Alison Kinney (Author of Hood)

Alison rated a book it was amazing Mud on the Moon: A Hybrid Memoir by Nita Noveno	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Nita Noveno read excerpts from her debut memoir, MUD ON THE MOON, and now that it’s published have finally been able to read the whole thing: a hybrid memoir of the author’s own personal narratives, researched/recolle ...more
Oct 06, 2026 10:17AM · like · see review
Alison rated a book it was amazing Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings by Myriam Gurba (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Myriam Gurba's wonderful POPPY STATE: A LABYRINTH OF PLANTS AND A STORY OF BEGINNINGS was a book that made me long to go walking and digging and talking plants with the author. I read a lot of plant books (60-80 in the past few years?), but I often d ...more
Sep 30, 2026 09:10AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Poppy State by Myriam Gurba. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Poppy State by Myriam Gurba <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Whidbey by T Kira Madden	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
All the praises for T Kira Madden's novel WHIDBY suggested that it was a book of extraordinary empathy and beautifully written. That was true, but, awesomely, not at all in the ways I expected. That's because the mystery/thriller aspects of the novel ...more
Sep 25, 2026 08:01AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Whidbey by T Kira Madden. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Whidbey by T Kira Madden <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Whistler by Ann Patchett	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Next in #BookJoy: I get why folks might feel alienated by Ann Patchett's WHISTLER; I'd ordinarily feel pretty hostile to any novel about rich people in Manhattan and Westchester having great lives, and though I'll forever be a fan of Patchett's THE MA ...more
Sep 03, 2026 09:37AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Whistler by Ann Patchett. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Whistler by Ann Patchett <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
oh my god, what a wondrous novel, a literary novel that's a dystopian space fantasy that's a detective story that's an ecological drama, right down to our young Black nonbinary neurodivergent protagonist's name, Aster. I loved it. In addition to the ...more
Sep 01, 2026 11:05AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I'd been looking forward to reading Jordan Rosenfeld's most recent novel, FALLOUT, ever since we started planning a book event together. It's simultaneously an activist thriller and a domestic novel, where two central middle-aged women face career hi ...more
Aug 28, 2026 10:49AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It was really strange and wonderful to read Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON'T REMEMBER while undergoing a neurological event of my own. The first 50 pages or so made me feel dizzier and more nauseated! But that was OK, because: 1. ...more
Aug 23, 2026 12:06PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Everybody Needs Something by Melanie Pappadis Faranello (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder. So ...more
Aug 17, 2026 11:06AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Everybody Needs Something by Melanie Pappadis Faranello. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Everybody Needs Something by Melanie Pappadis Faranello <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing The Translator's Daughter: A Memoir by Grace Loh Prasad (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There’s no better way to introduce THE TRANSLATOR’S DAUGHTER, the debut memoir from Grace Loh Prasad, than her own words: “As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where ...more
Aug 16, 2026 11:03AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Translator's Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Translator's Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing How It Happens by Joyce E Young	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I'm so delighted with Young's lovely debut collection, HOW IT HAPPENS, whose poems begin in a Brooklyn I recognize through friends' stories of growing up here ("Fulton Street Saturday Afternoon," "Stoops") and travel through cities, experiences, love ...more
Aug 10, 2026 01:07PM · like · see review

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Mud on the Moon: A Hybrid Memoir
by Nita Noveno

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I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Nita Noveno read excerpts from her debut memoir, MUD ON THE MOON, and now that it’s published have finally been able to read the whole thing: a hybrid memoir of the author’s own personal narratives, researched/recolle I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Nita Noveno read excerpts from her debut memoir, MUD ON THE MOON, and now that it’s published have finally been able to read the whole thing: a hybrid memoir of the author’s own personal narratives, researched/recollected narratives about her dad’s immigration and his life and family before and after her own immediate family’s development, imagined/projected/empathized narratives based on historical research, and letters to the reader expanding, explaining, and commenting on it all. What do you do when the story you think you know about your grumpy, taciturn father’s experience gets overturned by a discovery? Do you “Cut and rewrite with these newfound facts? Save scenes and create another version? Empty the glass jar to hold other found objects?” Noveno turns the painful confusion into part of her own story, to wonderful effect.
I love that mix of stories, intentions, and perspectives, the way the book lends itself immediately to a multi-genre approach (or class!). And I love how each chapter and story within this larger multi-genre framework illuminates not only the personal narratives but also the work of (re)collecting and writing those narratives:
“My immigrant father and his two unruly children (now subdued in front of the small screen) regarded the pale-faced stars, their comical and poignant expressions, their death-defying antics, in anticipation.... We went along for this nighttime ride together through their odd, mysterious, and surprising world of narratives about immigrants and dictators, love and escape, shattering language and time barriers in silence before these forces would worm and wedge themselves between us.”
And then, “Oh! I see him now!
(A silent film intertitle—a moment of recognition between scenes.)”
With this shock/disappointment turned into the matter of the story itself, every experience can provide that kind of double revelation. Two girls in Ketchikan playing Wonder Woman in dirt roads and forests and fishing frigid waters: "This ocean, this home, fans our growing imaginations. We are both drawn to its hem, to squint through its rippled surface, to breathe in its cool, abundant stink."
This memoir tells the story of a father and a daughter, larger families and communities, and ends with the end of the father's life, and a last conversation with a historian of the father's community.... but there are so many glimmers of possibilities for a next book, a Part 2 of this lovely memoir about everybody else, especially the narrator. Where will her research and imagination take us next? Thanks, Nita! ...more

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Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings
by Myriam Gurba (Goodreads Author)

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Myriam Gurba's wonderful POPPY STATE: A LABYRINTH OF PLANTS AND A STORY OF BEGINNINGS was a book that made me long to go walking and digging and talking plants with the author. I read a lot of plant books (60-80 in the past few years?), but I often d Myriam Gurba's wonderful POPPY STATE: A LABYRINTH OF PLANTS AND A STORY OF BEGINNINGS was a book that made me long to go walking and digging and talking plants with the author. I read a lot of plant books (60-80 in the past few years?), but I often don't feel that way. But this book, which I absolutely adored, burgeoned with so many things I care about--the relationships between peoples and plants, Indigenous ecologies, Southern California communities--and the way Gurba writes about them is full of knowledge, research, personal and cultural history, humor, indignation/indictment, and passion. And, in case you self-identify as not into plants, for some reason, it's also about restoration after "soul loss," and the reciprocity of growth, learning, and care. This book is a doorway into other worlds built by human and nonhuman beings: "Honeybees came for the pollen. In service of their queen, workers hovered and hummed, making music that inspired us to make-believe. World-building is most powerful when it’s done with others, and my fellow visionaries were three tween tomboys who shared my appetite for ceremony, storytelling, theatricality, and adventure."
I love the form(s) (azquiles marching down the page), which play and open up more entrances to more life: "I share this apartment with plants. That means that I also share it with bugs. At sunset, crickets squeeze through a crack in my kitchen wall, invading. I’ve asked them to be quiet, but they ignore me. My indoor garden and I have resigned ourselves to their nocturnal chamber music."
Funny because it's true: "One Saturday, during a lunch break from landscaping, I asked, 'Dad, why do we have to do work that the other kids in the neighborhood don’t have to?' I watched my father deliberate between a dill pickle spear and a cheese square sweating on a plate in the middle of our kitchen table. Without looking away from either of these deli items, he answered, 'I put my children to work so that you won’t grow up to be assholes.'"
And omg, THIS, which hits me hard all over again as I prep for a second day of transplanting in my garden: "Please let me be vulnerable. I want to share a failure with you. My failure as a writer. I can’t describe for you the ecstasy I felt planting the hill. But you might be able to feel what I felt if you do this: Think of the time that plants made you happiest. Or most yourself. Figure out how to access that feeling. Let it move through you. Nurture it. Maintain it. Allow that feeling to remain for as long as you can. My father and I spent weeks digging holes, filling them with water, prepping soil, prepping root systems, easing native plants into the earth, refilling holes, saturating soil with water, letting roots know that we cared about them and wanted to feed them. Letting roots know that we loved them." I can never describe that ecstasy to anybody, but now I don't have to, because Gurba did it for me, for all of us. ...more

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Whidbey
by T Kira Madden

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All the praises for T Kira Madden's novel WHIDBY suggested that it was a book of extraordinary empathy and beautifully written. That was true, but, awesomely, not at all in the ways I expected. That's because the mystery/thriller aspects of the novel All the praises for T Kira Madden's novel WHIDBY suggested that it was a book of extraordinary empathy and beautifully written. That was true, but, awesomely, not at all in the ways I expected. That's because the mystery/thriller aspects of the novel, which I enjoyed greatly, are even more profound and enjoyable when the reader realizes that there's a second mystery going on here: how on earth did the novelist succeed in extending SO MUCH empathetic imagination to SO MANY characters doing obnoxious, terrible, oblivious, or otherwise upsetting things, and to continually shake up her readers' complacency about what they think they've understood about these characters, challenging our own empathy? I already knew about and so was expecting Madden to be able to skilfully handle the character of the person who's a sex offender and his steadfastly supportive and in-denial mother. What amazed me was to see how far Madden could extend this revelatory empathy toward so many other characters and keep surprising and delighting me. For example, Linzie. Honestly the first few pages of Linzie's excerpted memoir made me want to put the whole book down--I was afraid that the verisimilitude of the rhetoric (saccharine, casually racist, self-regarding) would just soak up too much space in the book. But if I hadn't pushed through the slow burn of so much opening loathsomeness, then I wouldn't have had the extreme gratification of (ha, mild spoiler)
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reading page 151, where the overturning of expectation began to escalate, HARD, more truth and revelation kept pouring out, and the book just lit up with magnificence.
And it is gorgeously written. I love her tangos with metaphor. I love the vividness of her descriptions of people's motives, of how humidity feels, of smells. I love how Birdie's character, for example, can be drawn in two different passages that do so much different yet unified work:
"I pushed my hands into the soil. Bright gold slugs shiny as pencils slid along beside me. I didn't see them move though I know that they did, even when I stared and stared, I saw no will outside the jelly twitch of their antennae. Beautiful, I thought. Go. Be alive. And I stayed right there, lying with them, like it was the only thing to do. Next thing, maybe a moment later, maybe an hour, maybe more, the ground was wrapped in the cellophane their bodies left, dead leaves and earth under their canopy of translucence, slimed and shrunken without air, like a world perfectly packaged."
And: "For years, I'd liked to Trace, to my mother, to my therapist; I'd told them all that in my visions of Calvin, I killed him.... *It is good, to identify and place your anger*, one therapist said. But my truest, fiercest fantasy was this: Calvin simply apologized, flatly, almost silly, and together we'd decide all of it--all the years and losses, all the court appearances and sentences and evidence and dismissive judges and lukewarm coffees--had been some wild and complicated misunderstanding. Then we'd find things in common, two unlikely friends laughing at a recent news item, bonding over a mutual favorite film, staring out at the horizon, relieved, healed."
Thank you! ...more

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Whistler
by Ann Patchett

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Next in #BookJoy:
I get why folks might feel alienated by Ann Patchett's WHISTLER; I'd ordinarily feel pretty hostile to any novel about rich people in Manhattan and Westchester having great lives, and though I'll forever be a fan of Patchett's THE MA ...more

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An Unkindness of Ghosts
by Rivers Solomon (Goodreads Author)

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oh my god, what a wondrous novel, a literary novel that's a dystopian space fantasy that's a detective story that's an ecological drama, right down to our young Black nonbinary neurodivergent protagonist's name, Aster. I loved it. In addition to the oh my god, what a wondrous novel, a literary novel that's a dystopian space fantasy that's a detective story that's an ecological drama, right down to our young Black nonbinary neurodivergent protagonist's name, Aster. I loved it. In addition to the gripping plot, it's gorgeously, lyrically, perfectly written. It's based on incredibly immersive, persuasive world-building, where the world being built is the dream of justice and freedom amidst a violent authoritarian society so deliberately stratified by white supremacy that it names, narrows, and incarcerates its people in levels A-Z...and everything about this world is deeply, historically familiar and yet also freshly, vividly created.
"They used to talk about making it to the very top one day and hiding out there. They imagined a hidden deck only they'd know about. Grander than the upperdecks. Full of swimming pools and gardens and spice cakes. Home of the angels transporting MATILDA." Matilda--that's the space ship we're on.
Here is Aster, born into a class confined to fieldwork, who can't help but be a brilliant scientist and visionary: "'This strain of wheat produces a toxin that the larvae find malodorous, so it's not of particular concern. Mostly they eat the nasturtium.' Then she kisses the caterpillar as it sits in my palm. She does that. Kisses bugs. Leaves of plants. Microscopes. Paper."
In this novel love and hope and nature spring irresistibly from the pages through a wealth of imagination and attention to detail--but both the imagination and the knowledge behind that bloom also means that the depiction of violence, suffering, and atrocity is also keen and exact, not for the squeamish. (The story begins with a graphic medical procedure, as Aster volunteers as a healer for the starved and frozen people of her own and other lower levels.)
And fae's so good at bringing us closer and closer into the solving of mysteries while pointing to all that remains that we can't know, perfectly or sometimes at all--and incorporating that uncertainty into the world we've been learning: "decoding the past was like decoding the physical world. The best that could be hoped for was a working model. A reasonable approximation. That was to say, no matter what Aster learned of Lune, there was no piecing together the full mystery of her life. There was no hearing her laugh or feeling her embrace. A ghost is not a person."
I loved reading this SO MUCH--it took me out of myself at a time this summer when I truly needed immersion inside a different view and a different world--and yet everything about it was also so grounded, so familiar, so rightly done. I recommend it to all sci fi readers, but also to readers who rarely read sci fi and need their horizons both adjusted and expanded (me). What an experience, what a joy! ...more

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Fallout
by Jordan Rosenfeld (Goodreads Author)

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I'd been looking forward to reading Jordan Rosenfeld's most recent novel, FALLOUT, ever since we started planning a book event together. It's simultaneously an activist thriller and a domestic novel, where two central middle-aged women face career hi I'd been looking forward to reading Jordan Rosenfeld's most recent novel, FALLOUT, ever since we started planning a book event together. It's simultaneously an activist thriller and a domestic novel, where two central middle-aged women face career highs and disappointments, motherhood and loss, and, like, "ecoterrorism," as some characters might put it, and revolution, as others might. It's all set in the context of a generation of women who came of age amidst the anti-feminist backlash and the capitalist opportunism of Leaning In, undergoing ongoing political and environmental catastrophe: what then do they (or we) make of the different salves of philanthropy, mutual aid, direct action, and acts of revolution? How do you live a meaningful life in a nation that holds lives--of ourselves, our communities, our ecosystems, our planet--so extremely cheap and wages such massive political violence against us/them?
I especially appreciate that the two (several) protagonists have lived long enough on this earth for their stakes, commitments, complicity, impatience, and resolve to have all matured--and, perhaps, to have been ignited by perimenopause! "She has an image of herself suddenly as a woman made of fire—like something she once fantasized about as a teen, when the flimsy lock on her door had not been a strong enough barrier against her mother’s nighttime visitors. If she could burst into flame, she could always be safe. Maybe there is a similar mechanism to her body’s changes now. She is pricklier—her temper is shorter, more volatile, sending off messages to the world: Leave me alone or regret it."
In the acknowledgments, she wrote that this book was inspired by her journalism on environmental grief and the suggestion that much of our grieving is not only coopted by capitalism but also inflected by our having been inadequately taught how to deal with grief. That makes a lot of sense to me; many students have suggested to me that it just hurt too much to learn more about environmental injustice, when even hope itself felt too hurtful to bear. I understand why they feel that way; I also think that this kind of learning and reading and thinking DOES hurt, but not in the worst ways possible, but in ways that can help equip us to do, make, be, and create better ways. Like painful physical therapy, perhaps, it exercises our ability to live better. So thank you to Jordan for this book that helps renew our reckonings with environmental destruction, environmental salvage, and environmental hope--which is to say, our own and others' destruction, salvage, and hope in so many ways. ...more

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Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life
by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (Goodreads Author)

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It was really strange and wonderful to read Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON'T REMEMBER while undergoing a neurological event of my own. The first 50 pages or so made me feel dizzier and more nauseated! But that was OK, because:
1. It was really strange and wonderful to read Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON'T REMEMBER while undergoing a neurological event of my own. The first 50 pages or so made me feel dizzier and more nauseated! But that was OK, because:
1. Ecco REALLY should reissue this memoir, and maybe without the subtitle, because while telling us everything about having an unexpected youthful stroke, it says so much that's broadly relevant about the traumas and the opportunities of being forced to build and rebuild one's own body, life, and concept of self. And as memoir, it amazingly challenges and reinvents what we think we understand about memoir and memory, in the most visceral, injured, and regenerative ways possible.
2. It's wonderfully written: lyrical, perceptive, sharply funny, and very honest about illness, self-esteem, brutal encounters with failure and loss, and the frustratingly slow nonlinearity of healing: "Recovery is harder to write, because of this uneven arc. How to let the reader know how it feels to navigate terrain while providing a forward-moving story? How to be frustrated, and not make the reader frustrated—and to glean lessons learned and portray a kind of resilience without glorifying yourself? It is different from the sickness, which is something that happens, a flood of descriptions and confusion and a definite downward slide—initial affliction is a more exciting and cohesive narrative. Recovery is a day in, day out onslaught of alternating perseverance and self-pitying tears. Was today better than yesterday? Sometimes it was not. Was this week better than last week? Sometimes it was not. Was this month better than last month? Probably. Wake up each morning and ask, “Is this good enough?” Because you know that this might very well be the full extent of recovery. Recovery is repetitive. Keep doing the same things over and over again. Fail all the time, react to the failure, learn from it, feel from it, move on. Do it again. Fail some of the time, react to the failure, learn from the failure, feel the failure, and then recognize the successes, react, learn, feel, move on. Each time, different reactions, different lessons learned, different emotions, and then moving on. Go to occupational therapy. Write words. Go to therapy again. Write a small sentence. Go to therapy again. Write a longer sentence. Wake up. Wake up." OMG yes.
3. I read this after regaining the ability to read books. I felt completely riveted--and was willing to feel sicker afterwards for the pleasure of immersion in the pages. Lee writes of their own health, but the writing rings true for me in so many ways (like when she describes feeling *better* during an MRI: "It was peaceful inside the tube. I had been craving a small space. The world had been too big since my stroke."). I imagine that other people enduring other forms of catastrophic and/or chronic illness will also feel affinities. "If I pushed myself too hard—say, went to a department store and then went to lunch with a friend in a noisy restaurant, I would be near collapse with disorientation and fatigue. In fact, I would have to sleep and rest the next day, too. Those were times that felt like two steps forward, three steps back. It still is that way. If I am at a high-decibel restaurant and I am already tired and I’m with people I don’t know, I want to clap my hands over my ears and close my eyes and stop talking. This is not the way I used to be."
I pulled so many gorgeous quotes from this book and won't share them all: instead, you can just read it. And we'll hope it gets reissued, because this was exactly the book I needed right now, but it's also the book that so many of us need, even if we haven't been ill, to live better in a world where so many live with these realities every day. This is a book that teaches us about what recovery should and shouldn't be, but also, to share the singular vision of an artist who learned beautiful things the hard way, and very much their own way. Thank you! ...more

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Everybody Needs Something
by Melanie Pappadis Faranello (Goodreads Author)

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I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder.
So I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder.
Some of the characters are children, but I'd like to give a special thumbs-up to the gorgeous middle-agedness of most of the stories: "Jack surveyed his organs, the ones he knew by name anyway. Go on, he said to each one as though demanding away a stray having wandered onto his property. Stubborn, lost, looking for love. Go on, go, find a new body to work for, do the one thing you were designed to do, and do it well."
Mourning for children--those you were, those you've had--who are grown and lost is a major theme, alongside the quest to define what it means to be, or not to be, "fine" amidst it all. Here's a couple mourning their missing daughter and visiting her "simple clubhouse. A hideaway. A place to be a child, to make believe, to read magazines, and later to kiss boys, to smoke and drink. A bunker in the sky. Just a quarter mile from homebase. What fools they were to make this pilgrimage today. Their daughter on that motorcycle, hair whipping across her face, pursed lips, in the corner of the photo, a gray shirtsleeve belonging to the prehistoric dinosaur who was riding their daughter away, driving her away down some windy rocky road."
Then, "As they headed back through the woods, a different silence descended. They stepped over damp logs and matted leaves, unwinding their way through this territory they knew so well, crossing the half mile of land that if one kept going would extend toward route 99, and even further, right into the parking lot of the Kreugers that went up last spring, and beyond that across the Butler’s farm, which had been ravaged last summer from the drought, Bob Butler never fully recovering from the toll it took, but word was it also had something to do with little Robbie going off to Afghanistan and coming home six months later only to be shipped off again, and beyond that the Elmwood subdivision where some of the bible folks lived, and even further to some windy road with a wall of boulders where their only daughter was riding away, but that was a place they didn’t know and Dawn stopped her thoughts from going there. But this here—that elm, and the fallen oak, and the poison ivy crawling around that rotted stump, and the patch of clover around the bend, they knew this stretch of woods as well as the dogs who’d learned their way since they were pups. But none of that made Martin’s strange reticence any better. His silence unsettled her." It leads to my favorite, most astonishing conclusion in the collection, such love, mystery, and healing. And a masterclass in world-building.
The collection reminds me of why I first fell in love with short stories, but with a different and renewed appreciation and excitement: they're stories for the reader and writer I am NOW. Thank you! ...more

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The Translator's Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad

The Translator's Daughter: A Memoir
by Grace Loh Prasad (Goodreads Author)

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There’s no better way to introduce THE TRANSLATOR’S DAUGHTER, the debut memoir from Grace Loh Prasad, than her own words:
“As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where There’s no better way to introduce THE TRANSLATOR’S DAUGHTER, the debut memoir from Grace Loh Prasad, than her own words:
“As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where we switch from one system to another, where we lack a perfect translation or direct equivalent. I would give you an example, but I can’t find one I am satisfied with. I am terrified of getting it wrong. I have written and rewritten this paragraph over and over because the hardest thing to write about is what you don’t know. How do I explain that living in two cultures is both abundance and loss at the same time? How do I describe the things I miss from another place and time when I don’t have words for them?”
The book begins with a nightmarishly Kafkaesque story of being caught in the limbo of international airport border control when the narrator has—in a way that’s simultaneously nervewracking, hilarious, and exasperating—failed not only to show up on the right night, but also to bring an unexpired passport: “I’ve never spent time in Taiwan when I wasn’t with my parents. They always mediate and translate for me. Without them, I lose the context I’ve always depended on for my visits. They’re the only way I can connect with anything here—my relatives, the language and customs, the insider’s knowledge of the city. The little bit of independence that I have—walking around Sanhsia or taking the bus alone to certain parts of Taipei—is based on observation, repetition, and the growing usage of English signs. But I still can’t order my own food in a restaurant, let alone deal with a hostile bureaucracy without assistance. I never imagined I might have to learn to navigate Taiwan on my own. What would I do if my parents weren’t here to bail me out? How would I communicate? Who would I call for help?”
This is a book about the trauma of disconnection, diaspora, and many, many kinds of loss. It moves between the literalizing of the metaphor of being caught between languages and worlds and the even further extension of that metaphor through the personal grief for and losses (over years, and in many ways) of the narrator's parents. It explores so many of the ways in which grief can be, in addition to all the sadness and other expected feelings, an unsolvable conundrum, a confrontation with one's own inadequacies, and an opportunity for bracingly honest exploration of failure. It's also a real vivification, and memorial, of what communication can look like within the protection of a loving family.

"All my life, my dad's voice was enough for both of us. He was the one who always spoke for me, translated for me, eased my passage across borders, provided the bridge I needed without my having to ask. As the translator's daughter, I was safe, I was accounted for, I never had to worry about being stranded. But what happens when the translator can no longer speak?"

Well: then a book like this might happen. It's a beautifully written book, not a word out of place, and it provides an answer to that question that perhaps only an appreciative reader can perceive. Thank you, Grace! ...more

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How It Happens
by Joyce E Young

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I'm so delighted with Young's lovely debut collection, HOW IT HAPPENS, whose poems begin in a Brooklyn I recognize through friends' stories of growing up here ("Fulton Street Saturday Afternoon," "Stoops") and travel through cities, experiences, love ...more

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