Genre bending and heartfelt glimpse into a world of smoke and mirrors
590546
Norman Leaf plays with the boundaries between a very personal memoir, a very public without naming any names tell-all, and a medical survey on the origins, heyday and future of aesthetic plastic surgery in Beverly Hills and beyond.  With so many voices within a small space (approximately 160 pages), the book is a very enjoyable read that goes by quickly.  While one might expect it be rather clinical or, on the other hand, sensationalistic given its setting, it treats what some would present as a sensationalistic world in a very balanced manner.  We still travel all over the world in this work--from the beaches of Capri and the runways of Milan to the ER hospital on the south side of Chicago--and are also afforded glimpses behind walls and gates of the rich and famous from Carbon Beach to Bel Air and Dr. Leaf is an excellent tour guide.

I was especially touched by the anecdotes that begin and end the book as they deal more with Dr. Leaf's origins and of course, the important and altruistic work he does for Iraq Star, an admirable program that provides gratis reconstructive surgery for wounded soldiers.  I would have preferred to learn more about the man himself, especially the budding folk music days, and I thought some of the ink spilled on the various patient/characters could have been forsaken for more detail about Dr. Leaf and what makes him tick.  While Dr. Leaf keeps his professionalism and integrity by not naming names of his subjects, it almost does not matter as his choice of anecdotal "characters" plays out much like Richard Johnson's Page Six column in the NY Post; while we do not know who the ingenue/starlet may be, the Lindsay Lohans and other celebutards of vapid young Hollywood rear their heads without needing to be named and it is entertaining to guess for yourself just who Dr. Leaf is referring to.

In summary this is an enjoyable read for anyone considering any aesthetic plastic surgery or even the least bit interested in Hollywood culture. It is a page turner with a message and a heart.
498346
A Mormon girl in small town Oregon confronts prejudice against Japanese Americans during World War II.

The Fires of Edgarville by Craig Joseph Danner is a poetic and absorbing tale of two outcasts, looking for themselves: Myrna, raised Mormon, a courageous survivor of brutal prejudice during World War II who is now lost in Alzheimer's, and her half-Japanese son, Hank, a doctor accused of a terrible crime, struggling to unravel the convoluted mystery of his ethnicity.

Hank and Myrna have returned with Hank's wife to Myrna's family home in small town Oregon, where the pear orchard has rotted, the house is collapsing, and no one but a few old-timers remember that this was once the town of Edgarville. Hank has lost his profession as a pediatric cardiologist, his license snatched away when he is accused of hastening a child's death. With grit and tenacity, Hank sets about rebuilding his life as a volunteer fireman, repairing the homestead, and exploring the minefield of his mother's past.

Myrna proves to be a very difficult woman to live with, dropping into sinkholes in her memory, triggered into explosions by the smells, faces, and landscapes of her violent childhood. Through her eyes the reader grows up again in a repressive Mormon home, falls in love with a Japanese man, and is hideously deserted by her family on the eve of World War II. We see Myrna, a young teenager, going alone into the world, weaving elaborate lies to protect her son, and throwing her body between a hostile America and her tender little boy.

Through Hank's eyes Myrna lives a non sequitur; swearing at her scrambled eggs, laughing into silences, and slapping Hank for things he never did. Between answering calls of the fire siren, Hank fights to keep the confused Myrna safe, outmaneuvering her tendencies to wander and to play with matches, digging deep for every last scrap of compassion he can feel in an effort to not abandon her. It takes the patience of a saint to care for a loved one whose mind is deteriorating, and in the end Hank proves to be only human. But it is his love for his mother, however difficult the circumstance, that leads Hank home to the truth: about himself, his heritage, and his mother's breathtaking courage.

I highly recommend The Fires of Edgarville for the poetry of Mr. Danner's language, the sensuousness of feels, smells, and sights, and the humanity of the tale.
2858824
Rachel Rose's fourth book, Marry & Burn, goes into the heart of the personally difficult and abides there on the page through cycles of addiction and faltering love in a faltering world. These are poems of the complex domestic, of the fractured self at work in the Protean efforts of remaking, and they are also poems of deep compassion for all the ways we stumble, erode, and gather in. So too, the poet gathers her readers in, with her exceptionally honed musical ear, her formal range, and her striking insights. There is no easy transcendence here, but when it comes in fragile moments, it sings in the body. Like the blue horses galloping on the cover, language gallops with vivacity, momentous and charged, and keeps surprising in its deft turns. A brilliantly lyrical and powerful book of personal myth.
3313766
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's first novel reads like anything but a maiden voyage, as she artfully jumps between times and tones to create a heart piercing but eventually hopeful portrait of highly flawed and conflicted human beings. The real feat of skill, though, is that despite their mistakes, their selfishness, and their injuring acts to each other, we always empathize and usually end up caring for if not loving each of them.

In Harmless Like You, we follow the two parallel plots covering two generations of a family caught at the intersection of multiple cultures.

The first is the story of Yuki, a Japanese-American teenager whowhen faced with her father's company calling the family back to Japan decides to stay in New York City after spending most of her life there, embracing a culture that, although now more home than the country of her parents, still renders her alone.  We follow her as she falls into deeper and deeper love with the arts, all while trying to find a sense of home that invasively roots itself to her life through out the borderlands of the 1960s and 70s counter culture.

The second story is that if Jay, Yuki's biracial son and an a modern day art dealer, feeling flight and unease permeate his already neurotic life as one major milestone after another, from family deaths to new parenthood, causes him to return to searching out his estranged artist mother to find out why she abandoned him and his father and chose flight in the face of motherhood.

Hopefully, if he's lucky, he might find a new home for his elderly, hairless therapy cat.

Earnest vulnerability and fragility permeate every character in Harmless, while their defense mechanisms and processing of reality render equal amounts of surreal, sarcastic, and hilarious, and sublime observation of the self, the world, and the anxieties and hopes we project into it. Shockingly real at one moment and comedically flippant the next, Buchanan's characters learn to infuriate you as only your closest friends and loved ones can, and even those you want to hate pierce your empathy. As a reader of the world she has built and the characters in it, you'll find yourself loving people who infuriate you and pitying at least one abusive narcissist even as you pray for their exit.

From the poetry to the architecture and craft of her prose, the author shapes a world where the colors of a one character's colors and paints frame story, the fashion of another echoes the shredding arc of ambition, and the dealing and collection of another reflect the quest to become whole when, even if you're not sure you ever have been.

Even small choices of writing craft, like the choices between first and third person voice, reflect their character's alternate angles and realities with in the world.

Intersecting art, internationalism, parenthood, love, intersectionality, race, and diversity, Harmless Like You will leave you a bit hollowed out in the best way, and exactly what you need to move forward and try again, regardless of how much you've messed up the lives you live and those you love around you.

And it will leave you hungry to know when you'll be able to read more of the author's worlds.
2243476
The characters in the stories are so real its haunting.  Each story is like peering into someone else's life or at times looking back on your own slice of reality.  This collection of stories has a little something for every kind of reader.  The author spares you nothing by exposing the emotional roller coaster that makes up everyday moments.  Each small story is its own little world where the characters compel you to keep reading.  It's real, it's beautiful and it's honest.  I anxiously await the author's debut novel.
2283719
Train to Pokipse by Rami Shamir is one of the most enthralling books to be born into our world of cultural lassitude since a long while. This new eBook edition is for me the fourth read of Train to Pokipse, it's as exhilarating as the first time, even more so. From the first page, Pokipse melds two worlds of absolute opposites into a lyrical and classical hybrid of beauty and sadness where words become kisses and pinches in just the right amount to make the reader walk away with a sense of humanism punctuated with the grotesque and the sublime.
A marvelous read which lingers in the non-linear time space of the mind and will imprint itself on your synapses giving you more than just a moment of pause. Haunting you and staring you down, it will become part of your vocabulary of knowledge and be forever embraced with tenderness, forgiving life entirely for it's cruelty and chaos.
360575
The Love That Split the World was rather...unexpected. Instead of the kind of book that's enjoyable but largely ruminates on the post-high school limbo and feelings that come with that, you're given this very thoughtful experience that focuses so intently on being far-reaching and philosophical that it kind of falls flat? There's nothing that says The Love That Split the World isn't well-written or very thought out, but there's a lot that says it should have been more emotionally affecting (before the final few pages) and heart-pounding.

Giving a book such a title promises a love story that'll stop you in your tracks, that will leave you wishing for more pages, more moments, more time. Instead, the romance between Natalie and Beau relies on their "connection", not on the kinds of things that forge lasting relationships. It's the kind of relationship that makes Romeo and Juliet look like immature kids, despite the mastery of the pen that wrote them. Maybe it'd last, maybe it wouldn't--but it doesn't necessarily offer the grounds to prove it would, despite the prettiness of the language that delivers it.

The strength of The Love That Split the World is how strongly held up by stories it is. The moments of Grandmother telling Natalie stories are far and away the most fascinating parts of the book--especially in contrast to the complicated theoretics of time travel and alternate realities we're given. They range in kind, most certainly including Native American folk tales and Biblical stories, and how they're woven into the novel is wonderful and masterful. Had all the jargon been ditched in favor of a more mystical approach, I bet I'd have liked this much more.

Throughout the novel, I found myself shrugging, wondering to myself how much I cared. It's a long book, and I never felt fully engaged until the final pages, when the emotional core finally does come to the front--but the bits that should have been surprising weren't, and the big moment isn't any kind of a shock. To see it happen is still affecting (finally), though.

The Love That Splits the World is a high-reaching book, one I can't say reached the expectations it set in me, but one that makes for a thoughtful read. I would argue it likely reaches too far, trying too hard to be both scientifically credible and based in heritage, instead of being fully immersed in one and giving more meat to the love that (supposedly) split the world.
224553
This meta-mythic novel is set in the material world of our diseased, touch-starved bodies, our light-housed landscapes dotted by wastebaskets echoing the wail of abandoned babies.  It is also set in the event horizon of its own unfolding creation, the subjective laws of which are continually laid bare before us.  Finally, though, I suspect the book will be mostly enjoyed for this: here's a good old fashioned ghost story with a ghost story's conflicted heart that sounds both of loss and reclamation.  Waterbaby is a fascinating contribution to Mazza's impressive oeuvre.
936053
RJ Samuels A Place Somewhere, is like nothing Ive ever seen in this genre. In fact, Id go out on a limb and say this is genre-bending fiction because it is much more than pure les fic romance and much darker than others in its class.

A Place Somewhere is not a lighthearted romp, nor is there the humor we saw in Ms. Samuels excellent Falling Colours. But thats okaysometimes a dark, edgy story is the one that needs to be told, and Ms. Samuel obviously needed to tell an intricate story that speaks to the emptiness and pain inside those of us who have experienced profound loss.

A Place Somewhere is a tragic tale of love and loss that unearths the ugly side of meeting a potential partner online, with many twists and unexpected turns. It is a romance, a mystery, and a ballad all wrapped into one. But where there is loss there can also be redemption.

In RJ Samuels vision painter books, she added something extra by inventing a profession that only existed in her imagination. Once again, Ms. Samuel adds a delightful extra goodie for her readers in A Place Somwhere, by teaming up with singer-songwriter Sharon Murphy to co-write the recorded song that bears the same title as this booka song that ties in very neatly and directly to the story.

Bravo to RJ Samuel for once again giving readers the unexpected, keeping us guessing right up until the end, and making us think about what truly defines love.
3500769
This timeless, classic-feeling novel is a story that will find its place, not just in your heart, but rising, rising, rising, in the world of promising contemporary fiction.

You turn the first few pages and a stardust hand wrought of virginal possibility, reaches out and pulls you in immediately. The reader enters Flannerys world of plausible, yearning, unforgettable characters, a world divertingly and edifyingly doomed with the pressing challenges of a forgotten time, but a world not without love. In fact, this cleverly-woven story of unique romance and reckoning and honor, speaks not only of that magical realm that lies in the breath of Noras walks, in her fragile yet strong hands, and in the final twist that proves high tension stories can end in a way that many of us still pine for, but it also speaks of the inextinguishable and awe-inspiring power of love, to not only transcend seemingly insurmountable odds, but also to transform the souls of major characters in a book.

If you don't read this book, then, quite incontrovertibly, you are not interested in the talented, exciting debuts in modern fiction, particularly within the genre of paranormal westerns/romance.

Yours in literature,

J.G.C.
3853322
Hemming Flames, a collection of poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, is a visceral, disturbing narrative relayed in surrealistic bursts over time and spacea liberal peek at the raw substance of a family riddled with mental illness. Akin to a train wreck, the reader wants to look away but cannot. Instead, we observe, as voyeurs, the speakers battles with psychosis, addiction and bellicosity, because its the only way to experience its harsh reality without donning our own armor. Murphys language speaks truth that teeters on the edge of sanity, pulling the reader into a maelstrom of lunatic years, of high hopes and bad habits. Of mediocrity and offenses. Each word, judiciously chosen and juxtaposed onto the page with perfect precision, paints the disturbing picturefraught with sights and sounds, colors and tastes, shapes and texturesof familial devastation. And we, the readers, are forever changed.
1456847
This is one of those books that from time to time I have to just put down and breathe.  The beautiful language and fragmented glimpses of thoughts and memories that flit through Emma's mind as she struggles to find a place and purpose for herself in Africa, are breathtaking.  Imbedded in Orr's novel are glimpses of the unintentional hubris of western thought against the background of a more natural and ancient wisdom.  There is strong contrast of value systems. What we might label as 'the poor and suffering' are seen as holding richness and blessing. There is great dignity in the people of Africa, and Orr captures this in a vivid way. A key quote for me that represents an upside-down way of seeing and valuing is found in the chapter called "Revelations".  Emma meets a wise woman, the Iyalode, and she sketches in the dirt a map of Africa to enlighten the village woman. "When Emma raised her eyes, the sun nearly blinded her and she remembered for a moment swinging out under the big oak in her front yard when she was a girl, how she would let her head go back to watch the sun falling upside down through the trees.  Then when she got off the swing, the right-way world looked upside down." In this novel full of real, well-developed human characters who struggle to deal with passion, faith, love and losses, we are able to view from the inside out a powerful intermingling of human lives.
2685749
I was lucky enough to preview the story, and I have to say I was really surprised and drawn into it. I felt like a time machine had thrust me back into the sometimes seedy setting of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver, and offered a narrow glimpse into the lives of a few young, emerging adults, who had embarked on a journey to the dark and often sobering reality of a large gathering of comic book fans -- many young and naive, others older, wiser, and sometimes exploitative. I found myself cheering for the protagonist, as he navigated this new and uncertain world coupled with courage and a big heart. I really look forward to seeing it translated to the big screen, someday.

Don't expect a dull story about a few comic book geeks and freaks hanging around a comic book convention.  Much like the bold and mysterious cover, this tale really does deliver a much more wondrous, surprising, and often moving tale, than one might expect from a story centered around comic book geeks.
1346502
I picked this up from my library, not knowing about it. What a deep and surprising read this was! This book was very artfully crafted as an exploration of what it means to be a part of the world, and how our environment encroaches, no matter how hard you try to isolate. The transcriptionist spends her days hearing news stories that need to be transcribed for the paper and slowly the stories impact her psyche. Cracks begin to form when she briefly meets a blind woman on a bus who seems to understand her. When she reads about the woman's remarkable suicide, she undertakes a journey to understand the woman and herself. Poignant, sage and deftly written. I loved the style where the themes circled the plot and kept ringing true and present.
4302520
I am glad I picked up this volume

Although I don't typically find myself drawn to read short stories, I am glad I picked up this volume. I quickly became engrossed, drawn in by the writing, the interesting plot lines, and the characters. The stories, some idiosyncratic, some visionary, are engaging and turn out fascinating protagonists; the characters are ordinary and relatable, yet possess a sensitivity, self-possession, and keenness of insight as they navigate the world.

The stories encompass a variety of experiences and settings, from a virtual screen reality to the reaches of death. While each one exists for the sake of its own story, I began to notice some common themes. The one that emerged most strongly involves the individual's struggle against society, represented at times by parent and teacher, and at times by culture at large. "IV Club" is set in a school (IV stands for "Innocent Victims") It's interesting to note the name of the club shares the same initials as "intravenous", which is an apt name for a school club led by a vengeful, twisted teacher who attempts to infuse students with ideas that threaten to erase their individuality. This theme also comes across in "Pill" in which a doctor prescribes a mood altering drug to a vulnerable college student. In "Precipice," the menace of society is exceptionally vivid as a pressing force that pursues Jake to the edge of a cliff, and while one might suppose death is his only way out, the author does suggest an alternative.

While I noticed this theme penetrates a number of stories, others were more sharply focused on a single, seemingly mundane experience that drives the plot. "Eye Contact" examines the nonverbal behaviors that influence a poker game; "Sadman" is about the irked feeling the performer protagonist feels after a stranger calls him Mr. Sadman. The experience is gently transformative as he alters the content of his songs but insists at the end of the story, "I wasn't a changed man, I hadn't seen the light or anything." One of my favorites was the last story, "Not the Same," in which the narrator demonstrates interesting self-consciousness as he maintains that "I am not an artist" even as his photographs are exhibited in museums.

An enjoyable read, Modern Day Fables is also thought provoking. It is well worth the read!
4211275
I found The Grave of God's Daughter an absorbing and magical  journey to a time and place that was not only Lost Allegheny, Pennsylvania among hand-scrabble, insular, obsessively private and shriveled-spirited Polish Catholic immigrant stock, but a sojourn reminiscent in a hundred ways of an emotionally-starved and delimited childhood savored and endured anywhere, on any dark streets or backroads. The narrator is being metamorphosed by the gigantic events of her lived world into an ultimately-wise but scarred, brave and (in her case) empathetic, self-reliant but regretful young woman before reaching adolescence and awareness of what being a woman will mean for her. The narrative is spare because the milieu of her and the younger brother dependent on her emotionally is stark and spare, darkened by overpowering but realistic foreboding and fear, by a graniness and plainness that darkens the sky and stunts childhood itself. The author is to be highly commended for not straying outside the bounds of that sadly all-too-common, even prevelant, milieu in the larger world beyond our tinsel and fading affluence. Lest we forget! At times, toward the end, I was almost afraid of what I might uncover turning the page... I, a child of the rural small-town protestant and anglo midwest, by far happier of circumstance, was taken back to that other world.
88535
The Fangipani Hotel is an interesting creaturean atmospheric collection of ghost/supernatural stories that are contemporary in their setting, but grounded in centuries-old Vietnamese folklore. Im not usually a reader of supernatural fiction, but having read a fair bit of non-fiction about the war in Vietnam, I was curious to see what the author would do in creating post-war narratives that drew on both recent and more distant history. The war itself was certainly more horrific than any Stephen King noveland our war was only the latest in a long history of struggles for Vietnamese independence.

These aren't really stories that will surprise. The tropes of this sort of literature are familiar enough, even to people like me who read very little of it. But these are definitely stories that will unsettleand in more ways than one. First, they offer that seductive pull of a situation that begins just a little bit off, then takes the reader further and further from reality as she knows it. I found that the added glimpses of contemporary Vietnamese culture and experience (both in Vietnam and the United States) turned the collection into a sort of other-worldly diversity training: this combination of supernatural real and real real made for an interesting read.

This is Violet Kupersmiths first book, and it feels like a first book. Some moments are exquisitely presented; others seem a bit flat-footed, as though the writer couldn't quite move beyond her initial idea to a fuller embodiment of that idea. In some of its best moments, the collection has a thread of humor running through it that illuminates many of the cultural contrasts underlying the stories. In Guests, set in Vietnams community of European and American ex-patriots we are told about one character, an American teaching at an Australian international university, that If he ever worried about color it was over whether or not he should spell it with a u. In the same story, the characters spend endless evenings in bars and clubs that embody the cultural hybridization they experience, including one bar in which the back wall was taken up by a lovingly rendered mural of Marx, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh frolicking together in a swimming-pool-sized bowl of pho. Marx was wearing water wings and a snorkel.

Another story, Turning Back, features a Vietnamese-American narrator who works night shifts at a local convenience store while her brother engages in low-level gang activity. This piece is related in first person and opens with the wry observation that Though one fortunate consequence of my fathers disappearance was that we became estranged from his family and whatever nuptials they might incur, given the size of Mommas side there are still at least four weddings to attend each year. Weddings of cousins, weddings of second cousins, weddings of people who are most likely cousins because their last name is Nguyen and they live within a sixty-mile radius.

My hope is that Kupersmith will continue to writeand continue to be published. I expect the imagination she brings to her work will continue to yield interesting narratives and that her prose will become increasingly rich and complex.