Book Reviews

Maeve Rose Reviews "8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster"

When I first picked up Mirinae Lee’s 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, I knew to expect an old woman’s tales of living through two wars. What I didn’t expect was a character who reinvented herself so thoroughly with each “life” that I was never sure which character in the chapter was our protagonist. Lee keeps the…

Chance Freihaut Reviews "Hungry For What"

These stories are not normal. They will fool you as they have me. Suburbia, office buildings, untouched thickets, the roiling heat of the desert. Settings you have read but have never been forced into without escape, not like this. Translated from the Spanish, Hungry for What, is María Bastarós’ first book to be…

Nolan Rollins Reviews "Dune: Part Two"

Let me start by saying that we are witnessing history. Dune: Part Two, despite being released last Friday, has already landed itself at #18 on IMDB’s Top 250 Films of all time and amassed a 4.6 star rating on Letterboxd. Even weeks before its theatrical release, the film was receiving comparisons to Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Night…

Maya Somogyi Reviews "Ghost Forest"

Ghost Forest is a story about a daughter struggling to reconnect to her astronaut father in Hong Kong while her family has long since immigrated to Vancouver. Between a forgotten language, separate cultures, and two long lives spent on different continents, the narrator struggles…

Rowan watts Reviews "Homeland Elegies"

When I first picked up the copy of Ayad Akhtar’s “Homeland Elegies” that I soon purchased in my local bookstore, I skimmed the prologue, what the author dubs the “Overture” of the book, and then I committed baleful, disgraceful blasphemy: I skipped to the end (“Coda”) and read it. This bifurcated glimpse of the book…

Maya Somogyi Reviews "She Who Became the Sun"

Zhu Chongba in Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun must maintain her role at her monastery as one of the male disciples, trick the men in her army into giving her respect, and above all, sustain her masquerade before the watchful eyes of Heaven as ‘Zhu Chongba,’ the stolen identity of her dead brother…

Amie Samson Reviews "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue"

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was written by V. E. Schwab, also known as Victoria Schwab, who is a queer author. Schwab’s debut novel, The Near Witch, was sold to Disney her second year in university and later published in 2011. She graduated from Washington University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009. The…

Aberdeen Roy Reviews "The Last Words on Earth"

What aspects of life compose the “American identity”? How can one acculturate after a great loss? Nicole Krauss’s short story “The Last Words on Earth” answers these questions by focusing on the life of Leo Gursky, an elderly Jewish man who lived through the Holocaust…