RaveForeword ReviewsContaining summer friendships, whispered secrets, and a dark, hidden truth, Felicity McLean’s The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is poignant and jarring ... McLean’s writing style is poetic and fluid, and her descriptions are tactile. Gripping and beautiful in its sadness, the text conveys the girls’ fear and anxiety in a way that is tangible and eloquent ... The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is extraordinary—a warm flashback to summer with a dark underbelly. Reading it is like opening a beautifully wrapped package while holding a deep, irrational fear of what lies inside. It is a blazingly well-written, impressive, and deeply satisfying thriller.
Marq De Villiers
PositiveForeward ReviewsSatirical and snarky, the book is thorough and borders on exhaustive. Written as if hell were a real and true place, it is the best guidebook to a horror that no one hopes ever to experience ... It seems that the entirety of Hell and Damnation may be a not-so-slight jab at everyone who believes hell to be a real and actual place, giving obsessive detail to a mythical abyss.
Karen Babine
RaveForeword ReviewsAchingly sad and incredibly beautiful, Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers is a welcoming invitation to dinner, family, and laughter, evoking a warm, full kitchen and good company ... Brief chapters read like poetry ... Every detail in All the Wild Hungers has meaning and weight or a connection to a memory, and Babine takes the scenic route to get there—speaking softly but with force on issues including money-hungry polluters, choosing to remain childless, and modern medicine. Snippets from intellectuals like Soren Kierkegaard and culinary touchstone Julia Childs are an entertaining addition. With emotion and details, colors, seasons, smells, traditions, history, love, and family are made to intertwine in All the Wild Hungers, whose pages impart pangs of sorrow and of hunger.
Kim Sagwa, trans. by Bruce Fulton & Ju-Chan Fulton
PositiveForeword Reviews\"Sagwa does an excellent job of portraying mental illness without exaggeration or drama; it is an accurate, unsettling portrait ... A deeply disquieting account of mental illness, Mina is a novel about the tiny hints that, in retrospect, become the biggest clues to a person’s unraveling.\
