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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…