REVIEW: They Thought They Buried Us by NoNieqa Ramos

Reviewed by Betty Fall Punchy, provocative, and full of unshakeable pride, NoNieqa Ramos’s They Thought They Buried Us takes a unique, if messy, approach to selling a horror story to its audience while not compromising the identity of its author or protagonist. The book follows Yuiza (she/they), a young Puerto Rican filmmaker, as they struggle to keep their head above water at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy, a highly regarded boarding school with a murky past and dangerous present. Isolated from their friends and family, gaslighted and harassed by students and faculty alike, and haunted in their dreams by the…

TCR Talks with Attica Locke, author of Guide Me Home

By J. Schuberth  Attica Locke has been busy. The award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and TV producer behind such shows as Empire, When They See Us, From Scratch, and Little Fires Everywhere is currently in a multi-year development deal with Universal Television, working on an adaptation of her Edgar-Award-winning Highway 59 trilogy, among other shows. The Coachella Review caught up with Locke to talk about her writing process; her love of TikTok; the aesthetic and political value of land; going to museums in a bathing suit; and the final book in her Highway 59 trilogy, Guide Me Home. The novel opens with…

REVIEW: My Chicano Heart by Daniel A. Olivas

Reviewed by Pallas Gutierrez  In My Chicano Heart, Daniel A. Olivas presents thirty-one short stories about love, loss, and Chicane identity. The stories range from starkly realistic to deeply magical, and at the core of each one are expertly crafted characters. These characters span a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, from twelve-year-old James falling in love for the first time in “Lucky Dog,” to Alisa recovering from optical surgery in “Diplopia,” but they are all grounded in Olivas’s rich storytelling and clearly drawn realities. Five of the stories contained in My Chicano Heart are new, and in the collection’s…

POETRY: Love Language: VI by Alissar Nahhas

if it meant you felt loved, i would do it. this is the sixth love language. it is a feeling, rather. it is happy and it is sad and it is neither. it is quite vermillion with a mystery that cannot be comprehended nor explained. i will love you, and you will be loved by me. but i will not be loved by you. the sixth love language is unrequited love, yet my soul cannot love in another way. you will be loved, by all means. every love language, i will give to you. i will cross the ends of…

TCR Talks with Nicholas Belardes, author of The Deading

By Daniel J. Collins Multi-hyphenate author Nicholas Belardes writes what he knows—the ecological landscape of Central California, the study of climate change and crisis, birds, the Chicano experience—and then blends and turbocharges it with the unknown, crafting energetic and complex works that combine the best elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. A graduate of UC Riverside Palm Desert’s Low Residency program with an MFA in fiction, Nick studied under horror writer Stephen Graham Jones and crime writer Tod Goldberg. His new book, The Deading, is an eco-horror tale that blends the sensibilities of both genres while also grounding the…

POETRY: When the Dog Learned to Bathe by Bibinaz Nami

The world came into black and white, not like a movie, but the way a dog saw it: low to the ground, up the ass, running with no purpose/filled with the urge to find myself somewhere in the zig-zag path of movement my head bobbing incessantly, my tongue catching the taste of petrol in the air slowly, I let the emotions bathe me, scrubbing away all feeling I wake up in the water, lukewarm.  Bibinaz Nami (she/her) is a freshman at UCLA and a co-founder of the literary youth organization The Imperfect Poets, where she plays a pivotal role in…

Voice to Books: Recent Graphic Novels

  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…

NONFICTION: A Map for Living by Elizabeth Amon

Bleached bones, picked clean by a lion, are left to bake under the East African sun, says the reedy-voiced British narrator on the nature film I watch from beneath a mound of covers. The abandoned bones stop the elephant matriarch in her tracks. She raises her trunk to trumpet a call of distress across the plain, lamenting the death of one once part of her herd. Elephants can remember more than 200 individual, extended family members and recognize them by smell or call, as well as sight. An elephant never forgets. From my sickbed, I watch the matriarch fondle the…

REVIEW: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

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…

REVIEW: The Forbidden Daughter by Zipora Klein Jakob

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…