If you lost a loved one and found yourself unable to manage your profound sadness and sense of loss, would you choose to sleep it away? Could you sleep your grief away? Nikki Erlick poses these are the questions in her newest, speculative work, The Poppy Fields. Our tale begins in the Kansas City airport.…
'The scent of fresh-baked bread and roasted meat drifts toward her, and hunger blooms, sudden and bright, but when she moves toward the table, Andrés catches her wrist. "Leave it," he says again, and María knows, by the tone of his voice, that his hunger has a different shape.' V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in…
Solvej Balle's On The Calculation of Volume, Book I is a hard sell, to put it mildly. First, the title sounds like a geometry textbook. Second, it’s a projected seven-book series. Third, it’s translated from its original Danish. You would be forgiven for thinking that I was recommending you a sleep aid. In truth, this…
“...the cat knew, because it’s the impermanence of life that makes it perfect.” Family, redemption, and cats are all subjects that draw me to a book. Annie Harnett beautifully explores these topics in her quirky, heart-tugging novel, The Road to Tender Hearts. From the opening pages when Pancakes, the cat, not only predicts…
The Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe in Wisconsin is a microcosm of small-town politics with the added complications of being a sovereign nation. “What happens when the rez dog finally catches up with the car” is a question our main character, Mitch, asks himself a few times – with varying…
"I could not hear even one of them over the screaming wind. But that is a sight that will never leave me. The waves of earth crashing over the prairie. The sky exhaling all her birds." Karen Russell, The Antidote, pg. 23 Uz, Nebraska, is full of ghosts; ghosts of regrets, of accidents, of mistakes…
Families are the compass that guide us.” Brad Henry Fun for the Whole Family by Jennifer E. Smith is a family drama filled with laughs, heart, and road trips. The Endicotts, by anyone’s measure, are extraordinary (emphasis on the extra). Jude is an Oscar-nominated actor; Roddy is an elite athlete, and Connor is a…
Rumors swirl around the abandoned orphanage, Coram House. It sits perched on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont – and it’s purported to be haunted by the ghosts of residents who may have been abused or killed by the very people who were there to care for them. Ghost-writer Alex Kelley comes to this…
"I've seen a body taken by the sea, and the state of it will rid a man of any hubris. We are soberingly weak under its hammer. This woman, delivered by such a sea--one more powerful than most--is clinging on with a bewildering defiance." Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore, pg. 5 The sea is many…
Laugh all you want, but I like a nice laundromat, especially at night. They’re infinitely more pleasant than that creepy laundry room in the basement of your college dorm. They’re cozy, even when they’re brightly lit. They smell nice. The rumble of the machines is soothing. In short, laundromats are charming. Yeonnam Dong’s Smiley Laundromat…
