Book Reviews
Explore thoughtfully curated book reviews that help you discover your next favorite read.
Light Beneath the Lids, by Jane Lightbourne | Book Review
Light Beneath the Lids (Nevada Street Press, 2025) is the second collection of poetry by London-based writer Jane Lightbourne, following Bright Dust. The poems vary in subject matter but largely tackle themes of intimacy, relationships, and the nature of memory. Lightbourne treats…
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The Sanctuary of Tomorrow, by Lyntara Choi | Book Review
The Sanctuary of Tomorrow is the kind of novella that makes you think. Set against the backdrop of Europe between the end of the First World War and the rise of fascism in the 1930s, it tells the story of Martino Griffiths,…
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Residents of the Deep, by Marianne Villanueva | Book Review
One of the more interesting books I’ve read as part of this site, Marianne Villanueva’s Residents of the Deep is a gripping yet at times unsettling collection of short fiction that moves fluidly between myth and history. It is in short a…
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Cicatrice, by Jo Boyle | Book Review
Jo Boyle’s Cicatrice: New Eyes and Brave is a dark, unflinching novel about survival. It follows Brinda Anand, who also lives under the names Malavika Lal, Melinda Burman, and most often, Mel, with occasional POV chapters ffrom Jamie. The story opens in…
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Legends of Little Canada, by Charlie Gargiulo | Book Review
Set in 1960s Lowell, Legends of Little Canada tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy thrust into poverty when his father abandons the family, forcing him and his mother to move into Little Canada. I had never heard of this place, but…
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Editor's Pick
The Players: Act 1, by Amy Sparkes | Book Review
With The Players: Act 1, Amy Sparkes transports readers to the playhouses and muddy roads of Elizabethan England. The book follows the Ticehurst Players, a ragged troupe of wandering actors whose performances teeter between theatrical triumph and humiliating disaster. As a sucker…
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Mt. Everest in Flip-Flops, by Terence Shannon | Book Review
Originally published in 2018, Terence Shannon’s Mt. Everest in Flip-Flops is a reflective, autobiographically styled but apparently completely fictional novel about the formative power of youth and memory. Set in a Catholic summer camp in 1972, the book mostly eschews conventional plot…
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The Fragments of Shadow & Sound, by Richard Risi | Book Review
Richard M. Risi’s debut The Fragments of Shadow & Sound is a poetry collection that manages to be both easy to read and daringly experimental at points. Comprising five sections, Faultlines, Reflections, Longings, Thresholds, and Ascents, its poems reflect on subjects such…
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Editor's Pick
The Colts of Midnight, by C. E. Wooldridge JR | Book Review
American writer C.E. Wooldridge Jr.’s The Colts of Midnight drops the reader right into Golterran, a continent where magic and steel clash in ways that explore old tropes in new light. This standalone entry in the Twelve Paladins series walks that tricky line between…
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Meanwhile, Here in Austin, by Cetywa Powell | Book Review
Cetywa Powell’s Meanwhile Here in Austin is not a conventional memoir, travelogue, or photography collection, but rather a layered fusion of all three. It is also a deep look into everyday life in Texas’s capital, following Powell’s move there. Structured around the…
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