"And love is a bond radiating from primaries to secondaries, tertiaries and beyond." Humanity has an obsession with sorting itself into categories. Academic, athletic, tall, short, old, young… the sorting never ends. With these categories, inevitably comes stereotypes, certain kinds of people that we expect to see attached to each category, and ridicule if they do not.
Maiden Leap by CM Harris is an exploration of identity and relationships, the pressure to conform for the people you love, and the terrifying freedom of embracing who you truly are after a lifetime of denial.
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by Erin Theresa Welsh  The Brutally Beautiful Complexity of Friendships Review: The Light Source Erin Theresa Welsh Kim Magowan Fiction 7.13 Books pp.221 Cost: $12.80 (paperback) Relationships, no matter what type, are complex. Society sees friendships as one of the strongest relationships that can be established, and romantic relationships are one of the more challenging and delicate things to be a part of. Either way, both seem to be crucially important to human culture, and both tend to have a strong impact on an individual’s life.
Kim Magowan’s novel, The Light Source, is an interestingly realistic and compelling perspective on creating, maintaining, and destroying relationships over a lifetime. Each chapter is a whirlwind of new perspectives and opinions from each character and helps the audience get to know them personally and understand them more. Magowan writes the entire book split into the perspectives of seven of the main characters while the chapters jump through time to give the audience a well-rounded view of the same event surrounding each friend. Though it has a lot of back and forth throughout time and perspectives, it sticks to the main topic of Heather and Julie’s friendship and, eventually, their romantic relationship and how every character’s life ends up panning out. It is like a butterfly effect of one person’s actions or reactions causing a difference in another’s life and eventual outcome.  A Deep Dive Into Familial Relationships Review: The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish Elizabeth Mecca Katya Apekina Fiction Two Dollar Radio, pp. 353 Cost: $16.99 (paperback) In Katya Apekina’s novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, relationships are used to emphasize characterization and create drama within the story. In particular, the novel examines father-daughter relationships, mother-daughter relationships, husband-wife relationships, and artist-muse relationships. Told through numerous first person accounts in the form of narratives, letters, phone conversations, and interviews, Apekina provides the reader with an in depth, up-close look at the intimate intricacies of these relationships and their meanings. The unique structure of this novel allows the reader to see each character’s internal and external struggles and conflicts. These accounts in various forms help create strong characterization and drama within the story.
 Seemingly Simple Reflections of Life Review: Driving Together Julie Darpino Robert Tyler Sheldon Poetry Meadow-Lark Books, pp. 84 Cost: $15.00 In his poetry collection, Driving Together, Tyler Robert Sheldon shares personal observations of seemingly simple moments in his life: observations on a hummingbird, a physical scar, yard work, and graduate school. Spanning all of these subjects, Sheldon’s poems use crisp imagery and storytelling. Through his prevalent themes of childhood experiences, the nature of Kansas, and the relationship to his wife, Sheldon reveals to his readers an unexpected depth to life’s simplicity by use of imagery.
 The Art of the Uncomfortable
Review: Pretend We Live Here Laura Kincaid Genevieve Hudson Fiction Future Tense Books, pp. 168 Paperback, $13 US Genevieve Hudson captures the comfortable in the uncomfortable. Her collection of short stories, Pretend We Live Here, centers on characters looking for home in places, in people, in their own bodies. No matter where her characters roam, readers are confronted with the violence inherent to existence through her sharp-edged but haunting, sometimes even joyful, prose. |
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