“Redemption Lake” by Susan Clayton-Goldner

It’s 1989, and Matt Garrison is getting ready to graduate high school and leave for college like any other 18-year-old. Except that he isn’t your typical 18-year-old: he’s still haunted six years later by the drowning death of his cousin. And then one night he finds himself in the bed of his best friend’s mother […]

“Wolf Hunt” by Ivailo Petrov

In “Wolf Hunt,” the threads of village passions come together as a group sets off on a wolf hunt that serves as a pretext for something even more murderous. Living side-by-side for decades, right through the upheavals of WWII and forced collectivization, has inflamed resentments rather than drawing people together, leading to a violent denouement. […]

“The Blended Ones” by Angela J. Ford

“The Blended Ones” is a high fantasy novel in some ways very reminiscent of the Shannara books. There are the Four Worlds and the Four People Groups, and adolescent siblings who have to go off on a magical quest to save the world. In this case, though, it’s two sisters, Phyllis and Ilieus, who are […]

“Land of Hidden Fires” by Kirk Kjeldsen

Kari’s just your typical teenage girl, dreaming of boys and being like Rita Hayworth…except that her country is currently occupied by Nazi Germany. When an American pilot crash-lands near her father’s farm, she sets off on a desperate adventure to smuggle him to Sweden. I always have my eye open for some good Nordic reading, […]

“Slime Pop! Saga” by CB Archer

***Okay, I need to start out with a disclaimer! As a representative of higher education, my official position is that I do NOT approve of any of the action in this book! End of disclaimer*** Ian Walker is a black gay science and math nerd who has two problems sullying his undergraduate idyll: He and […]

“Sankya” by Zakhar Prilepin

“People like you save yourselves by devouring Russia, and people like me–by devouring our own souls. Russia is nourished on the souls of her sons–she thrives on them. Not by the righteous ones, but by the cursed.” So says Sasha (“Sankya”) Tishin, the protagonist of “Sankya,” Zakhar Prilepin’s novel about “communofascist” Russian opposition group the […]

“A Winter’s Love” by Madeleine L’Engle

I read this book with conflicted feelings: on the one hand, I was impressed by what a talented and insightful writer L’Engle was even so early in her career, and on the other, compared with her later works, it’s clear here that L’Engle hadn’t quite hit her stride. What for another writer would be a […]

“Ahe’ey” by Jamie Le Fay

The problem with writing woman-centered, feminist, or matriarchal texts is that we don’t actually have a lot of good examples to pull from. Our art and archetypes have been filtered through millennia of misogyny, so that all the storylines, tropes, topoi, cliches, and everything else that goes into making a novel have a base setting […]

“Froelich’s Ladder” by Jamie Duclos-Yourdon

Two brothers fall in love with the same woman. Instead of settling it sensibly, or at least by dueling, one of them climbs up an enormous ladder they’ve been constructing, and refuses to come down for years. And rather than just letting the ladder fall, the other props it up till he dies and is […]

“Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man” by Alan M. Clark

Although serial killers are not normally my thing, I’ve been reading these illustrated novels based on the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper with interest. Rather than focus on the pathologies of Jack the Ripper’s mind, and the goriness of his methods, this books put the spotlight on how his victims lived, and […]

E. P. Clark: Author, Book Reviewer, and All-Around Literary Handiwoman

Fiction