RaveThe Southern Review of Books... an immersive work as shimmering with details as it is with mystery ... Deliciously descriptive, Pedersen does not skimp on details in this book ... The novel’s imagery is so striking that it’s easy to fall inside of the details and drink them up, until one becomes a third party floating among the June bugs ... The characters are this story’s shining attraction. All of them are so complex, and their voices so strong, that the piece feels less like a book and more like a memory. Each character is complete on their own, and watching them find their own voices and work through their traumas is extremely cathartic. This extends, especially, to Sunshine. She’s allowed to be a kid, yet her own traumas and issues are not downplayed. All the while, she’s bearing the full brunt of her family’s baggage, too ... the characters themselves bring light, love, and happiness to one another, and to readers. Though there is pain, there is equal parts joy and humanity. Overall, The Crocodile Bride is a very human and intricately constructed novel that should be on bookshelves for years to come.
Kendra Decolo
RaveSouthern Review of BooksI Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World is filled with raw, comedic, politically eclipsing language that leaves you choking on the brilliance of a rebirth ... DeColo’s perspective on motherhood is refreshingly unashamed, candid, and downright defiant ... DeColo’s collection looks inward, grappling with where she begins, ends, and lives in-between, but in no way does she shrink from the world. Within the lens of motherhood, DeColo goes through the growing pains of finding out definitively who she is, and doing it not only on purpose, but in spite of everyone who believes they have some right to her ... triumph of verse ... a specialty of language and mastery of tone that not only mechanizes the messy, it empowers and electrifies it.
A J Gnuse
MixedSouthern Review of BooksHome is a living, breathing creature that is just as important as the people inhabiting it, openly shedding its skin to the studs, a vector of change, and yet a gatekeeper of memory ... The piece hyper-focuses on small moments with Elise and the Mason family through a third-person omniscient narrator, which slows the pace of the novel considerably, though in this stillness there is an appreciation of the finer details ... When the pace does pick up, it sprints to the opposite end of the spectrum — highlighting the already tense atmosphere with loud, bombastic action, carrying the story into the realm of the downright terrifying, yet incredibly addicting.
