About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Alex Hortis
Rave Foreword Reviews \"A riveting true crime story ... The book includes a wealth of enticing historical details, as of newspaper carrier pigeons waiting for their next delivery and the lighting of candles in the courtroom chandeliers. And Polly’s three trials are recreated with the gripping pace of a novel ... Rollicking and unnerving, The Witch of New York spotlights one of the first media-driven trials and a continuing social climate of biased and sexist judgments.\
Tlotlo Tsamaase
Rave Foreword Reviews \"As the book’s narrator, Nelah’s voice is captivating and valiant. Caught up in a forbidden extramarital affair, she manages to briefly elude her technological enslavement and later enters a murderous spiral of violent liberation. With both chilling precision and anguished passion, Womb City depicts a toxic future of cyber-reincarnation and authoritarian omniscience.\
Jessa Crispin
Rave Foreword Reviews Voluble ... Crispin explores diverse topics with varied brilliance ... My Three Dads is challenging in its assessment of American life—a personal story that’s conveyed with piercing humor, sharp details, and whirlwinds of intelligent, expansive prose.
Antonia Fraser
Rave Foreword Reviews Captivating ... With engrossing detail, The Case of the Married Woman recounts actual scandals, romances, tragedies, and triumphs. Few fictional heroines could rival Caroline Norton’s shrewd defiance: she used her charm and writing talent to lobby for British women in matters of divorce, property, and child custody ... A historical delight.
Greg Sarris
Positive Foreword Reviews ... resonant ... Sarris’s prose includes wonderful imagery ... Personal recollections complement these observations ... Testifying to the impacts of people on the land, the powerful memoir Becoming Story lauds the power of language when it comes to leaving tracks for others to follow.
Monica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker
Rave Foreword Reviews Despite the familiar undergirding of its privileged, manipulative school girls, Jawbone distinguishes itself through fevered brilliance. Clara’s struggles stand in vulnerable, vengeful contrast to the girl’s behavior. Like the strange bloom of a corpse flower, the novel Jawbone evokes life, death, and a vortex of twisted beauty.
Fiona Snyckers
Positive Foreword Reviews ... dark and riveting ... Though Lacuna is weighted with anguish, it also includes twists of mordant humor.
Minae Mizumura
Rave Foreword Reviews Innovative yet influenced by traditional Japanese literary style, An I-Novel focuses on subtle details within an intimate structure. There are evocative descriptions, as of the snow’s \'soundless dance\' and how Nanae dates \'a merry-go-round of men.\' More intense events, however, like the crime and veiled racism Minae encounters in the US, are included with detached yet troubled candor ... an intriguing, nuanced portrait of a family in flux, and of a young woman finding her creative center between two worlds.
Emily Adrian
Positive Foreword Reviews ...[a] quirky, resonant novel ... With keen wit and affecting emotion, Everything Here Is under Control is a novel about love, family, and motherhood that balances compromises with possibilities.
Caitlin Chung
Rave Foreword Reviews ... wondrous ... With beautiful, tempered language, Ship of Fates weaves history and lore into a captivating, otherworldly tale. Its characters are as vibrant as its chaotic and carousing backdrop, centered around Mei’s desperate, restless spirit.
Anna Dorn
Positive Foreword Reviews Prue, with her insecurities, talents, ambiguities, and flaws, is a captivating narrator ... Peopled with vibrant characters amid searing yellow skies and cobalt twilight, Vagablonde is a glimpse into a rarefied, \'of the moment\' world, with a heroine who, like other famed platinum blondes before her, hides her troubled vulnerability behind the icy whiteness of her hair.
Sagwa Kim, Trans. by Sunhee Jeong
Rave Foreword Reviews ... haunting ... Surreal and luminous, b, Book, and Me turns a dark mirror toward teen bullying—often ignored or enabled by adults, and a shameful global phenomenon.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Kate McCabe
Rave Foreword Reviews ... powerful ... Eloquent and captivating, [Roundtree\'s] book weaves personal memories with history’s scope ... Roundtree’s tone is candid and engaging ... Humble, reflective, and triumphant, the text details a life of determination, sacrifice, hope, and unending love of knowledge. Mighty Justice is an inspiring and intense memoir by an extraordinary woman and mentor who deserves a high profile in American history.
Benjamin Markovits
Positive Foreword Reviews Beyond its curious Essinger brood, the novel captures the compressed intensity of holiday gatherings: elderly parents are jarred from their settled routines, forced into hosting and accommodating; siblings reconnect or clash; non-family members try to find a sense of belonging or just endure a few days of strangeness. Though Austin is the central location, the narrative incorporates present and remembered lives in Germany, London, New York, and New England with equal perspicacity. Christmas in Austin ends with a feeling of incomplete closeness, with an almost personal attachment to all of the Essingers and a decided yearning to read about them again.
João Reis
Positive Foreword Review ...melancholy yet comic ... Long, rushing paragraphs flow along with the narrator’s exasperation as he ventures from his boardinghouse in search of work and payment for translations already completed ... The circuitous absorption of The Translator’s Bride is sustained by its novella-like structure and dark, gleaming humor. Reis’s direct translation of his work from Portuguese to English adds an element of personal irony and intimacy as well. The language is beautiful, mordant, and tragic.
Aatif Rashid
Positive Foreword Reviews ...witty and dissolute... Sebastian is a flawed but compelling character, and his romances are detailed with rushes of color and sensation. This sensuality alternates with undertones of humor and even subtle splendor ... In the end, Sebastian’s Berkeley days may be the last strokes on a canvas of pageantry and excess, but despite the somber palette of post-graduate life, his newer, self-determined portrait seems to be more complex and changing for the better.
Stuart Turton
Positive Foreword Reviews \"Stuart Turton’s The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle features the basic elements of a classic British mystery: a country estate, lords, ladies, servants, quirky guests, a fox hunt, a ball, and a murder to be solved. Turton’s innovative version, however, scrambles these familiarities in a kaleidoscopic manner, transporting his narrator into the minds and bodies of different characters, with each strange incarnation offering new perspectives and challenges.\
Elliot Reed,
Positive Foreword Reviews Reed deftly advances [protagonist] William’s story ... William’s voice is appealingly and alternately streetwise, poetic, comic, melancholy, and confused ... Through its deceptively simple structure, A Key to Treehouse Living creates a portrait of a compelling, perceptive adolescent who keeps slipping through society’s cracks, either due to circumstances or of his own volition. By the novel’s end, William is still troubled and at risk, but with the hope that perhaps his curious resilience will help him keep adding to the glossary of his distinctive alphabet.
Les Wood
Rave Foreword Reviews \"Les Wood’s Dark Side of the Moon is the painfully funny tale of a jewel heist that never should have happened and a plan gone unsurprisingly wrong … Wood’s creation of this underworld is brilliantly insidious. Whether hardened, hapless, or both, these men are memorable and vivid, caught up in spirals of greed, fear, violence, or just numb confusion. The general running dialogue is a slangfest of Glaswegian argot, keen insight, and profane babble, yet it never seems gratuitous or forced. And at the base of these various misadventures is often a surprising humanity: lost chords of compassion, remorse, and dim flickers of hope … Full of jaggedly poetic charm and twisted humor, Les Wood’s Dark Side of the Moon is a fine novel about an unforgettable Scottish demimonde.\