RaveThe Masters ReviewThe people and the world [Moniz] creates on the page are alive, beating and thriving and demanding to be met on their own terms ... In all of these stories: mortality. The beauty and fragility of life set against characters equally delicate ... There are no wasted pages in this collection. Each passage is richly detailed, unfolding layers of character, emotion, metaphor, place, circumstance, and their legion intersections ... That tension is everywhere in Moniz’s writing. Ava is written with such intimate fragility, anguish and discomfort and all the awkward frailty of girlhood ... Here, there are women exploring the implications of being more than daughter, mother, friend, cousin, walking the precipice between living and loving and not. What it means to ache and exist as a person separate from, bonded to, not defined by the labels of relationship. It is a vibrant tension that runs through nearly every story in the collection ... Often, when reading a collection, I will skim over a story if it doesn’t catch my fancy. Not so with Milk Blood Heat. Each story pulls the reader along, inviting them to reflect upon their own delicate grasp on mortality, the tenuousness of emotion, until the story ends. And it is in her endings that the power of Moniz’s writing lingers with the reader, sinking into your chest, pumping hard.
