Reviews

Reviews,
Flashback and Resilience in Cherie Jones’s How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
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.

Reviews,
Chicanismo and Longing: Claudia Delfina Cardona’s What Remains
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.

Reviews,
Rooting for Buck: Mateo Askaripour’s Adventure into Race, Capitalism, and Family in America
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.

Reviews,
Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem Speaks of Rivers and Bodies
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.

Reviews,
The Sound of The Lion King
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.

Reviews,
The Future of Dark Fiction is Bright: On “Monster, She Wrote” by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson
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.

Reviews,
On Memory, Patriarchy, and Gender in Siri Hustvedt’s Fiction
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.

Reviews,
“The Pull of the Great Wrong World”: On Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Verge”
In Verge’s stories, Yuknavitch marshals her considerable talents and well-documented experiences—as a survivor of abuse, a recovering addict, and a self-proclaimed “misfit” (her pride in this appellation forming the basis of a famous TED talk and book, The Misfit’s Manifesto)—in service of illuminating the lives of women on the margins.