About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Halle Butler
Positive Booklist Butler’s narrative voice can also be comedic with a nihilist touch. Daring readers will eagerly turn the page to see their own unspeakable thoughts exposed by Butler.
Nina Sharma
Positive Booklist Just as impressive as Sharma’s composed, polished, and wholly sincere writing is her range of topics, including mental health, the model minority, police brutality, familial trauma, and COVID-19’s anti-East Asian racism.
Alana S. Portero, trans. Mara Faye Lethem
Positive Booklist Raw, unapologetic, and ingenious in its expressions of pain ... Hidden within this heartrending story is the healing power of caregiving within women’s circles, offering novel ways to consider feminine alliances.
Chantha Nguon with Kim Green
Positive Booklist Demonstrating an exceptional sensitivity to the cultural, social, and political significance of food, Nguon extends cooking metaphors across documentations of war, poverty, sexual exploitation, and authoritative terror ... With hunger for gender equality and attention to class differences, this memoir is also a redemptive homecoming to parts of Cambodian history still fresh in many minds and a meditation on the beginnings of a new Cambodia.
Scott Guild
Positive Booklist \"With tones of Black Mirror’s ethical acuity and the quirkiness of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, it mixes first- and third-person narrations with song lyrics, scenes from a TV show, and Erin’s flashbacks to her sister’s betrayal. Plastic’s figurines also communicate in destandardized English and play with religious imagery, challenging the boundaries of an already experimental genre. Despite its uncensored descriptions of violence, there remains a tenderness that is at times whimsical in the figurines’ demonstration of how trauma and grief are still entrenched in the human need for connection.\
Kate Briggs
Positive Booklist The kinetic, poetry-like prose aptly communicates how disorienting and unfamiliar mothering life feels for Helen, and readers are made to share in that experience of newness.
Claudia Dey
Positive Booklist Dey’s narrative voice is restrained, as if the distance between her characters is recreated between us and the book, which is apt for a novel examining articulations of pain. Readers ready for an emotionally intense experience will find that Daughter brings unforgiving perspectives on life imitating art.