sketches and graphic artmaking endeavors. And I love the description of the mystery tree that pops up in their “barren dirt patch” of a front yard, written in the narrator’s characteristic, comic-obsessed voice:

This mystery tree is huge, and the bark is a perfect Silver Age green, like it jumped right off the Incredible Hulk #2 cover. The tree has sparkly leaves and golden fruit sprouting from its nuclear green arms. The fruit is round like an orange, but shiny like a ripe apple.

What would you do if a golden goose fell in your lap? Would you capitalize on it, even if your intentions were pure? Pure as healing the sick, mending the broken, making whole what once was? Would you play God? Would they call you a hero? Our narrator wrestles with this and so much more as the tree—their golden goose—and its magical powers permeate the couple’s lives in unimagined, unintended, and unwanted ways.

This story will stay with you for a long time, and the characters are so real—with that detailed writing—that you will think of them as friends—or foes, depending on where you sit on the good versus evil scale.

Fruit Rot by James R. Gapinski. Etchings Press, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Samantha Kolber (samanthakolber.com) is a chapbook-loving poet and editor living in Montpelier, Vermont. Her own debut chapbook “Birth of a Daughter,” poems that reconcile an artistic self with motherhood, is out now with Kelsay Books.

Guest Post by Murali Kamma

I haven’t picked up The Plague or A Journal of the Plague Year, let alone a contemporary dystopian novel. What I wanted in the Year of Covid was escapism. But having found comfort (and laughter) in the timeless fiction of the peerless P. G. Wodehouse, I was ready to move on. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice caught my attention as I scanned my bookshelves.

All I knew about Mann’s Death in Venice—and Visconti’s film—was that a distinguished artist (Gustav Mahler?) is vacationing in Venice when he becomes infatuated with a boy visiting from another country. Soon I was swept away, and Michael Henry Heim’s brilliant English translation played no small role in providing another kind of escape from 2020. Not for long, though. I almost fell off my chair when I realized why the locals in early twentieth-century Venice don’t want to tell the protagonist (an author, not a composer) that their city is in trouble.

There’s an epidemic—a cholera epidemic, in fact, “emanating from the humid marshes of the Ganges Delta”—and though people are dying in Venice, officials are in denial. Even as the news spreads, causing increasing anxiety in the malodorous city, Venetians hide the facts from the tourists. It’s the oppressive heat, the sirocco—and there’s nothing to worry about, they say, their lies making the city as menacing as the disease threatening it. The author finally hears the truth from another foreigner, but it’s too late.

“The epidemic even seemed to be undergoing a revitalization; the tenacity and fertility of its pathogens appeared to have redoubled,” Mann writes.

More than a century has passed since Mann wrote this gripping novel. Sadly, we humans continue to make the same mistakes, and as this literary classic reminds us, some blind spots may never disappear.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. 1983.

Reviewer bio: Murali Kamma’s Not Native: Short Stories of Immigrant Life in an In-Between World won the 2020 Bronze Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for multicultural fiction. 

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Guest Post by Ed Davis

Donna Meredith’s new novel Buried Seeds is a timely novel of activism, about, among other things, the West Virginia teachers’ strike of 2018 that electrified the nation. Buried Seeds is actually two novels beneath one cover, alternating between Clarksburg, WV teacher Angie Fisher’s strike narrative and Angie’s great-great-grandmother Rosella Krause’s early twentieth century activism in the struggle for women’s right to vote.

Angie Fisher is an excellent Everyteacher, fiftyish, funny and self-deprecating. When Angie accepts leadership of the American Federation of Teachers in her district, she sets herself up for an agonizing dilemma: how can she lead a strike when her unemployed husband Dewey is applying for work with the local FBI, likely to frown on such law-breaking? After Angie and Dewey are forced to move in with her parents, daughter Trish and her new baby soon follow—and if the old farmhouse weren’t already over-crowded, sister MacKenzie winds up there, too, when she leaves her husband.

Alongside Angie’s anguished life, Meredith shoots us into the early 1900s, where we meet her great-great grandmother Rosella, who has endured similar suffering. Rosella, an artist, is now in San Francisco, along with her fourteen-year-old daughter. The girl’s diary describes her mother’s life as an activist tirelessly working for women to earn the right to vote in 1907. We also get Rosella’s first-person account of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906, providing one of the novel’s most dramatic set pieces.

A seasoned writer of mysteries, Meredith doesn’t ignore the need for suspense to keep readers tantalized in this well-researched novel containing many shocks and surprises with great historical themes.

Buried Seeds by Donna Meredith. Wild Women Writers, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Ed Davis’s Time of the Light, a poetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His latest novel, The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014), won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010.