“You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you’re standing in the eye,” sings Brandi Carlile. No one was dancing in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. In Words Alone Are Certain Good (Pen & Leaf Press, 2025), Trenton Judson writes of characters paddling, swimming, crawling, clinging, but rarely dancing, during the storm and its […]
January 2026 Books of Note
January 11, 2026 by Leave a Comment
“Cinnamon Beach” by Suzanne Kamata “Multicultural family” does not adequately describe the relationships among the characters in Suzanne Kamata’s Cinnamon Beach (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2024). Characters who are Indian American, Black, Japanese, American Japanese, white, hearing impaired, and gender fluid people this novel. Add in family members with chronic illnesses related to aging, and the character who […]
“The Goddess of Weaver Street” by Joy Ross Davis
August 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Review by Deb Bowen Prolific author Joy Ross Davis offers readers both magical realism and a view of societal norms for upper class women during the Eisenhower era in The Goddess of Weaver Street (Wyatt-MacKenzie, July 2, 2024) Women in the 1950s and early 1960s, relegated to rigidly defined domestic roles, cherished their portable hair […]