mlafave's reviews
351 reviews

May Our Joy Endure is utterly destabilizing in construction, jumping into and out of the heads of a cast of prickly Montreal upper-crusts in ways that insidiously coerces you into believing the worst kinds of people and viewpoints. At the center of this vortex is the architecture superstar and digital media personality Céline Wachowski - who comes undone at the hands of public opinion. Yet, this novel never feels like a mere story of cancellation, but instead an almost drowning immersion into the world of the design world’s elite. At numerous points in reading this I set the book down to recalibrate my brain from  Kevin Lambert’s character viewpoints leaching into my brain. 

We will all encounter disability someday. Yet, as Johanna Hedva notes in their opening essay to this collection -a re-examination of their influential “sick woman theory” - culture refuses to view disability beyond disability’s diametric opposition to capitalist productivity. In this expansive, vulnerable, radical collection of essays, Hedva articulates the ways that their own thinking of disability has led to a more radical vision of utopia. From UFC shows to kink, Hedva’s collection asks readers to leave their socially conditioned ideas of disability, death, and doom behind. Full of more questions than answers, but in a way that writhes from topic to topic, How to Tell When We Will Die will rearrange your thinking. 

 Perhaps the emotion All Friends are Necessary provoked in me the most was yearning, a tender-hearted love for these characters, from their triumphs to their anxieties, and everything in between. Tomas Moniz maneuvers through time in this beautiful exploration of friendship, longing, and belonging, as Efren “Chino” Flores navigates his relationship with family through the partnerships he forms within his community. This will leave you wanting to immediately call your closest friends. 

In The Empusium the gothic mixes with folk horror in a slow burning - no, scratch that, slow decaying - narrative of illness, paranoia, and the fogginess of fall at a 1910s sanitarium. Nature and trees are not what they seem in the idyllic countryside, gone slightly off, surrounding the sanitarium guesthouse, full of men dying of tuberculosis, and ready to spend their last days claiming the inferiority of women with their last shredded breath. Narrated by a mysterious entity that invites you into their voyeurism for unknown purposes, this left me chilled to the bones like a chilly October night.

Only chaos could ensue when six wildly different middle school boys – brought together by their shared job as paperboys for the Milwaukee Sentinel (and shared hungering for Burger King) - plus their harangued manager go to down-on-its-luck neighborhood Hampton Heights, especially as Hampton Heights turns out to be the most haunted neighborhood you’ve met since Hawkins, Indiana. In Hampton Heights Dan Kois follows each set of kids, as well as their manager, as they encounter witches, werewolves, and trolls, and grow along the way. Part coming-of-age, part fairy tale, part something else entirely, Hampton Heights is the perfect novel to ease you into the spooky season.

Annie Lane isn’t going to let anything stop her - not her cheating ex-boyfriend, not her gossiping school enemies, not her toxic mother, not her creepy boss, and certainly not her murder on Resurrection Peak. When she wakes from the cold water of the Paulinskill River, she does so with a hunger for revenge on the entire small town of Hagley, and everyone in it who are acting like this is all somehow her fault. Codie Crowley subverts the “final girl” trope with all the dark hilarity of Jennifer’s Body complete with a beautifully rendered, realistic, complicated friendship between Annie and her best friend Maura - made even more complicated by Annie’s death and Maura’s seeming disappearance. For all of the “unlikeable” girls, and those that love them.

Shakespeare retellings are sometimes, to me, the bellwether for the world writ large. Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth takes the powerful character of Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, combined with the myth and magic of Marie de France’s lais and reforms the story you know, even if you’ve read Macbeth backwards and forwards. Intrepid Shakespeare readers will know the story beats, but will gasp at the “how” and the “why” of each one. The beautiful and witchy Roscilla - soon to become our Lady Macbeth - finds herself and her power in the lonely peaks of medieval Scotland. Riveting and gorgeous, Reid’s writing will captivate you.

As soon as I opened Mordew to both a map and an author’s note telling me to not check the glossary of terms at the end of the book, I knew this book was for me. This only continued when presented with an itemized list of what to expect ranging from “God’s dead body” to “various magical knives.” Alex Pheby tosses his reader directly into the (only slightly metaphorical) waves in Mordew with city politics, living mud, corpses, and magic. Especially considering the final appendix titled “Fragments Towards a Natural Philosophy of the Weft,” Mordew feels particularly historical and creepy in its world building and construction. 

In the twelve stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People, Mariana Enriquez finds the haunting darkness in the cracks of the pavement of city life in Buenos Aires, reveling in the off-kilter and macabre that we know, and blending it with the supernatural. Enriquez plays with horror tropes throughout - from the cityfolk gone to the country in “A Local Artist” to the beleaguered (true crime!) journalist in the titular story “A Sunny Place for Shady People” - but does so in ways that will still leave you thrilled and unsettled by the close. Much like the ghosts that will not stop screaming in the first story in this collection (“My Sad Dead”), Enriquez’s prose insists on finding its way into your brain. 

In Bluff, Danez Smith reckons with the role of art and poetry as a poet from the Twin Cities in 2020 and beyond. Bluff offers a meditation on the power of art against a world and a system designed in opposition. Particularly, the poems and mini-essays in this collection offer a reckoning of the Twin Cities and Minnesota through its history, its present, and its hopeful future. In “My Beautiful End of the World” – my favorite from Bluff – Smith asks “Who does this country believe deserves beauty? Who is allowed nature?” – a question that metonymously stands in for the question at the core of this collection – who is allowed beauty?