Judging from her exceptional poems in Like Zeros, Like Pearls (Charlotte Lit Press 2025), award-winning poet Lola Haskins has both a scientific and a literary bent to her world view. In this new and glorious collection, she showcases both. Like the cicadas in her poem “The Spirituality of Cicadas,” creatures believed by ancient Chinese to […]
“Love You to Death” by Christina Dotson
September 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Love You to Death (Bantam 2025) by debut author Christina Dotson is an action-packed, smart, genre-blending story of a deep but dysfunctional friendship between two young women. The novel is superb—and superbly disturbing. While female friendships are the heart and soul of women’s fiction, the toxic relationship in Love You to Death is not the […]
“She Had To Die” by Rebecca Barrett
September 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In Rebecca Barrett’s new novel She Had To Die (2025), murder in a small-town near Mobile Alabama sets off a riveting police procedural steeped in late-sixties atmosphere. A beautiful young woman, Ruby Stanton, is found shot dead in a shabby motel, and Mobile detectives Hugo August and his longtime friend Junior Knight are called in. […]
“Son of a Bird” by Nin Andrews
September 8, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Son of a Bird (Etruscan Press 2025), is a disarmingly fascinating memoir of a childhood on a dairy farm in Virginia that is told in a collection of prose poems by well-established poet Nin Andrews. While there are some harsh memories, on balance it is a book with a great deal of charm—and courage. Andrews […]
“The Dark Library” by Mary Anna Evans
July 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Mary Anna Evans has been intriguing readers with her masterful and intelligent mysteries for over two decades. During this time, Mississippi-born Evans earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Exeter and became an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. […]