All is the Telling (Diode Editions, 4/5/25) is a memoir in poems. That’s what made me want to read and review it. But when I opened the book and began to read I understood why so many memoir instructors and instructions suggest that all writers should read poetry—for the language. The language throughout this book […]
“What Love Can’t Fix: Navigating the Storms of My Husband’s Mental Illness” by Kay L. Harris
May 3, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Tallahassee systems analyst, Kay L. Harris, will move you to tears with her memoir of her husband’s serious mental illness (SMI), What Love Can’t Fix: Navigating the Storms of My Husband’s Mental Illness (2026). Written from the heart of a child raised on Disney dreams in the post-war recovery from the Great Depression, it reveals how life […]
“The Mango Tree” by Annabelle Towmetich
April 15, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Annabelle Tometich’s delightful sense of humor sweetens even the toughest, most humiliating moments of her life in her outstanding memoir, The Mango Tree (Little, Brown and Company, 2024). Beginning with an epigraph from her mother’s Facebook feed, the book announces its tone immediately: laugh-out-loud funny. “I shook my family tree and a bunch of nuts […]
“The Slip” by Lucas Schaefer
April 14, 2026 by Leave a Comment
To write a novel that both expands generations and centers on one person is always a hard thing to do. To do it so successfully with your debut novel is another thing altogether. The Slip (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Lucas Schaefer is a huge novel, not so much physically as mentally. You start the […]
“Ava: A Novel” by Victoria Dillon
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Just as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World invited us to imagine test-tube babies and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale invites us to imagine fertile women enslaved as breeders, Ava: A Novel by Victoria Dillon opens us to the possibility that in a post-Roe world, human birth might evolve into something entirely different. I mean, entirely […]
Read of the Month: “Art Work: On the Creative Life “by Sally Mann
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Almost without exception, seeing a book with the subtitle “On the Creative Life” I’d take a pass. But who can resist a book like Sally Mann’s Art Work Art Work: On the Creative Life (New York: Abrams Press, 2025), that begins with “This is a book about how to get shit done” ? Sally Mann, […]