A Predictable Loop: A review of If I See You Again Tomorrow by Robbie Couch

Stories focusing on time travel, or repetitive time travel, have always been spaces to explore the same experience in new ways. Like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, time loop narratives afford the characters, trapped for whatever reason, to try out new choices, new dialogue, and new interactions all in service of unraveling the loop and returning to the timestream they left.

Dreams, Fairies, and Silent Hollywood: A Q&A with Kathleen Rooney, author of ‘From Dust to Stardust’

The inspiration for A Star Is Born, author of a book of financial tips for women, and one of the world’s most famous flappers, Colleen Moore left a legacy that flourishes in Rooney’s new novel, From Dust to Stardust. The book, full of hope, is an elegantly told fictionalized version of her life, under the new name Doreen O’Dare. In this interview, Rooney talks about some of the book’s most powerful themes.

A review of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject by Jared Harél

Harél searches for joy with the recognition of how much we are up against in the world. His has a willingness to see sharply the challenges and obstacles that are often devastatingly difficult to understand—to admit joy through inquiry and truth. If we do not see clearly, we are victims of magical thinking, wholly unprepared for those inevitable struggles and painful circumstances that are unavoidable.

A review of Serengotti by Eugen Bacon

Ch’anzu’s narrative arc drives the novel forward, as does a mystery that begins to unfold in the the strange confines of the dreamlike village. Through this story, Ch’anzu begins to explore hir own background, trauma and ghosts, that become part of the app being created, self-reflexively looping back to the creative unfolding that the reader is experiencing. 

A review of A Gilded Drowning Pool by Cecelia Tichi

As our detective duo uncovers new facts, and tangos with a decidedly subpar and self-serving police chief, their position in society and ability to move through the world unencumbered becomes even more important. Like wealthy daughter-of-a-lawyer Nancy Drew, their bold moves and demanding lines of questioning are only possible because they have the resources and status to back them up.

A review of Talking Me Off the Roof by Laurie Kuntz

All in all, these poems are sensitive, moving, perceptive, and carefully crafted gems. Discouragement might lurk in the words, yet the balance is tilting toward hope. As expressed in the poem “A Close and Constant Rage,” the poet notes “my continuous rage colliding / with the natural world, … / surround me with a can-do moment of hope.”

An interview with Joanne Greenberg

She laughs when she talks about those who think she’s locked up somewhere “blowing square bubbles.” She went on to have a “normal” life, got married, raised a family, wrote twenty novels, worked as an anthropology professor at the Colorado School of Mines, volunteered as the first female EMT in her mountain community, tutored students in Hebrew, made jam and sewed clothes…and made trouble when necessary.

A review of The Elk in the Glade by Bruce E. Whitacre

Whitacre makes it clear from the start that this is family folklore handed down over generations at Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas celebrations and other family gatherings. Indeed, the second poem, “Jennie at Thanksgiving,” introduces us to the central figure, now a toothless old lady who is hard of hearing, her food “ground to mush” so that she’s able to eat. “She gums away fitfully.”

A review of Poor Richard’s Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father by Nancy Rubin Stuart

This book will be of interest perhaps most to Franklin fans who will appreciate the spotlight shifting from him to the multiple women who play secondary characters in his biographies.  It must be noted that Stuart does more than simply tell the stories of these players that usually otherwise merely populate the background of the US colonial and revolutionary drama; she offers several insightful and challenging reappraisals.