At once troubling and lovely, infuriating and breathtaking, Claire Fuller’s SWIMMING LESSONS is a triumph in literary fiction—and one that demands you have your next read ready if you want any chance to cope.… Read More We’ll Never Know What We’re Leaving Behind: Reading SWIMMING LESSONS by Claire Fuller
Here is a link to my review of K. Arsenault Rivera’s THE PHOENIX EMPRESS, available now over at BookPage.… Read More Book Review Up at BookPage!
Readers, let me explain first that I am not one to contest reviews, whether overly positive, unconstructively negative, or anything in-between. But when a review makes a claim that is societally problematic, I have to respond—not to the review as a whole, but to its thematic issues. A week ago, a review appeared for… Read More To the New York Times Book Review, Domestic Violence is Never Funny: A Response Review of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau
We all have to grow up someday. And some of us are dealt a better hand than others—some during our childhood, others later in life, and even others not at all. But we find a way to persist, to perceive the world and how to function within its barriers. We learn how to love,… Read More The Two (or More?) Sides of Friendship: Reading Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona del Mar
Even when you read regularly, it takes time to find something truly great; but every once in a while, there will be a book, a poem, a story, that truly turns you on your heel, holds you in place, and keeps you loving, recommending and discussing that piece for months. Though first described to… Read More The Surrealist and Bodily Nature of Grief: Reading Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s The Art of Floating
After reading Désirée Zamorano’s The Amado Women, many readers have claimed to have found a new story with women who are more properly, culturally portrayed, an interesting story which offers new commentary on the larger themes of love and loss, family and finding strength in numbers and learning from our past. As I begin… Read More A Unique Design of Women and Culture: Reading Desiree Zamorano’s The Amado Women
