Suspend Your Disbelief

Reviews

Reviews |

Animal Sanctuary, by Sarah Falkner

by Laura Valeri

Published last month by Starcherone Books, Sarah Falkner’s debut novel is the winner of their seventh annual Prize for Innovative Fiction. Contributor Laura Valeri says this of the book: “Even beyond the novel’s halfway point, the reader may still be uncertain of the story’s protagonists or the animal sanctuary’s role. But the pages keep turning because of Falkner’s incisive prose, her accurate and fluid discussion of the aesthetic values of film, and the moral complexity of her characters.”


Reviews |

Animals, by Don LePan

by Laura Roberts

In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.


Reviews |

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin

by Brad Wetherell

In this wide-ranging review, Brad Wetherell looks at Tom Franklin’s newest novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and considers the way Franklin subverts genre expectations, as well as how e-readers like the Kindle have the potential to change readers’ expectations.


Reviews |

[Reviewlet] In Caddis Wood, by Mary François Rockcastle

by Anne Clinard Barnhill

A good place to die? Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel In Caddis Wood unfolds as call and response between a husband facing terminal illness, and his wife of more than thirty years. What does it look like to draw strength from a shared past, even as the future dwindles?


Reviews |

Journal of the Week: A Public Space

by Michael Rudin

Our latest Journal of the Week, A Public Space, strives to be “a literary forum for the stories behind the news, a fragment of an overheard conversation, a peek at the novel the person next to you on the subway is reading, the life you invent for the man in front of you at the supermarket checkout line. Ideas and stories about the things that confront us, amuse us, confound us, intrigue us.”


Reviews |

The Angel Makers, by Jessica Gregson

by Cyan James

Ever wish your problems would disappear? Jessica Gregson’s history-laced debut (released this week in the U.S. by Soho Press) follows a village of Hungarian women who “make angels” of abusive husbands. But it doesn’t end there. Yank on your rain boots and follow her into a complicated rural wasteland for a bracing read.




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