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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…