Grief is a part of life that every single one of us has to deal with, in ways big and small, yet no one seems to know how to talk about it. Grief is heavy, and putting it into words is no small task. However, author Ashley Roth takes on this duty with grace and nuance. Her debut novel, We Never Took a Bad Picture, recognizes that mourning isn’t a linear process by using a non-linear narrative and showcasing how much space grief takes up at different points in the main character’s lives. Roth shows readers that coping looks different for everyone, and that these processes can just as easily push people apart as they bring them together.
The novel follows the lives of the Joyces, a multi-generational nexus of complicated relationship dynamics. The book builds up to the 55th anniversary party of the central characters Artie and Gloria. As the family prepares for the party, as well as Artie’s retirement from the grocery store he’s been working at since before they got married, we learn that their relationship isn’t perfect, and neither is anyone else's.
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Jesi Bender’s Child of Light is a masterclass in narrative in-betweens. Bender writes beautiful, evocative prose and descriptions that are both startling and disturbing. The story is both narratively complex with several throughlines, and deceptively simple. The novel follows Ambrétte Memenon, a thirteen-year-old young woman moving with her family to Utica, New York in 1886. Ambrétte herself is imprisoned in a twilight land of “in-betweens.” For instance, her father only speaks French, her mother and brother are bilingual, and she only speaks in English. The book uses the main character’s feelings of being trapped between two words to launch into experimentations with structure, perspective, and language. The form of the book is both a testament to what novels can accomplish and breaks all conventions with a reckless abandon
Jeff Fleischer’s collection of short stories, Animal Husbandry and Other Fictions, experiments with adding a healthy dose of magic to create a sort of modernized mythos. While not included in every story, the majority weave mysticism, fantasy, or both into otherwise grounded stories—little girls making deals with witches, a king of the cats, and multiple varieties of the classic talking animal. This push to expand the “acceptable” boundaries of magical realism in fiction ultimately allows Fleischer to convey a wider array of narratives that, had he gone an entirely realistic route, likely would have come out rote and structurally similar to many other short fictions.
“The forest wears perfume. You’ve smelled it: sun-baked pine, heady as fresh bread. Forest dresses stout in summer, all kinds of layers. Then she strips naked in winter—the opposite of people. Forest sings and sighs, moans and hums. Voices legion, connected millions: leaves in windblown tremble; gray-brown trunks hushed as soldiers, some kissed by sun, some drowned in shadow; rain whisper and thunderbowl” (32).
It is evident that Darrin Doyle, author of the book Let Gravity Seize the Dead has a deep appreciation for nature. He describes the outdoors with such detail and respect you feel that you are deep in the thick of it. He speaks of it with human-like qualities, as if it were a living, breathing person with a past and feelings. And while these aspects give the book life and beauty, Doyle’s novel also evokes a sense of eeriness that leaves the reader with a chill that is hard to shake even after the words on the page end. This chill gets even more sinister as past and present intertwine and weave a story that transcends beyond time, leaving us encased in these vivid descriptions of nature with the question: “why?”
Most of us are familiar with the concept of the seven deadly sins: gluttony, envy, wrath, lust, sloth, to name a few. Alice Kaltman embraces these sins—along with their virtuous counterparts—in her short story collection, Almost Deadly, Almost Good. She personifies the sins in her complex characters while exploring an equal number of virtues. Her stories depict the tragedies and triumphs of human nature. Characters embodying gluttony, envy, and wrath seem to be in a constant state of inner conflict and turmoil while those who practice kindness, humility, and patience have better outcomes.
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