While Voice to Books has covered graphic novels and memoirs in the past, we couldn’t help noticing how many intriguing books from underrepresented communities have been published in the last three years—stories of difficult journeys, both physical and spiritual; of searching for one’s place in a new culture and finding an identity within a subculture; of intergenerational trauma and the struggle to improve one’s mental health when, traditionally, these topics are taboo. Though many of the five books we’ve reviewed feature teenage protagonists, these visually arresting stories, even at their most fantastical, offer insight into authentic and universal human…
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Dave Oei At under two hundred pages, Lost Ark Dreaming is a lean work of science fiction by Nigerian author Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Focusing on the lives of three residents inside a massive building called the Pinnacle several hundred years from now, Dreaming is a gritty, tense thriller. It’s also a succinct and merciless examination of society under great stress, one that questions whether humanity is doomed to repeat a history of environmental missteps, corruption, and greed. The key to understanding Dreaming lies in understanding the Pinnacle, a kilometer-high skyscraper built on reclaimed land miles offshore from Lagos…
Reviewed by Jackelin Orellana The Forbidden Daughter by Zipora Klein Jakob is the biographical account of Elida Friedman, a woman who defied all odds to survive the Holocaust. Elida’s life itself began as a protest when her mother, Tzila, bravely defied a Nazi decree forbidding Jews from giving birth in Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto. Tzila hoped to become a mother, despite living in a time of war, and made her choice knowing full well that she might not survive. How the choice affected Elida is a question Jakob explores as she walks us through the events of Elida’s life. From a…
Reviewed by Kyle Murphy A Kind of Madness, Uche Okonkwo’s debut short story collection, poses a question on its back cover: “Why is it that the people and places we hold closest are so often the ones that drive us to madness?” In ten brilliantly crafted page-turners set in Nigeria, Okonkwo provides no direct answers to this question, instead illustrating what this particular madness is: a silent suffering that plagues the minds of the stories’ respective protagonists. Okonkwo’s intriguing exploration interrogates internalized emotion to show how this suffering manifests in madness; for it is the apprehension about voicing concern that…
Reviewed by Dave Oei Molly X. Chang’s To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods is an Asian fantasy debut novel about Yang Ruying (Ruy), a young woman who lives in a land conquered and occupied near the time of her birth. Ruy’s once well-regarded family has fallen into despair and hunger through atrocity and war crime, and her mission now is to safeguard what little remains— the lives of her sister and grandmother. The story is inspired by Chang’s grandfather’s experience living in Manchuria, China during World War II, surviving the horror that was Unit 731, the Japanese military’s subjugation of and…
Reviewed by Toby LaPlant Garrard Conley, author of the bestselling memoir Boy Erased, makes his fiction debut with All the World Beside, a soft-spoken exploration of the interplay between religious belief and personal fulfillment, and how love, in its many varieties, can expand our understanding of who makes up a family. With complex characters that embody contemporary relationships to sexuality and gender while belonging wholly to Conley’s historical setting, the novel is a compelling invitation to leap into faith in a queer past that remains largely hidden. Set in colonial America, in the aftermath of the ferocious exercise of condemnation…
Reviewed by Dave Oei Georgia Summers’s debut novel The City of Stardust blends urban and high fantasy into an adventure that spans the English countryside, the continents, places hidden beneath and around us, and the mystical world of Fidelis, a land filled with equal parts magic and horror. It’s a story of a young woman, Violet Everly, who has inherited a family curse and is hell-bent on averting it. Failure means her death. Violet’s adversaries include, among others, a mysterious woman named Penelope who wields insurmountable power; Penelope’s reluctant, heat-starved assistant Yuri; and one particularly hungry ancient god chained under…
Magical realism is often associated with the works of Latin-American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges. However, in an essay for the New York Times titled “Saying Goodbye to Magical Realism,” Silvia Moreno-Garcia describes how the term can be problematic and limiting, not just for Latin-American authors, but for writers as a whole. By mislabeling works as magical realism, she says, we lose our chance at having more “nuanced, complex conversations about books”—e.g., how stories might fit within multiple genres, moods, aesthetics, and textures beyond easily marketable categories that unintentionally strip them of…
Reviewed by Francesca Jimenez In Yellowface, R.F. Kuang delivers a bingeable, page-turner about cultural appropriation and racial identity. The novel also explores self-victimizing, delusional, and conspiratorial effects of social media, fueled by exploitative, capitalistic values that permeate publishing and are embedded in every crevice of society. Athena Liu and June Hayward followed identical writing paths throughout college, meeting at Yale and taking the same classes. But their career similarities end there. The novel begins at the height of Athena’s career, having achieved the dream: three best-selling books from a major publisher, stellar reviews, multiple awards, and praise across all media…
Reviewed by Maxamina Muro The Way to Be, Barbara T. Smith’s memoir, is a ride through the life of a woman born in the 1930s, married in the 1950s, who then emerges as a performance artist in the 1960s, when feminism and equal rights for women became more prominent political and legal movements. While these causes were rooted in practical matters like pay equity, parental rights, and career and academic agency, Smith’s work explored the areas of a woman’s life not covered by laws before, during, and after this time of monumental change. Though Smith doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s…
Reviewed by Betty-Jo Tilley A car crash opens Deepti Kapoor’s novel, Age of Vice, the first of three sweeping sagas about organized crime in contemporary India. This prologue provides a metaphor for the story’s roadmap—a fast-paced and riveting collision course of deception, romance and ambition—and introduces the disparity between rich and poor in a world where only the wealthy win and everyone else’s demise is predetermined by their lower caste. When police arrive at the scene of the accident, they find the chauffeur of the totaled Mercedes passed out, an empty bottle at his side. To show limitless brutality, Kapoor…
Reviewed by Melinda Gordon Blum In November 2017, Claire Dederer’s Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men” documented her personal, lifelong experience of grappling with the problem of separating the art from the artist, exploring whether this is something achievable or even necessary. Monsters is, in part, the book-length outgrowth of that piece. A genre-bridging hybrid of memoir and criticism, the book examines the histories of several artists who (in current terminology) might be classified as problematic. It describes a journey that began when Dederer was a young woman, whose burgeoning identities of writer,…