Reviews - Who Even Reads

Cover of Deesha Philyaw's novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman featuring a woman wearing a green pantsuit and heels sitting on a gold chair with brown and gold background.

Reviews

A Song of Solomon Woman's "Virgo Shit": Deesha Philyaw's The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman

There is something infectiously appealing in Schar’s self-interest, in her daring to dream of what the church can do for her, and in the frankness and self-awareness she brings to the role of First Lady. Schar is so mesmerizing, so alluring, complex to the point of being unpredictable.

Cover of Female Life on Planet Earth, showing a person's hand holding a flare letting off pink smoke, set against a pink to purple gradient background

Reviews

A Time to Wail: Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi

In her fourth novel, Khadivi asks, what does one do with these questions we can no longer ask, hidden stories that can never be unraveled, which the dead have taken with them to their graves?

The cover of The Book of Chuck, featuring two sketched black hands, one reaching out to touch the index finger of the other. The background is a gradient from blue to light red.

Reviews

A Little Less Greek Tragedy, a Little More Genesis: The Book of Chuck by LaToya Watkins

With The Book of Chuck, Watkins cements her place as an essential storyteller of Black life in America and one of Toni Morrison’s heir apparents.

Cover image for The Great Wherever, featuring an open green landscape cloaked in what looks like a fine gold dust, on a complementary background

Reviews

"Better than the best reality TV": Shannon Sanders' The Great Wherever and Its Lingering, Gossiping Dead

The Great Wherever centers the pleasures of reading and stories, the pleasures that family and community can create and preserve, and the ordinary, apparently forever-tempting pleasures of messy human drama and gossip.

Cover of Triage, on gradient yellow-to-red background, featuring two people dressed in red clothing that appears to be connected between them, looking up

Reviews

“I want to throw myself in front of a speeding car”: Claudia Rankine's Triage and the Toomuchness of It All

How can one live like this, Triage asks, at the same time it declares the question beside the point. What is the alternative?

Cover of Names Have Been Changed, featuring a multicolor image of a person peering through window blinds, set between solid blue and black panels that complement the color palette

Reviews

Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow Explores One Woman's Lonely Version of "Be Gay, Do Crime"

Balasingamchow’s novel speaks to realities of queerness, marginalization, criminality and criminalization, of what not being able to live openly or straightforwardly does to a person and perhaps can’t be—or doesn’t need to be—undone.

Cover of Isabel J. Kim's Sublimation, showing multiple identical images of two people walking away from each other, on a deep red background with illustrations of TV sets in white.

Reviews

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim and Wild Speculation on Universal's TV Adaptation

Every detail and plot turn in Sublimation is clearly part of a meticulously well-considered arc. I’m very curious what the adaptation will be like. Whitewashing would be a disaster in this scenario, given the significance of instancing as metaphor for diaspora.

Cover of Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, featuring a red mazelike drawing in the shape of an apple that also resembles a fingerprint.

Reviews

A Double Exclamation in the Greater Milwaukee Area: Patrick Cottrell's Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

The other reviews and accounts of this novel I read before reading the book itself, which rightly suggested a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the proceedings, did nothing to prepare me for the several gut-punch revelations that occur near the end, revelations that hinge on specificity.

Cover of Earth 7 on an orange background matching the book's text. The cover shows a spaceship flying a meandering path away from Earth and the moon, in white on washed-out blue.

Reviews

Review: A Shot of Urgent Hope in Deb Olin Unferth's Earth 7

Earth 7 really sings in small moments that show deep respect for life, for its remarkable diversity, its endurance and durability. Unferth’s admiration for the inhabitants of Earth, its many creatures large and small, is infectious, at times exhilarating—a shot of urgent hope.

Cover of A Splintering set on a parchment-colored background, featuring a person looking through shard-like apertures that are elsewhere filled in with solid pink set against orange.

Reviews

Review: A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna and the Precarity of the Social Climb

If A Splintering is in some ways a morality tale, it isn’t one that suggests Tara is wrong for wanting more than life has given her. Rather, it shows that by defining her happiness only through the oppression of others, only through ascending from oppressed to oppressor, she remains oppressed.

Cover of No God But Us—divided into squares featuring various colored patterns, animals, and disembodied eyes—all against a muted teal background.

Reviews

Review: No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed and the Refugee Liminal State

No God But Us vividly illuminates what life is like for the many queer refugees who live in liminal space for years, whose only home is the state of uncertainty.

Cover of Let the Poets Govern, with gold blocky text on an olive-green background, itself laid onto a brown-to-gold gradient background.

Reviews

Review: Camonghne Felix's Let the Poets Govern and the Scam of Representation

Felix stresses that real, substantial change isn’t instant, nor does it happen without us—without people. But real change is happening, will happen, must happen despite the liberal cynicism and fear that will tell you it isn’t, won’t, can’t.