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The Troop by Nick Cutter (audio)

Source: Purchased
Audiobook, 11+ hrs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

The Troop by Nick Cutter, narrated by Corey Brill, is equally creepy and suspenseful as a cross between Lord of the Flies and bio-engineering and infection tale. Corey Brill is a stunning narrator and at times reminds me of the best crazy Jack Nicholson (think The Shining).

Scoutmaster Dr. Tim Riggs takes a group of teen boys into the Canadian wilderness (an island near Prince Edward Island) for a three-day camping trip when a sick man wanders into their area. Dr. Riggs offers to help the man, since the troop will be picked up by boat in a few days. What begins as a moment of altruism soon becomes a survival tale in which only the uninfected will survive, but only if they keep the infected away and can prevent their own sickness from taking hold.

Cutter has some pretty typical boys in this troop and each has a strength and weakness, and, of course, there are those who are not exactly friendly with one another. Kent and Ephraim are clearly the tough guys and in a silent battle to be top dog, while there are others who are harboring secrets and some who are trying not to be so weak (or what society perceives as weak).

This book will definitely have you squirming. It’s uncomfortable as all hell. The Troop by Nick Cutter is a horrifying read. Definitely one you’ll want to devour if you like terror, horror, or suspense.

Rating: Cinquain

Mailbox Monday #723

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

You Cannot Save Here by Anthony Moll for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (audio)

Source: Borrowed
Audiobook, 10+ hrs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, narrated by Kim Staunton, is a science-fiction and historical fiction novel about Dana Franklin who travels from 1976 California to antebellum (1816) Maryland by unknown means or a calling from Rufus Weylin, a young white boy living on a plantation with slaves, one of whom Dana is related to. She saves this nearly drowned boy and only returns to her present time when her life is threatened by a shot gun.

Through multiple time-traveling episodes, Dana becomes more akin to the slave-holding ways of Maryland and her actions become less like a modern woman of the 1970s and more like the actions of a slave from the 1800s. Even as she returns within hours to her present time, her adjustment back into her life is tough and wrought with anxiety about returning to the plantation and ensuring she can protect herself. At one point, even her white husband Kevin is trapped in the past, but his experiences are far different from hers and his sensibilities reveal what many of us know, how can you understand what slavery was like if you were not a slave yourself? Can you put yourself in the shoes of another to even empathize with them?

Dana is so naive at the start of these episodes, but she’s also curious, and while she’s given a bit of leeway by the slave owners because she does disappear and reappear randomly in their lives, she is also still considered their property, even if they have no papers to prove it. Her resemblance to Alice and her relatives also poses another threat to her freedom and it also begs the question who is her kindred in this story. She seems like Rufus in many ways (including the love of a man who is white, like Rufus’ “love” of Alice, a slave he owns), but she also seems like her relatives in that freedom to choose and love being important to them.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is deeply complex and utterly riveting, even if the time travel episodes are never fully explained. I sped through this audio and haven’t regretted it.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Author:

Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.

After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer’s workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction.

Mailbox Monday #722

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Trace by Melanie Figg, which I purchased at the Takoma Park Poetry Reading series.

Poetry. Women’s Studies. Figg’s is a collection that embraces and experiments with the multiple meanings of the title: without a trace, tracing, trace elements, etc., and with multiple female figures: mother, sister, girl, woman in an insane asylum, and so on. There is a ghostliness here embodied in the poems’ palimpsestic layers of feminist meaning and in the variety of interpretation inherent in its verse.

“In language so lovely, rich, and full of voices that seem out of another world, this book of departures also opens many doors. Each door lets in a wild wind of longing, loss, gods, myths, war, and ragged humanity. We find ourselves in a museum maze with one entrance and one exit but that final exit, we do not want to take. It is art that speaks us through, speaks witness, speaks desire, tells us there are other worlds in an ending world. We can move beyond if we are only brave enough to endure the moment of departure.”–Heid E. Erdrich

“The stunning poems in Melanie Figg’s debut full-length collection, TRACE, exist in a sublime and terrifying world filled with visual art, human atrocity, and a complex family history, including a sister that serves as a mirror and window into the forces that formed them both. These poems are breathtaking in their braided complexity, unwillingness to settle for two-dimensional revelation, and ability to face the abyss and sing, symphonically, into it. The two long, sectioned poems, ‘Untitled’ and ‘Leaving a Trace,’ are the crowning jewels of this book and illuminate Figg’s tremendous gift on the page, ‘forming perfect sentences / of evidence and sorrow.'”–Allison Benis White

“‘You can pray if you want to,’ says Melanie Figg in her ravishing debut collection TRACE, ‘but the wind / makes its own halting pleas.’ TRACE is a collection of metamorphosis, of things becoming more than they are and the liminal spaces between transitions. Figg explores the stains of history both global and personal as well as the mythos of love to reveal the vestiges of light inherent in all. ‘Better to unmuscle and move through / a field of wildflowers you cannot name,’ she concludes. TRACE is a revelation.”–Quan Barry

Still Life by Katherine J. Williams, which I purchased at the Takoma Park Poetry Reading series.

Katherine J. Williams writes with an artists’s eye, candidly and exquisitely exploring moments of beauty, tenderness, doubt, and devastation. These poems from one life become a celebration of the human capacity for joy in its complexity. Readers will recognize themselves in Still Life, and will find ways to understand the world anew.

“With rich sensory detail and a keen perception of the natural world, Katherine J. Williams explores absence and presence and affirms that even after great loss, life is Still Life. Through the roles of daughter, mother, wife, widow, grandmother, and contemplative, she explores how sorrow ‘ties us to each other, wears our edges smooth, and over and over washes the world, leaving us rinsed and clean'”. -Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

“Katherine Williams’ poems have a crystalline quality, polished and honed over time. Yet they retain the rare ability to capture fully that moment when ‘something new flames into being’, surprising both writer and reader alike. Each poem brings glinting new insights to the surface, and I have no doubt her work will be read with relish for many years to come”.-James Crews, Poet and Editor of The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection & Joy

“Elegance, intelligence, and a deep and tender wisdom run through this marvelous and much-anticipated debut collection. Katherine Williams asks us to slow down, to pay ever more close attention, as she explores family lore, mortality, the truths our bodies tell us, and the subtle unfolding mysteries of the natural world. Page after page, these clear-eyed and open-hearted poems unfurl their lyrical surprises. This is an achingly beautiful book”. – Rose Solari, co-founder of Alan Squire Publishing, author of The Last Girl.

Metabolics by Jessica E. Johnson, which came for review in March.

Metabolics, a book-length poem, borrows the movements of metabolic pathways to consider how nature accomplishes both balance and deep transformation. In visual figures and prose blocks that bridge the divide between poetry and nonfiction, Jessica E. Johnson employs scientific idioms to construct an allegory about a family in the Pacific Northwest. The region becomes a character in its own right, with cedars, moss, and heavy cloud knitting the mother, father, boy, and girl into their setting.

This far-reaching volume also serves as a study of the ecologies of contemporary parenting, with adults and children affected by “feeds” both on screen and off as their bodies metabolize food, the environment, and excess feelings such as rage. From climate change to kombucha to smartphones and curated produce, the smallest details of daily life in “Plasticland” catalyze a larger examination of selfhood: “Despite so many attempts to resolve this tension, sometimes you are you and also sometimes mother just as light can be both particle and wave.”

What did you receive?

Gargoyle Online #4

Yesterday my poem, “Endless Spiral,” went live at Gargoyle Magazine.

This poem is on theme for me. With the recent shooting at Michigan State University, I am just beside myself. Gun violence, particularly in schools, is an issue we all should focus on finding solutions for.

Please see the poem here.

Mailbox Monday #721

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, which I borrowed from Hoopla (public library app for audiobooks).

The first science-fiction written by a Black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of African-American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity.

Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life.

During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.

Author Octavia E. Butler skilfully juxtaposes the serious issues of slavery, human rights, and racial prejudice with an exciting science-fiction, romance, and historical adventure. Kim Staunton’s narrative talent magically transforms the listener’s earphones into an audio time machine.

The Troop by Nick Cutter, which I purchased from Audible.

Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip – a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfre. The boys are a tight-knit crew. There’s Kent, one of the most popular kids in school; Ephraim and Max, also well-liked and easygoing; then there’s Newt the nerd and Shelley the odd duck. For the most part, they all get along and are happy to be there – which makes Scoutmaster Tim’s job a little easier. But for some reason, he can’t shake the feeling that something strange is in the air this year. Something waiting in the darkness. Something wicked…

It comes to them in the night. An unexpected intruder, stumbling upon their campsite like a wild animal. He is shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry – a man in unspeakable torment who exposes Tim and the boys to something far more frightening than any ghost story. Within his body is a bioengineered nightmare, a horror that spreads faster than fear. One by one, the boys will do things no person could ever imagine.

And so it begins. An agonizing weekend in the wilderness. A harrowing struggle for survival. No possible escape from the elements, the infected…or one another.

What did you receive?

Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 68 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard is a slim collection of poems that transcend time and space, speaking to transient nature of love and life. There are transitions in time and space that happen in this collection, but there also is so much mystery.

In “Nightwatch,” the narrator speaks of burning capitals and “how bright was our pleasure/how quickly we faded”. In this poem, it’s clear the narrator is witnessing the passing of time and the quick end of a civilization. We often feel as though civilizations last a long time, but in the grand scheme they are a blink of an eye.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Solus”, which has an epigraph from Nietzsche: “When you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

Solus (pg. 15)

this somnolent night

we sleep with doors open

when the void stares back

we do not stir

our body as solus

our shadow - the empire

our hopes - the color

of fire

Upon reading several of these poems multiple times, you can glean a greater meaning and get a sense of the impermanence of life. But many of these poems left me wanting. There is a sense that something has broken, but there’s also an entire section of love poems that ends the collection. Was this the juxtaposition? Were these sections to speak to one another? I’m unclear on that. Death Throes of the Broken Clockwork Universe by Wayne David Hubbard does have some real gems in it.

RATING: Tercet

About the Poet:

Wayne David Hubbard is a poet, former U.S. Marine, and chess player.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry (audio)

Source: Purchased
Audible, 11+ hrs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Book Lovers by Emily Henry, narrated by Julia Whelan, is intense and hilarious. I am so glad I wasn’t listening or reading this on my subway commute, people would have been staring at me during my laughing outbursts. It’s bad enough the dogs thought I was losing it.

Nora Stephens is a literary agent and her life is buttoned up and precise. Charlie Lastra, a book editor, is her nemesis after he turns down her client, Dusty’s latest work. Both get off on the wrong foot, but there’s always time to make a second impression.

Nora’s sister Libby, who is five months pregnant, pitches taking a 3-week vacation in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, the setting of Dusty’s latest best seller. She’s got a notion that Nora needs to break free and needs to finish a checklist many Hallmark movies create — dating small town man, saving a local business, and more. While the idea is ridiculous, Nora agrees because it’s obvious that Libby needs some R&R away from the kids and all that comes with being super mom.

Whelan is a fantastic narrator. She infuses each character with their own personality and quirks, which is a great enhancement for Henry’s characters. I loved everything about this book – from the characters to the hilarious encounters and the deep relationship rifts and healing.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry, narrated by Julia Whelan, is a book that will have you laughing out loud, wishing you could get Nora to stop doubting herself and pushing her feelings aside, and urging the sisters to have more frank discussions about their past and future. This is definitely my favorite of Henry’s books.

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

About the Author:

Emily Henry writes stories about love and family for both teens and adults. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the now-defunct New York Center for Art & Media Studies. Find her on Instagram @EmilyHenryWrites.

The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels

Source: publisher
Paperback, 64 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels is a collection of American sonnets (14 line poems, no required rhyme scheme or meter) that sheds light on the transgender experience. Opening with “Morning,” xe walks the dog and embarks on a morning routine that is all too familiar, but soon readers get a glimpse of what it means to make a decision that will change things and how those things will be permanent and how the decision is less about society and more about self-care.

My Dead (pg. 7)

I don't know them. They hover around me
and whisper, touch my shoulders, but I don't 
know them. Tired, I sit and let them chatter.
I cannot speak. The silence is for them.
They fill the space in the room, wispy and
translucent. They tell me grief will pass, hurt
will dull, and the knife of urgency will
no longer cut me. I wish I knew their
names. I want to open my mouth, whisper,
but I know I can't. They need more time
to speak to each other, to lay to rest
their obsessions, to work through their wisdom.
The cold press of their breaths weighs on my heart
and I wait, palms open, and I listen.

Daniels is laying out her internal struggles and her struggles with society and its expectations and perceptions of xir. From the old man in “Mirror” who tells a 10-year-old girl that xe has nice legs to the narrator “Washing, always washing/trying to scrub away the feeling of/skin”, there’s a self-hatred of body, gender, and skin color. There’s a search for self and what that means in a world that judges everything negatively.

Yet, in each of these poems, there is a pause or a breath that is taken, a re-centering of self. “I’m trans like” is one of the most beautiful poems in this collection, in which the narrator is a frog, taking a breath before submerging and feeling sunlight and moonlight – xe is at peace here, even if just for a moment. It is the same in “Movement,” where the narrator is a chrysanthemum and a desire for someone to see xir and be the companion xe needs and is looking for is apparent.

In “architect,” we see an empowered person taking charge of the self, crafting who they have been on the inside and showing that to the outside world. But it is a heavy burden to bear alone, and it breaks my heart. The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels is heartbreaking and beautiful all at once. For those of us who do not live the trans experience, this provides us with a little bit more understanding, and hopefully it will generate greater compassion.

Rating: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Kwame Sound Daniels is an artist based out of Maryland. Xir first book, Light Spun, is out with Perennial Press. Kwame’s theatre reviews are on Richmond Theatre Critics Circle’s website. Xe were a speaker at the Conference for Community Writing for the Artsies Mentorship Program. Xe are an Anaphora Arts Residency Fellow and are an MFA candidate for Vermont College of Fine Arts. Kwame learns plant medicine, paints, and makes soda in xir spare time.

Mailbox Monday #720

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Nothing this week!

What did you receive?