About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Walter Mosley
Rave Spectrum Culture Mosley imbues each and every character with an astonishing degree of detail and genealogical backstory (often rendered within a single, almost impossibly informative sentence) that makes many of these stories read more like biographies in miniature. Each character is so fully realized as to come across as someone you could easily run into an immediately know and understand the whole of their story. It’s a remarkable achievement in any fictional narrative, made all the more so by the length constraints of the short story format ... the characters themselves remain of a piece with Mosley’s other creations throughout, existing on the page as fully fleshed out characters with lives behind and ahead of them, hopes and dreams, a rich family history and an overwhelming desire to simply make it through each day the best they possibly can. In this, Mosley’s titular \'awkwardness\' can be read simple as humanity and the existential struggles contained therein.
Ivy Pochoda
Rave Spectrum Culture Ivy Pochoda’s These Women seeks to be the literary equivalent of any number of the recent spate of true crime documentaries and podcasts that reveal their respective mysteries piecemeal, while also attempting to inject timely social commentary ... It’s hard to delve too deeply into the plot without giving away the series of well-paced clues and reveals, suffice to say that Pochoda deftly handles an otherwise tricky narrative that, in lesser hands, could easily come off as overly preachy or heavy-handed...These Women fleshes out each character in a way that feels wholly believable and lived-in, lending a depth and breadth to each that, in most contemporary crime narratives, relegates them to the fringes ... Ivy Pochoda has delivered a thoroughly enjoyable mystery novel that manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking without relying on an overwrought or overly preachy narrative. The book forces you, the reader, to give more notice to the people encountered in our day-to-day lives, fleshing out those otherwise static background players with rich backstories that help illustrate how and why they are who they are while forcing us to reassess our biases and prejudices with regard to those perceived as \'other.\'
Robert Hass
Positive Spectrum Culture Hass’s attention to such details helps anchor many of his otherwise out-there stream-of-consciousness poems, many of which bear an almost conversational tone, one that swerves wildly from one topic to the next, often within the space of a single line. Because of this, much of Summer Snow meanders and tends to get lost within itself, and that makes for tedious reading ... But those familiar with Hass’s style over the last several decades will already be well aware of what they are in for, and will find little reason to quibble when he goes off on florid descriptions of remote, almost anachronistically rustic and quaint European villages, or the haunting mountains and forests of his native California. A handful of esoteric locales serve as starting points for many of Hass’s poetic musings and diaristic recounting of a life lived with a great deal of passion and interest in the world around him ... From a traditional standpoint, Summer Snow will likely come off as somewhat avant garde. But the reality is that Hass’s approach is very much in line with how we in 2020 communicate and share our world with others. It may lack Hass’s more poetic flourishes, vocabulary and (most of the time) coherence, but the majority of us are sharing comparable insights via social media platforms and increasingly text-based interactions. In this, Summer Snow is a fine reflection of our current culture both in tone, topicality and execution.
Emma Copley Eisenberg
Pan Spectrum Culture With The Third Rainbow Girl, Emma Copley Eisenberg tries to cram far too many ideas into one narrative, in turn losing the most important thread contained therein ... But Eisenberg further muddies the waters by dragging herself front and center into the story, recounting her NYC girl experiences in the same rural county of West Virginia several decades removed from the crime ... . The approach feels not only forced, but unnecessary, as though it were part of a separate work that could’ve just as easily fallen under its own memoir header ... Unfortunately, this attempt to cover all the hot-button issues under the aegis of a true crime story causes each to receive short shrift and, in the long run, causes the overarching story to suffer ... Her ideas are all noble enough, they simply don’t fit together in a way that proves consistently engaging.