RaveThe Masters ReviewFears, loves, doubts, and desires garner fuller significance through highly self-aware, highly intricate modes of retrospection and introspection. With heart and skill, Zoffness is also able to extend the topic of conversation well beyond the domestic, framing her own daily struggles with global concerns. Even amidst worldwide instability, each essay steadfastly relies upon a kind of paradoxical bedrock of uncertainty, honesty, and vulnerability ... Her discoveries jolt both writer and reader into deeper consideration of these ongoing worldwide crises ... Throughout the collection, Zoffness appeals to similar types of transparency: the role of the writer with reference to the reader and vice versa. Zoffness forgoes the formalities and allows the reader to glimpse her process, a style that fosters empathy, connection, rapport. Perhaps the greatest strength of Spilt Milk is the way Zoffness approaches the very form itself—the essay as art-in-progress, as an open line of communication between writer and reader ... Zoffness, with compassionate clarity, exposes herself—her worst fears, her best hopes—to expose her art.
R. L. Maizes
RaveThe Masters ReviewImmersed in La La’s complex mind and body, readers experience the dutiful daughter’s sharp empathetic pain each time she encounters yet another suffering animal. Simultaneously, we become frustrated by La La’s innate inability to truly connect with humans. La La’s \'voice\' is almost deadpan, almost devoid of human emotion ... Maizes keeps readers invested with authentic care and concern for her two main characters, and possibly, though adjacently, even Elissa, whom we only merely glimpse from time to time. Still, Elissa’s final scene leaves everyone reeling, readers and characters alike. Overall, Other People’s Pets is an absorbing debut novel, one often quite difficult to put down. And even when set aside, if only momentarily, the book continues to resonate: Readers may begin to see the world differently ... a rich storyline that’s only slightly fantastical, adroitly addresses our own (hyper)reality of fact and fiction, illness and wellness, desperation and hope, love and loss.
Tina May Hall
RaveThe Masters ReviewWritten in startling vignettes...Tina May Hall’s debut novel, The Snow Collectors, draws upon the depressed and desolate. Set in a snowpocalypse, Hall takes readers deep into the icy reaches of both past and future ... the short snippets propel the plot and almost taunt the reader ... The prose is lyrical but measured, evocative but never florid. Hall wields a frank briskness in her words, but not an impatience. Readers see clearly what they need to see, and by that token, they do not see what they do not need to see. So often a mystery disappoints by revealing too much or too little, which is not the case in Hall’s novel. The Snow Collectors is a surprising blend of genres. Mystery, of course, but of a definitive literary bent. The aforementioned traditional Gothic elements are also woven throughout, but with heavy intent, and Hall’s exploration of grief speaks authentically to its particular expressions and emanations ... Given Hall’s innovative style—its spare, quick pacing coupled with its punchy, exacting prose—readers can easily devour both [the book] over a weekend.
