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Guest Post by Lauren Mead

ST is concerned about his owner Big Jim when his eyeball falls out and lands in the grass. He should be, considering that Big Jim has just turned into a zombie thanks to a mysterious virus that travels through screens. When it becomes clear that cheering Big Jim up with his favourite beer and a bag of Cheetos isn’t going to help, ST (a domesticated crow) and Dennis (a dog) set out across the wilds of post-apocalyptic Seattle to find a cure.

On his journey, ST encounters hordes of vicious humans who are suffering from the same malady as Big Jim. He braves a deadly market (for doughnuts), the aquarium (for answers) and follows cryptic rumours of the one remaining human who can save them all. ST must set aside his fears to find a way forward in this new, and often frightening world.

I read Hollow Kingdom before COVID-19 was a phrase in my everyday life. I can remember thinking that I was glad there wasn’t some deadly virus on the loose, because gosh, wouldn’t that be awful? At the time, it kind of felt like it would be the end of the world. I’m a germaphobe, so I don’t handle sickness very well on a good day. Throw in a worldwide pandemic and you’ve got a recipe for this girl to never leave her house again. I didn’t, for awhile.

But if ST can face his fears in a zombie-infested world, I can sure as heck set foot outside. It’s funny how horror stories can have the opposite effect of real fear. Instead of making us want to hide, it makes us bolder to know that even if the worst, most terrifying thing were to happen, there would be a way forward. Horror gives us hope.

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton. Grand Central Publishing, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Lauren Mead has been published in The Danforth Review, The MacGuffin, Soliloquies and Forest for the Trees. She also writes for her blog, www.novelshrink.com.

Buy this book at our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Karabi Mitra

Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth opens on the shores of a sea lapping at the edges of the Siberian Peninsula. Two young sisters are playing on the beach. It’s a simple enough setting. The older one is trying to get the younger one to come home. You don’t yet know why, but you’re starting to feel unsettled and you can almost feel the oncoming danger. By the end of the chapter, the girls have disappeared.

The chapters that follow are not an investigation into the disappearance. Instead they are stories of various inhabitants located in and around the Kamchatka Peninsula. The disappearance of the girls hangs over each of them, but the stories are about their own lives. A new mother struggling to come to terms with staying at home and giving up her career. A mother whose child similarly disappeared three years ago. And that’s when the patterns start emerging. The complexity of relationships, the underlying beliefs and mistrust towards certain groups of people. Natives are treated in a slightly different way. There is a distrust towards the so-called new people who have migrated to the region. There are superstitions and practices. And you realize that ultimately people are the same, no matter where they are. We’re all dealing with the same issues.

The setting of Disappearing Earth makes you feel as though you’ve dipped your fingers into a faraway world. The descriptions of the volcanoes and open tundras and thermal springs and open fields add an allure to the overall story. You sometimes feel as though you really are at the end of the world. The ending is stunning, and Julia Phillips ties up at the loose ends in a way that makes you close the book with a satisfied hush.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Penguin Random House, April 2020.

Reviewer bio: Karabi Mitra is an avid reader, based in Toronto. She also enjoys writing and has been published in various literary magazines such as Litro Magazine and Volney Road Review.

Guest Post by Natasha Djordjevic

Natalie Jenner’s debut novel, The Jane Austen Society, is a delightful, insightful tribute to the author who brought us so many memorable characters. The story is set at the end of WWII in Chawton, where Jane Austen spent the last part of her life and where she wrote her final three novels. A group of unlikely people become friends and form a society that has a mutual love for Jane Austen. They want to use their love to save her home and make it a museum with items of the era she resided in.

We’re introduced to Adam Berwick, a farmer who is the character we meet first, upon meeting with a stranger looking for Austen, develops an affection of Austen’s works; Dr. Gray, who is grieving over the loss of his wife; Mimi Harrison a Hollywood actress with a soft spot for Austen; Frances Knight, a descendant of Jane Austen’s brother; Evie Snow a housemaid working at the estate and who secretly catalogs the library; Adeline Lewis, an English teacher who has experienced a series of losses; Andrew Forrester, a lawyer handling the estate’s affairs; and Yardley Sinclair, an estate sales expert of Sotheby’s in London.

With an easy pace, a well-executed plot, and its ability to explore themes of grief, loss, identity, love, this is a novel that is sure to delight both Austen fans and newcomers to the author.

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner. St. Martin’s Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: My name is Natasha Djordjevic. My favorite genre to read is Historical Fiction, especially books set in the Tudor times. You can find my blog at poetryofreading.blogspot.com.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Leah Browning

I Refuse is a novel by Per Petterson about two childhood friends. Tommy and Jim are now adults and have been estranged for many years when they unexpectedly cross paths on a bridge outside Oslo.

Per Petterson, who also grew up in Norway, is a thoughtful and moving writer. Overall, I see this book is a meditation on friendship, not only between the two main characters, but between others as well. There are several instances where a spontaneous act of kindness reverberates through another person’s day or even, in at least one case, an entire lifetime.

The book also focuses on something slipperier: the role of persistence or determination in a person’s life. One of the boys has a harsh, even brutal home life; the other has, in many ways, been luckier. Either could be destroyed by his circumstances.

At the beginning of the book, one of the men has been fishing, but it could have been either one: “As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away. I hadn’t even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars. I turned my back to the road, my frayed navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me. I’d had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mørk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.”

Ambition has pushed one of the men in a strange, sometimes cruel direction. In this time of social distancing, reading about the powerful impact of friends and family members feels especially relevant.

I Refuse by Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett). Graywolf Press, 2015.

Reviewer bio: Leah Browning edits the Apple Valley Review, which publishes short fiction, personal essays, and poetry in spring and fall issues. She occasionally blogs at https://leahbrowning.blogspot.com/.

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Guest Post by Ethan Hayes

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” These are the immortal opening lines of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel filled with so many more beautiful lines. The novel is concerning the generational story of Maconda and its founders, the family of Jose Arcadio Buendia.

I have found the novel to be filled with a wonderful whimsy that has made García Márquez famous. Every line is poetry that flows through the magical story that fills the pages. The main characters are the motley crew of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s family, who range from the dirt-eating Rebeca who wandered into the family to Jose Arcadio, the first-born son of Jose Arcadio Buendia who inherited his strength.

The novel is told in such a wonderful fairy tale style that blends magic into the storied events that plague this family and the town that they founded. One of García Márquez’s best works.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. 1967.

Reviewer bio: My name is Ethan Hayes. I am a writer from Colorado. I like to write fiction and fantasy as well as short prose. You can find my blog at https://ewwhayes.wordpress.com/.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Dawn Corrigan

As a child I read voraciously, but erratically. When it was time to pick a new Nancy Drew, I made my selection based on the cover art, rather than reading in sequence. I reread old books just as often as seeking new ones. It wasn’t always clear where the books had come from.

Thus I had in my adolescent collection a copy of The Charmed Circle, a 1962 “teenage novel” by Dorothea J. Snow. Somewhere along the way it disappeared, but in 2014, in a fit of nostalgia, I ordered a used copy from Amazon, sorting through more than a dozen “Charmed Circle” titles until I found the right one. Then I stuck it on a shelf and forgot about it. But recently, in my search for comfort food reading, I took it down.

I thought I’d read a little and then quickly fall asleep. Instead, I stayed up past two and finished it. That’s how it was when I was a teenager, too. Sometimes I’d finish it, then immediately flip back to the first page and start again.

Which is funny, because even back then the class stuff annoyed me, and it annoyed me even more this time. For instance, it had not occurred to me previously that our heroine, Lauralee Larkin, is elected Homecoming Queen mainly because her parents are willing to host (and fund) an endless array of pizza parties.

Nonetheless, there’s obviously something about the book I really like, and this time I figured out what: Lauralee tries things that scare her, and never gives up, even when those things don’t work out.

It occurs to me now that reading this book over and over again as a youth may have contributed to my ability to keep trying—to keep submitting my writing, to keep applying for jobs that seem like long shots, even to keep asking guys out (right up through my husband). This tenaciousness in the face of much rejection has served me well. It’s pretty much my only move! Fortunately, it’s the only one I’ve needed.

The Charmed Circle by Dorothea J. Snow. Whitman, 1962.

Reviewer bio: Dawn Corrigan‘s poetry and prose have appeared widely in print and online. She works in the affordable housing industry and lives in Myrtle Grove, FL.

Guest Post by Kathryn Sadakierski

Little Women is a timeless classic and remains relevant during unprecedented days. On the surface, the endearing stories of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March may seem to recount simpler times, but greater complexity underlies what appears to be sentimental. At its heart, Little Women is about family, growing stronger despite distance.

While their father serves as a chaplain in the Civil War, the March daughters, with the loving guidance of their mother, adapt, soldiering on together, each making their own destinies. They support each other through adversities, sharing in triumphs. When Beth falls ill, Amy stays with Aunt March, avoiding catching scarlet fever, but while distanced, she learns about herself, ultimately maturing. Their “castles in the air,” innermost dreams of places far-removed from their Concord home, sustain them, until the Marches realize that the lives they lead are better than anything they could have dreamed, finding beauty even in the bittersweet, as they come of age, surmounting the burdens they once lamented. It is not tangible walls that make up their home, but the love of their family.

Reading Little Women at home during the quarantine came not to be an escape from reality, so much as a telling reflection of it; the novel captures the ebbs and flows of life and time, which, as the Marches saw, are to be cherished. Being at home, away from their father and the promising reaches of the world they had yet to see was difficult for the spirited March girls, but in time, they turned what were once limits into opportunities, each contributing her own gift to the world, from Jo with her imaginative writing, to Beth with her music and compassionate heart. Challenges they overcame shaped them, becoming a source of empowerment. This message of resiliency continues to inspire.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. 1868.

Kathryn Sadakierski is a 20-year-old writer whose work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Dime Show Review, Nine Muses Poetry, iō Literary Journal, and elsewhere.