“I believe that in order to survive, I betrayed everybody who was ever dear to me, including myself.” I’m a fan of Katya Apekina, I devoured The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, from the title to the entire story and am delighted that her latest is a completely different tale. Mother Doll is an interesting read that is hard for me to categorize. Historical fiction, paranormal, family trauma, revolutions, abandonment, unwanted pregnancy, flailing relationships, dead that cannot move on- there is a lot to sink into. Zhenia’s beloved grandmother Vera is dying, losing cognitive ability, a fac ..read more

You collapse into yourself, until you turn into a story that’s been told so many times it’s no longer recognizable. This collection begins with steps for eating your own heart; the human organ that breaks against the world and requires rejuvenation often. It’s a clever piece. In Green Frog a mother uses a Korean fairy tale to express how well she knows her daughter. Grief drives the story as the narrator dropped out of college to care for her dying mother, and maybe to hide from her own life. Is she truly like the fictional green frog? Will the similarities be enough to convince her to change ..read more

  He was the first who called Paloma “Pájaro,” he called her a black bird back when she was still Gaspar, and anyone who didn’t like Muxes would follow her around, calling her Pájaro. The cover is amazing, and it makes more sense artistically as I understood about Paloma and the word pájaro. It’s a cruelty, but people always find a way to puff themselves up by bullying others. Is Gaspar/Paloma truly a curse, born of a hex? Feliciana knows for a fact that Paloma is the only one in the family bloodline who carried the curandero blood, on her father’s side. Paloma has shared that inheritance ..read more

For Samuel, that painful pilgrimage was inevitable. His roots had been amputated the moment he’d set foot on the Kindertransport train. This novel is about two immigrant children growing up decades apart undergoing the trauma of upheaval from country, home, and family. The tale begins in 1938 with the Adlers living in Vienna as the Nazi’s are becoming more powerful and antisemitic policies are in effect. Rudolph, a family physician, and his wife Rachel, who teaches music to supplement their income, try their best to suppress their fears, to keep Samuel, their five-year-old son from understandi ..read more

Life isn’t geometry, life-changing moments don’t happen predictably, at the bottom of a linear slope. Tragedies and accidents are tragic and accidental precisely because of their unexpectedness. This book is beautiful, it grabbed my heart and wouldn’t stop crushing it. When fifty-year-old Adam Parson, father of a biracial Korean family living in Virginia goes missing on a ‘typical’ Tuesday morning, only one person holds the answers. That person is the youngest child in the family, fourteen-year-old Eugene, born with Autism and the genetic disorder Angelman syndrome, but a challenge to the case ..read more

Yet they thought their innocence would keep them safe. Foolish are the young. Cheyenne Ashby has returned to her hometown of Blue Cliff, Virginia, leaving the safety of her tiny Roanoke apartment behind. It was survival that made her flee to begin with, but the Police Chief is adamant that his hands are full ever since a little boy has gone missing and he cannot divide his time by dealing with her mother Connie, who has always been a force to be reckoned with. Amidst drying herbs and superstitions, her once fierce, strong mother looks more like a shriveled madwoman. Shamed for staying away for ..read more

Alejandra didn’t know how to articulate that she would rather die than experience another day in her current existence, as herself. Her soul felt so dim, the slightest shift of wind or breath might snuff it out. She was seeing things and didn’t know if anyone would believe her. Alejandra is the mother of three children, her life feels like it has shrunk, her soul withered. She wants it all to end, and a shadowy form is haunting her, whispering it can help her do just that. Is she on the edge of a breakdown or has something sinister risen from the depths of her bloodline? She scolds herself; it ..read more

This was visiting my tiny midwestern hometown to meet my very impossible-to-impress, very Chinese parents, whom I had struggled to get along with my entire life. What if he met them and saw what they were like- and what Hickory Grove was like- and then never saw me the same way again? Audrey Zhou grew up with the high expectations of her ‘very’ Chinese immigrant parents, exacerbated by coming of age in Hickory Grove, a ‘blot of the map’ kind of place. She never felt fully understood and returning now, after an 8-year absence with her fiancé, New York native Ben in tow, she is afraid of th ..read more

Even after forty-one years here, she wore American citizenship with discomfort, like a pair of shoes half a size too small. The shoes could fit, yes, but every step reminded her she should not be wearing them, that she should be wearing something else. E.M. Tran confronts erasure, of one’s family history and culture. Her parents left behind a Vietnam that no longer exists, surviving through the dangerous collapse of Saigon. E.M. Tran grew up with parents who didn’t reveal much about their past before coming to America and the silence that they held about the subject came from a place of pain ..read more

Nothing comes we haven’t conjured or called, one way or another. I have been trying to have a more varied diet of fiction therefore I was fast to dig into this novel based on culture and folk magick (yes, the k is intentional). It seems I keep picking up stories that are about witches and water lately, maybe because it’s October. Often, these tales are about women who must find strength, particularly reaching back into traumatic pasts. For Eva, water turned toxic when her best friend Karma drowned, haunting her forever in the swamps of her memory. Her mind isn’t reliable, and just when she get ..read more