Reviews

Melissa Febos’ Girlhood weaves together autobiographical essays, interviews, Greek mythology, and media research to form an intricate tapestry of personal experiences that reflect a greater societal impact. Febos relentlessly interrogates the various truths of growing up in a society that prioritizes the feelings, opinions, and power of men at girls’ expense.

Cherie Jones’s debut novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House interconnects various storylines to explore the heart-breaking and nail-biting journey of four individuals whose lives are forever changed by a burglary gone awry.

In “What It’s Like (Being a Brown Girl),” Cardona writes about “words too hard to pull from your throat,” yet she pulls the words out over and over again in this astounding collection of poems. Active in uplifting voices of the Latinx community, Cardona paves the way for Latinx writers with What Remains.

Black Buck is a novel that is immensely readable while critically engaging with questions that continue to define society’s relationship with race. As it inhabits a literary space that increasingly analyzes the tech world, in line with other current literary hits such as New Waves by Kevin Nguyen or Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte, it consistently underpins its story with a close point-of-view that exposes the implicit biases of said world.

Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz breaks all the rules with the breaks of her lines in Postcolonial Love Poem. In this collection, Diaz speaks through the native tongues of bodies groups that have been erased at the hand of the colonizer. She speaks of land, of rivers, of bodies, of love, and of the pain of a nation fighting to exist again.

The opening song, “Circle Of Life,” spread its unique mood to the entire The Lion King soundtrack, which became a childhood anthem for a generation of millennials. It was that authentic African voice, and that harmonious act by the South African choir and Carmen Twillie, that grabbed the audience’s attention. Their innovative performance evokes such deep emotion that it is clear why The Lion King has one of the most memorable opening scenes in animated cinema.

Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson’s Monster, She Wrote is an enchanting and necessary exploration of how horror has evolved since the seventeenth century—a genre that has made a fierce, subversive comeback in today’s publishing landscape. And women are at the center of it all.

If fiction is “the lie through which we tell the truth,” as Albert Camus said, then Siri Hustvedt’s fiction relays the truth that memory is more than just unreliable—it’s invented.