Book Reviews
Explore thoughtfully curated book reviews that help you discover your next favorite read.
Legends of Little Canada, by Charlie Gargiulo | Book Review
Set in 1960s Lowell, Legends of Little Canada tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy thrust into poverty when his father abandons the family, forcing him and his mother to move into Little Canada. I had never heard of this place, but…
Read More
The Players: Act 1, by Amy Sparkes | Book Review
With The Players: Act 1, Amy Sparkes transports readers to the playhouses and muddy roads of Elizabethan England. The book follows the Ticehurst Players, a ragged troupe of wandering actors whose performances teeter between theatrical triumph and humiliating disaster. As a sucker…
Read More
Mt. Everest in Flip-Flops, by Terence Shannon | Book Review
Originally published in 2018, Terence Shannon’s Mt. Everest in Flip-Flops is a reflective, autobiographically styled but apparently completely fictional novel about the formative power of youth and memory. Set in a Catholic summer camp in 1972, the book mostly eschews conventional plot…
Read More
The Fragments of Shadow & Sound, by Richard Risi | Book Review
Richard M. Risi’s debut The Fragments of Shadow & Sound is a poetry collection that manages to be both easy to read and daringly experimental at points. Comprising five sections, Faultlines, Reflections, Longings, Thresholds, and Ascents, its poems reflect on subjects such…
Read More
The Colts of Midnight, by C. E. Wooldridge JR | Book Review
American writer C.E. Wooldridge Jr.’s The Colts of Midnight drops the reader right into Golterran, a continent where magic and steel clash in ways that explore old tropes in new light. This standalone entry in the Twelve Paladins series walks that tricky line between…
Read More
Meanwhile, Here in Austin, by Cetywa Powell | Book Review
Cetywa Powell’s Meanwhile Here in Austin is not a conventional memoir, travelogue, or photography collection, but rather a layered fusion of all three. It is also a deep look into everyday life in Texas’s capital, following Powell’s move there. Structured around the…
Read More
Nurturing Decent Human Beings: The Case for Moral Education in Our Schools, by Michael Nill | Book Review
There are some books that you would never see yourself reading, but end up picking up for whatever reason and really enjoying them anyway. Michael Nill’s Nurturing Decent Human Beings: The Case for Moral Education in Our Schools is one of those…
Read More
Unacknowledged, by TJ Blaines | Book Review
TJ Blaines’ Unacknowledged is a debut thriller that immediately announces itself with ambition, with a strong female protagonist and delivering no shortage of adrenaline-charged moments. On the surface, it is a high-tech military thriller packed with acronyms, weapons systems, and covert operations.…
Read More
The Shadowbound Fates, by R. S Meander | Book Review
The Shadowbound Fates is an ambitious dark fantasy debut from biologist-turned writer R.S. Meander. Perhaps drawing his scientific sensibility and a taste for the mythic, the novel is set in the sprawling world of the Empiriac of Phylaxus. It opens in scripture-like…
Read More
…Because He Was Evil, by Domenico Del Re—Book Review
…Because He Was Evil is the debut novel from Domenico Del Re, the pseudonym for an anonymous European writer with German and Italian roots. It opens with a punch. Young Lucia, an innocent young girl anticipating her birthday celebration, discovers her parents…
Read More