Guest Post by Shaylee Morris.

The Last Story of Mina Lee is a beautiful narrative that depicts the timeless struggles of mothers and daughters from all over the world. This story follows Margot Lee as she begins to grapple with the sudden death of her mother, whom she had grown somewhat estranged from in her early adult life. As Margot begins preparations for her mother’s funeral, previously hidden details of her mother’s life come to light as Margot begins to piece together the jarring life her mother lived before Margot’s birth and during her early childhood.

The points of view shift between Margot in the present day and her mother Mina Lee as she traveled to the United States from South Korea and creates a life for herself and Margot. This narrative creates a stunning portrait of the secret lives of both mothers and daughters and the consequences these secrets can hold. Mina and Margot’s story also display the gripping reality of immigrants within the United States and how difficult the choice to migrate and its consequences can be.

This novel is a stunning work of diversity that implores readers to consider race, gender, class and what identity truly means. The conclusion is heartwarming and will leave readers with a sense of curiosity regarding the true identity of their loved ones and the struggles that they went through to make it where they are today.

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The Last story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim. Park Row Books, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: My name is Shaylee Morris and I am a currently a university student with a passion for reading and a desire to begin my own writing.

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Guest Post by Natalie GN.

What. A. Journey. This book is a genre-bending satirical deep-dive into the consciousness stream of the United States and White America. Here, the reader is led through a series of storylines that converge before the nameless narrator, all of which begs the audience to question the pillars the USA was founded on, along with its people’s conditioning. It’s a hilariously poignant, tough-love, nudge into the deep end of the pool when you don’t know how to swim for people for whom equality and kindness are difficult concepts.

If nothing else, 2020 handed everyone a personal magnifying glass that only looks inward. The farther away from it you are, the more distorted things look. The closer you are, the clearer things appear. It’s your decision how closely you want to look through that glass. It’s hard work, so make it a little easier on yourself and read this book.

It’s also worth noting that, though this book’s audience would ideally be a very specific group of people, it was a super weird and enjoyable and read for me, a brown Latinx cis-chick reader. Something for everyone out here. Highly Recommend.

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The First Great American Novel: Where Parallel Lines Meet (A Story of Non-Sequiturs) by Mathew Serback. Atmosphere Press, January 2021.

Reviewer bio: My name is Natalie GN. Caguas born and raised, currently living the library dream in Ohio.

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Guest Post by Stephanie Katz.

The novel The End of Aphrodite by Laurette Folk follows a handful of women as they experience yearning, love, and loss in the sweeping New England oceanside. The characters move through their lives as if in a dream, and likewise Folk’s descriptive, ethereal writing makes experiencing the book feel more like dreaming than reading. Even the sadness and pain the women face is rendered beautifully in Folk’s gentle care, and themes of a Catholic, Italian-American culture adds an extra layer of depth to the story.

As the book progresses, each woman’s life wraps around them like a cocoon. Shy Samantha’s cocoon allows her to transform as she tentatively embraces her womanhood and sexuality:

“She came in with a big garbage bag with the wedding dress in it and handed it to me to put in the cedar closet downstairs. I hid there, took off my clothes and fit myself inside the regality of tulle and satin, of virgin white . . . I eventually abandoned the dress for the veil and would return several times that summer, surreptitiously, to undress and pull the tulle tightly around my skin, wrapping my entire naked body.”

Etta, the titular Aphrodite, spends most of the book struggling to attach the chrysalis of herself to lover after lover. She eventually is able to fully emerge when she embraces becoming a mother and the ramifications it brings. The End of Aphrodite is perfect for readers looking to slowly amble through a story, pausing to meander down a few subplots before making their way back to the denouement. Readers longing for more of Folk’s distinctive voice can pick up her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy, and her book of poetry and flash fiction, Totem Beasts.

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The End of Aphrodite by Laurette Folk. Bordighera Press, April 2020.

Reviewer bio: Stephanie Katz is a librarian with the Manatee County Public Library System and editor in chief of award-winning 805 Lit + Art. She was selected as a Library Journal 2020 Mover & Shaker for her work with 805. She is the author of Libraries Publish: How to Start a Magazine, Small Press, Blog, and More. She blogs about creative library publishing at LiteraryLibraries.org.

Guest Post by Raymond Abbott.

Recently I came upon a paperback copy of the novel 1984, George Orwell’s classic. I first read it easily fifty years ago. I remembered well the overall theme, a fictional account of the totalitarian government that existed in England in 1984, and well before that date.  What I didn’t recall were the particulars, the details, the events, the various characters, even the main character’s name, Winston.

I found the story engrossing for the first 100 pages, almost what one might call a page turner. Then the narrative slowed way down, almost stopped,  at least for me. This happened with the introduction of Julia, Winston’s lover.

What I noticed this time through is just how hostile Orwell is toward women. I quote a line (and there are others). He writes, “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nose out of unorthodoxy.”

Hard to imagine getting such words past today’s gatekeepers, many of whom are women. I say lucky for Orwell that he published when he did, late forties, or there might not exist a 1984 novel for me to reread.

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1984 by George Orwell. Secker & Warburg, June 1949.

Reviewer bio: Raymond Abbott lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Once in a while his prose is published. He used to be a social worker working among severely mentally disabled adults in Louisville.

Guest Post by Judith Chalmer.

The Inland Sea by Sam Clark is wonderful, full of interesting people left to live out their own mysteries, with rich and beautiful descriptions of the lake and communities on both sides. Evidence of intelligence and emotional complexity is everywhere in the characters Clark has created for his unusually constructed and sophisticated mystery.

An assortment of re-built boats skim across a lake bordered by forest and farm, carrying readers between islands, slamming waves, treacherous rocks, and the unpredictable currents of human capability. Designed with a craftsperson’s care and a philosopher’s depth, The Inland Sea covers a lot of territory.

I finished the book in two sittings, and had to make myself stop in the middle. I can’t wait to recommend it to friends.

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The Inland Sea: A Mystery by Sam Clark. Rootstock Publishing, December 2020.

Reviewer bio: Judith Chalmer is the author of two books of poetry, Out of History’s Junk Jar, and most recently, Minnow. She lives and writes in Vermont.

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Guest Post by Jack Graham.

Paul Beatty presents a roguishly sharp addressing of current race relations within the United States within his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sellout. In his plight to put his home town of Dickens back on the map, our protagonist (whose first name we never discover) explores notions of modern-day slavery under an Obama presidency, the revival of segregation in schools whilst also acknowledging the blatant racism of Hollywood, hiring black actors simply for their sense of ‘blackness’.

Our protagonist guides us through the chapters with a lexicon that can only be appreciated by sociology graduates, documenting in the earliest pages of the narrative as to how he was a guinea pig for his father’s experiments and torture in an attempt to mimic and alter notorious psychological experiments within the parameters of an African-American lifestyle adjacent to the struggles of a black community in small-town California.

Beatty presents his audience with the complete absurdity of segregation and slave-holding. The author is willing to excite and shock his audience as a means to illustrate the everyday strains of a black community, whether that be the ejection of black communities from city maps, the use of racial slurs, or the tremendous difficulties for black children to attend mostly white schools.

I wholeheartedly recommend that people read The Sellout as means to further understand and appreciate the tribulations of a much-subjugated class to acknowledge the role of often ignored small ghetto-like communities in the path of large-scale gentrification.

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The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Picador, March 2016.

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

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Guest Post by John Cullen.

The title for this review comes from the dedication which opens Deirdre Fagan’s collection of short stories, The Grief Eater.  This collection follows up on the author’s excellent poetry collection, Have Love, but turns its attention to beautifully written explorations of characters overcome with and attempting to live with grief.

In the story “The Grief Eater,” a young woman can’t stop reading the local obituaries and attending the funerals of people she does not know, initially believing she is doing it for the good of the grieving families and eventually coming to a larger realization about herself and the nature of life. “Dressing The Part” chronicles the events of a woman attempting to deal with having lost her husband. At various points she wears her wedding dress to work and discovers a strange yet movingly fitting way of spreading her husband’s ashes. In “Rotary Dial,” a grief-stricken man begins calling people at random and asking for his wife.

The characters in these stories struggle with that most human pain of how to move on from grief and possibly find a livable space. These psychological portraits of characters at extreme crossroads will strike a deep chord in anyone who has thought about mortality or confronted loss. This is an excellent first collection of stories.

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The Grief Eater by Deirdre Fagan. Adelaide Books, 2020.

Reviewer bio: John Cullen’s poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, and The Cincinnati Review.

Guest Post by Dawn Newton.

Jessica O’Dwyer’s novel Mother Mother is not only a story featuring two mothers but also a story about two worlds—a middle-class world in the United States where parents can seek an adoption through public or private options and the world of a Guatemalan mother forced to give up a child in the aftermath of a brutal civil war.

O’Dwyer writes about these journeys from many angles, revealing the complexities and emotional nuances of the adoption process for birth mothers and adoptive parents alike. There is despair, strength, and joy in the details. The juxtaposition of the two mothers’ lives, while highlighting the differences in socioeconomic issues and personal freedom in the two worlds, also reveals the emotional intensity involved in the journey each mother faces.

Just as Saroo Brierley’s A Long Way Home focuses on an adopted child’s journey to find a birth mother while portraying impoverished families in India, Mother Mother presents the stages of the adoption process while also revealing the work to be done once the adopted child arrives—helping him settle comfortably into an American society that still struggles with “the other.” In an incident on a playground just after newly adopted Jack’s arrival, a stranger comments on the boy, comfortable in her assumption that because Jack’s skin color is different from his mother’s, he must be adopted. Julie, his new mother, realizes that she won’t always be able to protect her son from external judgment or evaluation. Like most good books, this novel teaches us about worlds we might not know or understand, helping us to expand our empathy for others.

 

(Disclaimer: This book was published by the small press publishing my own work. While I don’t know the author personally, I consulted with her by phone once on a press-related issue.)

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Mother Mother by Jessica O’Dwyer. Apprentice House, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Dawn Newton is the author of Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages. Her novel, The Remnants of Summer, is forthcoming from Apprentice House Press in 2021.

Guest Post by Katrina Thompson.

From the moment I began reading Jeff Vandermeer’s “Annihilation” I was enthralled and intrigued by the mysterious top secret location dubbed “Area-X” as well as the suspicious yet compelling cast of characters, all of which have no name and are instead known only by their occupations “The Biologist,” “The Psychologist,” “The Anthropologist,” “The Surveyor,” and “The Linguist.”

The protagonist or “biologist” also known as “Ghost Bird” by her former lover throughout the entirety of the novel, is a self-contained loner who has spent most of her life wrapped up in her curiosities with the natural world, her educational pursuits, or her rich and elusive inner life. The narrative itself is from her perspective and is told through the medium of her journal. But despite the less than traditional narrative style, the pacing of this novel is extremely engaging and left me hanging onto every word wondering what would happen next. I found no lulls or filler in the plot or dialogue. There were only white knuckled, page turning chapters and beautiful, awe-inspiring descriptions of the intoxicating terrifying realm of Area-X!

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s into the sci-fi or fantasy genres or if you’re just looking for a creepy read to finish off the month of November.

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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2014.

Reviewer bio: Dreamer by day, writer by night. My rich inner life inspires my whimsical writings.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.