By Breen Nolan Elizabeth Ellen’s dazzling and darkly funny novel, American Thighs, follows Tatum Grant, a former child actor who steals her daughter’s identity to start her life over as a high school cheerleader. Tatum’s troubled upbringing is the catalyst for her move from Hollywood to Elkhart, Indiana, a town with painful ties to Tatum’s past. Written in interview style,…
Reviewed by Eric Martin In his latest novel, Theft, Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah spins a tapestry of interwoven lives in Tanzania, where social mores both connect and divide. It’s a world defined by family—historic and impromptu, broken and reimagined. In this world, the lives of individuals are powerfully shaped by a family history that the individual has no power to control.…
Edited by Dave Oei With the exploding popularity of Sarah J. Maas’s fantasy-romance series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and the more recent bestseller Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros, the newly named genre romantasy has exploded. While lacking in specific definition, all such books share at least one common trait: Their plotlines require both fantasy and romance, though…
Reviewed by Evelyn Garcia The Harrowing is an innovative thriller written by Kristen Kiesling and illustrated by Rye Hickman. When a teenage farm girl named Rowan discovers she has psychic powers that give her the ability to see horrifying visions of future murders, her life is turned upside-down. Rowan joins Rosewood, a secret organization dedicated to training Harrows, who are…
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…
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…
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…