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…
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…
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…
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…
You are poetry with verses that make you gasp and an ending that makes you joy-cry like the day you cover a heavy-handed arabee tattoo that begs for forgiveness with an olive branch from the motherland and you pick the olives and pop them in your pretty pink mouth and, when you’re left with the pits, you recall the…
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…
Some say it’s older than the universe itself but we could see it through your binoculars, the ones you carried to the opera the time we split forever over the third act of Lehar’s Stargazer. We lie on the grass beneath Methuselah adjusting the lenses, Bausch & Lomb your dad’s, their leather holster nearby repaired a few times by an…
By Jackelin Orellana UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA alumnus David Martinez wrote his debut memoir, Bones Worth Breaking, while grieving his brother’s death. With a background in writing fiction, David never intended to write a memoir. One day, he got hit by a car, and that experience made him take a deeper look at the scars that life had left on his…
By Kevin T. Morales Ashley Granillo delved deep into her family and the community of Pacoima, California, for her debut middle-grade novel, Cruzita and the Mariacheros, the compassionate and humorous story of a seventh grader who struggles with grief while trying to reconcile the conflict between her dreams of pop stardom with her family’s need for her to participate in…
By Ty Landers UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA alumnus Travis Burkett’s first novel An American Band hits shelves as the immigration crisis at the southern border of the United States continues to flummox Washington. Though his book, set in alternating timelines between 2015 and 1984, is not overtly political, the border problem serves as a brilliant conceit for a well-paced and…