July 20, 2021
It seems impossible that in the 700-plus years since Dante Alighieri wrote his famous poem, The Divine Comedy, a translator could present something new. Novelist and translator Gerald J. Davis, however, has produced a prose version without a single footnote, revealing something many scholars missed: The Divine Comedy is a great read!
For centuries, scholars […]
July 30, 2018
The world of foster care can be mysterious to those who have no experience with it. Author Bedlam Starr aims to familiarize readers with “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of “the system,” through three short vignettes that alternate between stories of hope and cautionary tales.
Starr first describes a young brother […]
March 27, 2017
Andrew Rodriguez’s Mediocrity in America is a work of cultural criticism, imagined from the perspective of Titan, a pet dog. In 13 concise chapters, Titan shares his musings on topics that include the deficiencies of higher education, the rise of vulgarity, and the demise of cultural literacy.
Titan introduces himself at the book’s start, telling […]
November 1, 2016
Margaret Nagel delivers a likeable, funny and, above all, believable protagonist in this delightful story brimming with captivating characters.
The year is 898 AD. Sixteen-year-old Brother Arcadius, proficient in Latin and Irish and passing fair in Greek and Hebrew, has outgrown the small abbey in Dublin where his widowed mother placed him, feeling that he […]
January 19, 2016
The influence of myth is inescapable in The Tigress and the Yogi, the epic first installment in Shelley Schanfield’s Sadhana Trilogy.
The action unfolds in a setting very similar to ancient India of 2,500 years ago. Although it’s clear that the story is a work of fantasy, the book is steeped in the ancient myths, […]
June 11, 2015
This charming novel continues the story of Julian, from author Eldot’s series Julian’s Private Scrapbook. Set in the early 1960s, it follows Julian’s coming of age as a gay man through the first half of his first year in high school, as he makes new friends, learns about girls, and navigates this strange but […]
May 21, 2015
In Deserted, Lana Petelis retells the story of Jack and the Beanstalk from the point of view of the giant’s wife.
The unnamed heroine of Deserted grows up loving fairy tales that end with “happily ever after,” but even at a young age suspects that a handsome prince isn’t the cure for all […]
December 15, 2014
This collection of short stories and poems takes a fairly starry-eyed look at young love and lust. Many of the pieces are written in second person and seem directed to one unidentified woman. Author Richard Soulliere also writes in first and third person and varies the settings from the beach to the Arctic, but generally […]
November 24, 2014
Consider the turducken, that holiday offering of a turkey stuffed with a duck, which is, in turn, stuffed with a chicken. Employing a similar concept, this story might be called a mystjournoir: It begins as a mystery, veers into the journal of the title, only to reveal itself finally as part novel and part memoir. […]
September 8, 2014
Bold ideas for quickly making the United States energy independent while increasing the country’s water supply and ending hunger are the basis of this ambitious fictionalized narrative.
California author Charlie Pedersen, who has had careers both in aerospace and banking, notes that he considers the ideas he’s presented here a workable solution for moving the […]