Guest Post by Samantha Kolber

At its core, Fruit Rot by James R. Gapinski is a sweet story. Not sweet like saccharine, or Hallmark, but sweet like the meager couple in the book, with their ailments and traumas, artistic talents and impoverished lodgings; sweet like fairytales read aloud next to a hearth at bedtime; and sweet like love and the magic of imagination.

The story begins with a narrator, one half of a couple, telling the reader, “Lacey and I need money.” He tells us Lacey is depressed, with a history of abuse from her father, and since they can’t afford health insurance, she relies on St. John’s Wort from Walgreens. “It doesn’t work,” says our narrator. “She says she needs real drugs, but that takes real money.”

Gapinski is a sparse writer, yet spares no details. I love the bottle of herbs from Walgreens. I love how the narrator shuffles around the hole in the stairs. Though I don’t read comics, so may have missed some comic book references, I still love the descriptions of the narrator’s sketches and graphic artmaking endeavors. And I love the description of the mystery tree that pops up in their “barren dirt patch” of a front yard, written in the narrator’s characteristic, comic-obsessed voice:

This mystery tree is huge, and the bark is a perfect Silver Age green, like it jumped right off the Incredible Hulk #2 cover. The tree has sparkly leaves and golden fruit sprouting from its nuclear green arms. The fruit is round like an orange, but shiny like a ripe apple.

What would you do if a golden goose fell in your lap? Would you capitalize on it, even if your intentions were pure? Pure as healing the sick, mending the broken, making whole what once was? Would you play God? Would they call you a hero? Our narrator wrestles with this and so much more as the tree—their golden goose—and its magical powers permeate the couple’s lives in unimagined, unintended, and unwanted ways.

This story will stay with you for a long time, and the characters are so real—with that detailed writing—that you will think of them as friends—or foes, depending on where you sit on the good versus evil scale.

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Fruit Rot by James R. Gapinski. Etchings Press, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Samantha Kolber (samanthakolber.com) is a chapbook-loving poet and editor living in Montpelier, Vermont. Her own debut chapbook “Birth of a Daughter,” poems that reconcile an artistic self with motherhood, is out now with Kelsay Books.

Guest Post by Murali Kamma

I haven’t picked up The Plague or A Journal of the Plague Year, let alone a contemporary dystopian novel. What I wanted in the Year of Covid was escapism. But having found comfort (and laughter) in the timeless fiction of the peerless P. G. Wodehouse, I was ready to move on. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice caught my attention as I scanned my bookshelves.

All I knew about Mann’s Death in Venice—and Visconti’s film—was that a distinguished artist (Gustav Mahler?) is vacationing in Venice when he becomes infatuated with a boy visiting from another country. Soon I was swept away, and Michael Henry Heim’s brilliant English translation played no small role in providing another kind of escape from 2020. Not for long, though. I almost fell off my chair when I realized why the locals in early twentieth-century Venice don’t want to tell the protagonist (an author, not a composer) that their city is in trouble.

There’s an epidemic—a cholera epidemic, in fact, “emanating from the humid marshes of the Ganges Delta”—and though people are dying in Venice, officials are in denial. Even as the news spreads, causing increasing anxiety in the malodorous city, Venetians hide the facts from the tourists. It’s the oppressive heat, the sirocco—and there’s nothing to worry about, they say, their lies making the city as menacing as the disease threatening it. The author finally hears the truth from another foreigner, but it’s too late.

“The epidemic even seemed to be undergoing a revitalization; the tenacity and fertility of its pathogens appeared to have redoubled,” Mann writes.

More than a century has passed since Mann wrote this gripping novel. Sadly, we humans continue to make the same mistakes, and as this literary classic reminds us, some blind spots may never disappear.

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Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. 1983.

Reviewer bio: Murali Kamma’s Not Native: Short Stories of Immigrant Life in an In-Between World won the 2020 Bronze Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for multicultural fiction. 

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Guest Post by Ed Davis

Donna Meredith’s new novel Buried Seeds is a timely novel of activism, about, among other things, the West Virginia teachers’ strike of 2018 that electrified the nation. Buried Seeds is actually two novels beneath one cover, alternating between Clarksburg, WV teacher Angie Fisher’s strike narrative and Angie’s great-great-grandmother Rosella Krause’s early twentieth century activism in the struggle for women’s right to vote.

Angie Fisher is an excellent Everyteacher, fiftyish, funny and self-deprecating. When Angie accepts leadership of the American Federation of Teachers in her district, she sets herself up for an agonizing dilemma: how can she lead a strike when her unemployed husband Dewey is applying for work with the local FBI, likely to frown on such law-breaking? After Angie and Dewey are forced to move in with her parents, daughter Trish and her new baby soon follow—and if the old farmhouse weren’t already over-crowded, sister MacKenzie winds up there, too, when she leaves her husband.

Alongside Angie’s anguished life, Meredith shoots us into the early 1900s, where we meet her great-great grandmother Rosella, who has endured similar suffering. Rosella, an artist, is now in San Francisco, along with her fourteen-year-old daughter. The girl’s diary describes her mother’s life as an activist tirelessly working for women to earn the right to vote in 1907. We also get Rosella’s first-person account of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906, providing one of the novel’s most dramatic set pieces.

A seasoned writer of mysteries, Meredith doesn’t ignore the need for suspense to keep readers tantalized in this well-researched novel containing many shocks and surprises with great historical themes.

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Buried Seeds by Donna Meredith. Wild Women Writers, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Ed Davis’s Time of the Light, a poetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His latest novel, The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014), won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010.

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

The Places I’ve Cried in Public is a young adult novel by British author Holly Bourne. This is not your typical young adult story about crushes and teenage angst. Teenage novels don’t usually come with a warning on the back cover, like this book does, that it contains material that some readers may find distressing.

In this book, Amelie fell in love with Reese, but now she can’t seem to get over him. So she’s going back to all the places where she cried in public to try and re-trace her steps, and see where her life went wrong. In the process, she’s learning about what love is not. This book is written in very British English and is set in places like London and Sheffield, but it deals with universal themes, like recognizing what is a healthy relationship, what is controlling behavior and abuse.

This book is powerful and intense. It is a work of fiction, but it deals with real issues. It is a tough read, in the sense that you need to mentally prepare to read until the end. You feel like you have been punched in the stomach after reading this book. But it is a good book; it deals with important issues. This book should be required reading for all young women.

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The Places I’ve Cried in Public by Holly Bourne. Usborne Publishing Ltd., 2019.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/.

Guest Post by Carla Sarett

What with election hysterics and the COVID Blues, I was starved for a truly immersive read, and lo, Peter Cameron came to my rescue in What Happens at Night.

I’ve been a fan of Cameron’s elegant writing since, well, forever (if you have not read The City of Your Final Destination or Andorra, by all means, do so). Here, he takes Bowlesian themes (he does quote Jane Bowles, if there’s any doubt) but sprinkles them with kindness. Cameron’s mercifully free from the dour outlook on humanity that I’ve come to expect these days, and it makes this work enchanting in the best sense.

A not very happy New York couple wants to adopt a child, and in their quest, ends up in an icy “northern” foreign city, in a comically grand hotel (elaborately, but impractically, appointed). Nothing that happens from that point could possibly be predicted: the couple meets a faith healer, for one thing, and no, he’s not quite a fake. From there, the story by turns becomes surreal and funny and moving. The novel’s atmosphere is dark and cold, but its spirit is one of light, “a warm golden light.”

(I must also mention that the publisher has sprinkled the cover with a barely visible glitter. Perfect.)

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What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron. Catapult, August 2020.

Reviewer bio: Carla Sarett’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Prole, Halfway Down the Stairs, and elsewhere.  Her novel, A Closet Feminist, will be published in 2022.

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Guest Post by Chuck Augello

The stories in Death, Desire, and Other Destinations, a new collection by Tara Isabel Zambrano, depict a vivid landscape of sensual experiences ranging from a widowed mother’s kitchen to the surface of the moon. A desire for escape is a recurrent theme. In “Lunar Love,” a couple flies to the moon to exchange their vows. “We have been excited about doing something that everyone we know does these days since they find nothing exciting about the earth anymore,” the narrator says, and it’s a telling line. Daily life, with its expectations and social conventions, no longer excites. Zambrano’s characters seek their pleasures elsewhere, often in the body.

One of the strongest stories is “Up and Up,” in which a daughter interrupts her widowed mother during an intimate moment with another man. While the daughter is shaken, the mother is nonchalant and unapologetic. “It’s a blessing to be alive with no one to answer to,” the mother says, dismissing her daughter’s questions about the neighbors and the memory of the recently departed husband/father. The mother’s new lover, Santosh, soon reappears holding three mangoes, a perfect detail, the succulent fruit signaling the sensual tour-de-force to come. Santosh stands behind the narrator, and a scene that could have been uncomfortable or even creepy becomes a passionate delight, Zambrano surprising the reader with what happens between the characters, her language lush and evocative, the daughter’s “pores opening onto wonder, previous half-baked climaxes and affairs slipping out, my body poured into a new cast.” It’s a moment charged with desire, sexy and emotionally revealing.

The stories in Death, Desire, and Other Destinations are imaginative and unique, Zambrano’s collection the perfect destination for readers looking to escape the doldrums of quarantine and sheltering in place.

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Death, Desire, and Other Destinations by Tara Isabel Zambrano. Okay Donkey, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chuck Augello is the author of the novel The Revolving Heart and the story collection The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love.

Guest Post by Claudia Gollini

Animal Farm by George Orwell was first published in 1945 and will be celebrating its seventieth birthday next year.

One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin.

Parents need to know that Animal Farm is a biting satire of totalitarianism, written in the wake of World War II and published amid the rise of Soviet Russia. Although it tells a fairly simple story of barnyard animals trying to manage themselves after rebelling against their masters, the novel demonstrates how easily good intentions can be subverted into tyranny.

The fable is alive with brilliant touches. At first the victorious pigs write out a set of revolutionary rules, the seventh and most important is of which is “All animals are equal.” It was a brilliant idea to have the clever pigs simplify this for the dimmer animals (the sheep, hens and ducks) into the motto “Four legs good, two legs bad.” But it was a real stroke of genius for Orwell to later have the pigs amending these rules, most notoriously amending rule seven to become “All animals are equal—but some are more equal than others.“ This says something so profound about human beings and our laws and rules that it can be applied anywhere where laws are corrupted and distorted by the powerful.

The book seems relatively simple on the first read but there are several layers of complexity to represent the Soviet government. The novel contains a fair amount of satire and humor, which personally is one of the main reasons why I recommend reading it.

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Animal Farm by George Orwell. 1945.

Reviewer bio: Claudia Gollini is a makeup artist, fashion/beauty blogger and journalist, editor and writer, and body painter of events and TV show (Make-up Deborah-Gucci and Castrocaro TV talent show, body painter to Art gallery ‘Spazio l’altrove’ and TV show Sky 869 Village festival and another fairs & exhibition on Italy).

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

Perhaps you need a little bit of an escape from reality at the moment. This is a good book to do that. The Princess and the Goblin is a classic fantasy novel written by Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824-1905). It first appeared in 1871, before being published in book form in 1872.

The Princess and the Goblin tells the story of Princess Irene who is rescued from a goblin attack by a miner boy called Curdie. The book tells of a battle between goblins who live underground and humans. With her new friend Curdie and some magical help, Princess Irene must find a way to defeat the goblins and save her father’s kingdom.

Despite being written in the Victorian era, the language in this book is very easy to follow. You can’t tell that it was written almost 150 years ago. This was a very enjoyable book. It’s the type of book where illustrations are not necessary because it’s better to use your own imagination to picture all the goblins and other creatures. This classic fantasy novel inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. George MacDonald wrote at least 50 books, but most of his work is not remembered now, which is a shame. George MacDonald deserves more recognition.

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The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. 1872.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/.

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Guest Post by Christopher Linforth

In her debut collection Collective Gravities, Chloe N. Clark offers a dose of the fantastic into the ordinary, and sometimes humdrum, lives of her characters. Twenty-five aesthetically similar stories make up the book, which dilutes the power of the collection as a whole, but shows the range of Clark’s fascination with parallel universes, zombies, and the breakdown of relationships. The strongest stories reveal Clark’s gift as a storyteller and as a purveyor of the weird.

In the collection’s opener “Balancing Beams,” the astronaut narrator Ava struggles with an unknown, debilitating ailment in a futuristic America. In a beautifully written flash of insight, she tells us:

I couldn’t speak for a moment. The weight of words on my tongue. In the Out, there had been so many times I fumbled words, slurred them. They don’t tell you that zero-gravity even affects your tongue. Your mouth can feel so heavy when you try to say something.

Other stories seem to take their cues from B-movies and horror stories and the world of science fiction. Throughout the collection, Clark remakes these historically male-dominated forms to center her stories on women and the deleterious effects of culture on their bodies.

Clark’s debut is a mixed collection, yet it shines so brightly in spots that it’s clear she is destined to wow us with her next book.

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Collective Gravities by Chloe N. Clark, Word West Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014).

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Guest Post by Laura Kincaid

Lacrimore by SJ Costello explores our relationship with grief and tragedy through a speculative lens. The gothic novel draws readers in with beautifully dark prose that builds a haunting world. While the story unfolds slowly, the flawed characters and mystery compel readers to turn the page.

The novel opens with Sivre Sen, a faithless medium journeying across a stormy lake to a small island. There sits Lacrimore, a crumbling labyrinth of a mansion shrouded by legends. During a vision, a ghost called her there to complete his funeral rites. In Costello’s Victorian-inspired world, mediums are revered and influential, especially after a recent epidemic. However, Sen has never before experienced visions of the dead. After arriving, she meets the dead man (who is still alive), a staff trapped by circumstances, and a dubious doctor in exile. As Sivre searches the house for answers and closure, she discovers dark secrets in its rotting walls. The book is like Lacrimore itself—a quiet, mysterious tale standing alone in a much larger world.

Though in development before the COVID-19, the novel was a poignant and refreshing take on pandemic literature. Instead of focusing on dystopian survival, the story centers on what happens after survival. How do we process our grief? How do we reflect on the societal failures that came to light? What change is required to be better? Lacrimore doesn’t claim to answers all these questions. It remains a spooky story that is fun to read, but opens the door for those who want to ponder its deeper themes.

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Lacrimore by SJ Costello. June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Laura Kincaid is a writer, editor, and lover of the fantastical. Find her work in Twist in Time and at laurakincaidmusings.wordpress.com.

Guest Post by Caroline V.D.

As a first timer being introduced into the world of Rizzoli and Isles’s grisly world, I found myself left exposed to the intensity and intricately woven plot in Tess Gerritsen’s addition.

In I Know a Secret, we are pushed straight into the unfortunate murder of Cassandra Coyle, an indie filmmaker and are soon greeted with Rizzoli and Isles. For those like me who are meeting the two strong women quite late into the series, Gerritsen does a wonderful job in establishing familiarity and understanding of their characters as the murder investigation goes on. The characters throughout the book all contribute to the tension and suspense in deducing the culprit’s motives and next actions, as the number of bodies pile up and pasts uncovered. There are no moments that are wasted and no conversations that do not provide a twist to the story, as Coyle’s colleague says “Horror 101 . . . it’s always the person you least expect.”

The symbolism and messages throughout the story are consistent and well placed by Tess Gerritsen who had impressively created an impression of a web laid out by a culprit who could not be traced yet by the end of the book; the web could be followed into a single string as the culprit’s motives are laid out to the reader. It is an amazing feat done by Gerritsen who I commend for roping in another reader into her series!

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I Know a Secret: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel by Tess Gerritsen. Penguin Random House, April 2018.

Reviewer bio: Hey all, it’s Caroline, and I am an aspiring book reviewer. Currently I’m working on a personal project where you’ll be seeing me and a lot more books in the future. Check it out at: https://theladywithinkstainedhair.tumblr.com/.

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