Guest Post by Chuck Augello

The stories in Death, Desire, and Other Destinations, a new collection by Tara Isabel Zambrano, depict a vivid landscape of sensual experiences ranging from a widowed mother’s kitchen to the surface of the moon. A desire for escape is a recurrent theme. In “Lunar Love,” a couple flies to the moon to exchange their vows. “We have been excited about doing something that everyone we know does these days since they find nothing exciting about the earth anymore,” the narrator says, and it’s a telling line. Daily life, with its expectations and social conventions, no longer excites. Zambrano’s characters seek their pleasures elsewhere, often in the body.

One of the strongest stories is “Up and Up,” in which a daughter interrupts her widowed mother during an intimate moment with another man. While the daughter is shaken, the mother is nonchalant and unapologetic. “It’s a blessing to be alive with no one to answer to,” the mother says, dismissing her daughter’s questions about the neighbors and the memory of the recently departed husband/father. The mother’s new lover, Santosh, soon reappears holding three mangoes, a perfect detail, the succulent fruit signaling the sensual tour-de-force to come. Santosh stands behind the narrator, and a scene that could have been uncomfortable or even creepy becomes a passionate delight, Zambrano surprising the reader with what happens between the characters, her language lush and evocative, the daughter’s “pores opening onto wonder, previous half-baked climaxes and affairs slipping out, my body poured into a new cast.” It’s a moment charged with desire, sexy and emotionally revealing.

The stories in Death, Desire, and Other Destinations are imaginative and unique, Zambrano’s collection the perfect destination for readers looking to escape the doldrums of quarantine and sheltering in place.

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Death, Desire, and Other Destinations by Tara Isabel Zambrano. Okay Donkey, September 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.

Guest Post by Claudia Gollini

Animal Farm by George Orwell was first published in 1945 and will be celebrating its seventieth birthday next year.

One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin.

Parents need to know that Animal Farm is a biting satire of totalitarianism, written in the wake of World War II and published amid the rise of Soviet Russia. Although it tells a fairly simple story of barnyard animals trying to manage themselves after rebelling against their masters, the novel demonstrates how easily good intentions can be subverted into tyranny.

The fable is alive with brilliant touches. At first the victorious pigs write out a set of revolutionary rules, the seventh and most important is of which is “All animals are equal.” It was a brilliant idea to have the clever pigs simplify this for the dimmer animals (the sheep, hens and ducks) into the motto “Four legs good, two legs bad.” But it was a real stroke of genius for Orwell to later have the pigs amending these rules, most notoriously amending rule seven to become “All animals are equal—but some are more equal than others.“ This says something so profound about human beings and our laws and rules that it can be applied anywhere where laws are corrupted and distorted by the powerful.

The book seems relatively simple on the first read but there are several layers of complexity to represent the Soviet government. The novel contains a fair amount of satire and humor, which personally is one of the main reasons why I recommend reading it.

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Animal Farm by George Orwell. 1945.

Reviewer bio: Claudia Gollini is a makeup artist, fashion/beauty blogger and journalist, editor and writer, and body painter of events and TV show (Make-up Deborah-Gucci and Castrocaro TV talent show, body painter to Art gallery ‘Spazio l’altrove’ and TV show Sky 869 Village festival and another fairs & exhibition on Italy).

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

Perhaps you need a little bit of an escape from reality at the moment. This is a good book to do that. The Princess and the Goblin is a classic fantasy novel written by Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824-1905). It first appeared in 1871, before being published in book form in 1872.

The Princess and the Goblin tells the story of Princess Irene who is rescued from a goblin attack by a miner boy called Curdie. The book tells of a battle between goblins who live underground and humans. With her new friend Curdie and some magical help, Princess Irene must find a way to defeat the goblins and save her father’s kingdom.

Despite being written in the Victorian era, the language in this book is very easy to follow. You can’t tell that it was written almost 150 years ago. This was a very enjoyable book. It’s the type of book where illustrations are not necessary because it’s better to use your own imagination to picture all the goblins and other creatures. This classic fantasy novel inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. George MacDonald wrote at least 50 books, but most of his work is not remembered now, which is a shame. George MacDonald deserves more recognition.

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The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. 1872.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/.

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Guest Post by Christopher Linforth

In her debut collection Collective Gravities, Chloe N. Clark offers a dose of the fantastic into the ordinary, and sometimes humdrum, lives of her characters. Twenty-five aesthetically similar stories make up the book, which dilutes the power of the collection as a whole, but shows the range of Clark’s fascination with parallel universes, zombies, and the breakdown of relationships. The strongest stories reveal Clark’s gift as a storyteller and as a purveyor of the weird.

In the collection’s opener “Balancing Beams,” the astronaut narrator Ava struggles with an unknown, debilitating ailment in a futuristic America. In a beautifully written flash of insight, she tells us:

I couldn’t speak for a moment. The weight of words on my tongue. In the Out, there had been so many times I fumbled words, slurred them. They don’t tell you that zero-gravity even affects your tongue. Your mouth can feel so heavy when you try to say something.

Other stories seem to take their cues from B-movies and horror stories and the world of science fiction. Throughout the collection, Clark remakes these historically male-dominated forms to center her stories on women and the deleterious effects of culture on their bodies.

Clark’s debut is a mixed collection, yet it shines so brightly in spots that it’s clear she is destined to wow us with her next book.

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Collective Gravities by Chloe N. Clark, Word West Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014).

Buy this book at our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Laura Kincaid

Lacrimore by SJ Costello explores our relationship with grief and tragedy through a speculative lens. The gothic novel draws readers in with beautifully dark prose that builds a haunting world. While the story unfolds slowly, the flawed characters and mystery compel readers to turn the page.

The novel opens with Sivre Sen, a faithless medium journeying across a stormy lake to a small island. There sits Lacrimore, a crumbling labyrinth of a mansion shrouded by legends. During a vision, a ghost called her there to complete his funeral rites. In Costello’s Victorian-inspired world, mediums are revered and influential, especially after a recent epidemic. However, Sen has never before experienced visions of the dead. After arriving, she meets the dead man (who is still alive), a staff trapped by circumstances, and a dubious doctor in exile. As Sivre searches the house for answers and closure, she discovers dark secrets in its rotting walls. The book is like Lacrimore itself—a quiet, mysterious tale standing alone in a much larger world.

Though in development before the COVID-19, the novel was a poignant and refreshing take on pandemic literature. Instead of focusing on dystopian survival, the story centers on what happens after survival. How do we process our grief? How do we reflect on the societal failures that came to light? What change is required to be better? Lacrimore doesn’t claim to answers all these questions. It remains a spooky story that is fun to read, but opens the door for those who want to ponder its deeper themes.

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Lacrimore by SJ Costello. June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Laura Kincaid is a writer, editor, and lover of the fantastical. Find her work in Twist in Time and at laurakincaidmusings.wordpress.com.