RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe answers that emerge and the conflict that comes close to tearing a community apart are both heartbreaking and redemptive, emotions that Ash Davidson skillfully weaves throughout her debut ... Davidson’s knowledge of the logging industry and its communities guides the reader into the woods. The language, beauty, color, and sensory details of their lives and work are all brought to the page, enriching our experience and making us believe their truths. And if we do get lost, we’re only a page turn away from hearing a voice, catching a movement, a sudden flash of light that urges us to stay, prompts us to keep going. Rooting for the characters in Damnation Spring—their unapologetic, protective, profoundly alive and kindred hearts—and understanding their complicated desires are made easier by the writer’s narrative style ... Damnation Spring successfully translates the logging industry into an experience of the heart ... This is a novel faithful to the intimate and sincere yearnings of the heart; its brutal and unexpected ending is worth every second.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... when love takes two tender hearts hostage, it is almost impossible to run from it. Caleb Azumah Nelson certainly delivers these goods in Open Water, but he encases his core story in a more significant tale of violence and crippling racial trauma ... because the novel is written in the second person...the reader is not a distant observer but a character playing along. The experience is as imaginative as it is engaging. For people who think this point of view can be alienating, it can be ... What makes Open Water more than a reflection of what it means to be a Black man in the United Kingdom is the intimate look into what living in a world like that does to the Black man ... Nelson best demonstrates the afflicted self, and his command of details, in his illustration of masculinity and vulnerability ... One of the book’s most enthralling qualities is the way Nelson illuminates Black culture ... While these snippets of creative expression are memorable and enrich the text overall, the references may be just a little much for a novel this size. I wondered at times if a scene would be more powerful without weaving in a work of art. After a while, the repetitive effect disrupted the flow, and some references faded as details that could be easily skimmed over ... an open journal of what is all too familiar, as if a close friend were peeling off their layers to show what lies underneath. You can expect to be surprised by what you’ll find, not because you’re unaware that they’re hurting but because you didn’t realize the extent and rippling effects of their pain. For readers who know these scars intimately, Nelson offers some truths: you don’t have to be a sum of your traumas.
Carol Edgarian
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"This yearning Vera feels—the true pulse of the story—is the desire to be accepted by her mother. Edgarian brilliantly captures the broken mother-daughter dynamic and Vera’s \'booming, wanting heart\' with the persistent backdrop of abandonment, longing, and displacement of 1906 San Francisco. The mother, however, is a shocking mystery ... There’s space for love to thrive: the wounded are nursed back to health, and broken relationships are mended. The pieces come together gracefully, as they should. But Rose is untouched. If she has any remorse, she doesn’t show it. She moves along as always — impervious, distant, and gone. Though it’s unsurprising, it does leave the reader questioning what a mother could possibly want or not want to so insistently choose a life without her daughter. Whatever she is chasing, does she ever find it, and if she does, is it worth all she leaves behind? ... As the people drive the plot, the place where it’s all happening is falling apart. People choose resilience in the devastation and get back up again and again. What is profound is how something as communal as one’s city can still feel utterly unhomely ... If there’s a book that speaks urgently to a time of grief, resilience, wounding loneliness, and collective hope in one of the deadliest pandemics in history, it is Vera—a work to be cherished for what it uncovers in the pages and, possibly, the heart of the reader, one that brings a traveler to \'the other side by a surprise or a marvel or a song.\'
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