​Grief Sequence by Prageeta Sharma is a collection of poems about the loss of her husband, Dale, due to esophageal cancer. It’s a painful, though important look at how or what a person is supposed to do with the grief they have. I particularly enjoyed, ‘Complicated Spiritual Grief, Part 1’, ‘Sequence 7’, and ‘Returning to Our Creation Myth’. There are moments where the speaker takes Dale’s medication away because they are being over prescribed or sending Dale’s ashes down a river. In the poem, ‘March Wind’, I was floored by what Sharma writes, “I learn that there are two winters and two early springs happening at the same time and I have to turn one season to the other to get past their painful awakenings. It’s just a snow patch. It’s still melting.”
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Austral by Carlos Fonseca is a novel about a professor, Julio, who digs up the past after receiving a request to edit the last novel of his dead friend, Aliza Abravanel. He’s sent to a commune called Humahuaca in Argentina where he meets Aliza’s assistant and is given Aliza’s manuscript. All the while, Julio’s wife returns to her family after a fight about Julio leaving the US. At the commune, Julio reads parts of the manuscript meant to be the ending of Aliza’s tetralogy on the elements of the earth. The novel seems to parallel the life of Aliza, though she was insistent her writing is not memoir. Along the way, Julio tries to fill and understand the space of Aliza’s passing by meeting another one of her assistants, Sarapura, who helped Aliza transcribe some of her writing into another manuscript titled Dictionary of Loss. With the two manuscripts, Julio returns home trying to determine the meanings of Aliza’s writing. Though, he keeps on hitting dead ends. That is until he finds out about a man who built a theater in the ruins of a town where an earthquake had destroyed it. In the theater, there are recordings of residents describing their childhoods before war and the earthquake. And in the voices, Julio realizes what to do with the manuscripts, as they weren’t meant to be edited by him, rather they were for him to read. So, he walks a little farther from the theater and buries both manuscripts in the ground.
 
Fonseca creates stories within stories as there are excerpts of Aliza’s novels in Austral. I enjoyed the way he illustrates the parallels between Julio and his journey to Aliza’s narrators, and I enjoyed the feeling that I was excavating a life along with Julio.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Ploughshares Vol. 50, No. 2 is a collection of stories guest edited by Rebecca Makkai spanning the lives of sperm donor children, cancer diagnoses, a video store robbery, and a child with a frog heart. The stories I particularly enjoyed—and there were many—were ‘Rooms’ by Molly Anders, ‘Frog Heart’ by Joy Deva Baglio, ‘Video Wonderland, How Can I Help You?’ by Diana Cao, ‘Goodbye, Raymond Carver’ by Jane Delury, ‘Prolific Donor’ by Peter Mountford, and ‘Gaps and Silences’ by Suzanne Roberts. Though, the story with the greatest impact was ‘Back-up Mom’ by Janice Furlong which is about a gay woman who doesn’t have a desire to have kids. However, her sister, a doctor, has recently and suddenly left her husband with their child. The sister continues to pull away from her family, and has an outburst at her son’s birthday party. Eventually, the son stays more often with the narrator until one weekend the narrator realizes her sister is about to kill herself. The narrator then finds her sister puking due to an overdose of Valium. At the end, the son stays more often with the narrator, and her ideas of parenthood slowly morph through the story. It was a powerful and heartbreaking story to read with the way the narrator at first views her nephew. Overall, I was floored with the stories in this issue, in both their range and their emotion.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg is a novel about a ghostwriter living in Florida whose sister becomes obsessed with a VR headset called MIND’S EYE. Set at the tail end of a pandemic, the narrator discusses her past episodes then her admittance into a mental hospital, her father’s passing, her runner husband, and her mother unknowingly beginning a cult. It follows the narrator as she experiences strange weather occurrences and then the disappearance of her sister. She believes it has something to do with MIND’S EYE, so she goes into the virtual world which turns out to be a parallel universe where her sister died from the pandemic and she is an author as opposed to a ghostwriter. In the parallel world, they find out that the narrator’s employer is dead and the assistants continue to publish formulaic novels as well as the fact that the creator of MIND’S EYE was close friends to the author the narrator ghostwrites. Her half twin sisters then take her to the bedside of the father in the parallel universe, soon coming upon the idea that all of them should return to the narrator’s world. When they return, the pandemic has started to change people’s bodies and the twins decide to move away, thus being saved from their initial world.
 
van den Berg writes in sharp prose that electrify the weird and strange things that occur in the novel. The narrator’s sister’s eyes continually change color, her belly button becomes a deep tunnel then smooths over, while other body transformations being described in interesting ways. I loved the idea of ghosts (i.e. the narrator being a ghostwriter as well as her father’s ghost talking to her sister through MIND’S EYE) that van den Berg weaves throughout the novel. It’s a climate novel, a pandemic novel, and a novel that uses its surrealness to create moments of tenderness.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Role Play by Clara Drummond is a novel about Vivian Noronha, a curator as well as daughter to a well-off family in Brazil. She sees herself as middle class, though has servants and her family owns multiple properties, putting her firmly in the wealthy class. Throughout the novel, Vivian goes to parties, does drugs, has sex, and lives a life of a Brazilian elite. Though, under the surface there are problems: Vivian grew up in a conservative household where sex was taboo, had medical problems with her eyesight, and was put on medication for her depression. There’s a moment where her cousin, Albertinho (whose father is actually the one supplying Vivian’s family with money), makes her drink until she blacks out because she doesn’t want to answer his invasive questions. Then, one night at a party, one of the usual vendors selling beer, Darlene, doesn’t appear. Vivian asks another vendor, and it turns out Darlene had died. This causes Vivian, not necessarily to feel pity for Darlene, but to think about Vivian’s life in context to Darlene’s. At the end of the novel, Vivian has rough sex with Luiz Felipe, in a way to work through her feelings both in relation to Darlene and to her family.
 
Drummond provides a really strong and nearly satirical voice to Vivian, which shows on the outside she’s a strong, rich woman. Though, on the inside has loads of insecurities that materialize in the way she approaches sex and partying. It’s a really interesting look into the lives of the elite, and the problems that they encounter.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​When They Tell You to be Good by Prince Shakur is a memoir about being Black, gay, and struggling with the absence of a father and a mother’s refusal of acceptance. Shakur describes his years of travel to France, the Philippines, Jamaica, South Korea, and throughout the US. It’s in these places where he attends protests, stays with the locals, meets and falls in love, all while trying to understand his place in a family that hates gay people and how he’s meant to deal with the story of his father’s death. In childhood, Shakur’s mother finds his journal which detail his feelings for another boy, which enrages her. Throughout all his travels, Shakur then processes his mother/community’s reaction, both getting close to other men and pulling away when the pain is too much. Shakur’s family is embroiled in a history of violence: his two uncles in Jamaica were shot and killed due to drug disputes, his other uncle in the US was killed by police, and his step father was arrested because of his citizenship status. Near the end, Shakur comes to realize his father is alive in Arizona, where they talk in a diner and part ways knowing their relationship existed only in imagination.
 
Throughout the novel, Shakur pulls in quotes and discusses James Baldwin, W.E.B Du Bois, and Frank B. Wilderson III to contextualize and make meaning out of the horrors that Black communities face. There were moments that felt as if some paragraphs were tangentially related, which sometimes gave a disconnected feeling while reading. Though, on the whole, I felt that Shakur’s synthesis of his life brought an intensity that I was glad to read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is a novel about a trans woman, Reese, a once trans woman, Ames (Amy), and Katrina discussing and prepping to have a child together. Reese and Ames used to date when Ames had once been Amy, a trans woman. However, when Reese begins to secretly date a married man, Stanley, and Amy finds out, their relationship turns sour. This creates a rift in their relationship, and is one of the suspicions Reese has of Amy’s detransition: that Amy was scared not of being a woman, but of how others saw her. Ames then comes back into Reese’s life after he gets his boss pregnant and isn’t up to being a parent, so decides to enlist Reese, who really wants to be a mother, in raising Katrina’s child. As they get to know each other, Katrina invites Reese to an essential oil party where Katrina reveals to her friends that she’s pregnant and Reese reveals that she’s trans. Then, at a dinner later that day, they are at a restaurant when a man Reese recognizes, her boyfriend, arrives to the dinner as the husband to one of Katrina’s friends. This causes Katrina to truly question Reese as a person, and whether she would be fit to be included in her family. Eventually, after an angry email, and a walk into the frigid ocean, Reese tries to convince Katrina to keep the child, though Katrina is already at this point apprehensive. Though, the novel ends at this moment before the abortion appointment, with the rest of what happens being implied.
 
I really liked the frankness of the novel as well as the way Peters weaves in the past and present. It feels as though I’m getting a close look at the intricacies of queer relationships, how people view them, and what it means to be a person. Peters shows her characters, not as the quintessentially perfect queers some media tends to do, but as people who make mistakes and have to owe up to their actions. It’s a beautiful rendition of what it means to desire motherhood, exist as trans, and what people will do to fight for created families.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Florida Review 47.2 features a collection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of which I enjoyed a few. I particularly liked ‘Antidote’ by Ben Kline, ‘Indulgences’ by Garrett Biggs, ‘Elegy with Snake Twisting my Blistered Tongue’ by Alejandro Lucero, ‘Suspended in Flight’ by Diane Gottlieb, ‘OWLS’ by Kathryn Campo Bowen, and ‘A Chest of Drawers’ by Jason Brown. I liked the flow of ‘OWLS’ in the way that the two men try to find their friend, Vanessa, after a night drinking where she wanted to have sex with one of the men. All the characters are studying law, with the speaker planning to write a novel but it never comes to fruition. In the end, they find Vanessa, as she is not lost, and is annoyed they went looking for her. I found this collection to be a generally solid read.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go by Cleo Qian is a collection of stories mainly about Asian American women living lives that are surreal, magical, or supernatural. There were many stories I enjoyed, particularly, ‘Chicken. Film. Youth’ about a man who has a theater attached to his chicken restaurant, ‘Wing and the Radio’ about a famous singer and a radio host, ‘The Girl with the Double Eyelids’ about a girl who can see strange tattoos on people’s skin after she gets surgery on her eyes which then leads to finding out her best friend is dating their Chemistry teacher, ‘Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go’ about a group of friends doing an experimental art piece by streaming their lives in a remote house online, ‘Power and Control’ about a woman who is an alchemist and tries to keep her girlfriend with her by manipulating and controlling her, and ‘Seagull Village’ where a woman, Miho, is the only surviving person in the town after the earthquake in Japan. It’s a brilliant collection and I was completely enthralled by the drama that ensued within ‘The Girl with the Double Eyelids’. Qian uses the surreal and supernatural in ways that aren’t overbearing, but lead to the story’s climaxes (either in the weird tattoos revealing something about the character’s inner lives or the changing or reality to benefit a relationship). Overall, I really enjoyed the collection.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Story Winter 1993 is a collection of short stories. Many of the story were decent, either dealing with grief, adultery, or loss of a child. Though, I particularly liked ‘The First Snow’ by Daniel Lyons, which is about a father whose family finds out he’s gay after cops catch him in the park, and his son, who is a high school senior, tries to understand and deal with the revelation of his father. The father, it seems then “over corrects” for him being gay by taking his son out shooting birds. Other stories I found interesting were ‘God’s Door’ by Sally Savic, and ‘Jacinta’ by Charles D’Ambrosio.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5