Book of the Day Roundup: July 21-25, 2025
Small Fires
Ronnie Turner
Orenda Books
Softcover $16.99 (300pp)
978-1-916788-47-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Ronnie Turner’s eerie novel Small Fires, a land is ruled by tales of the devil.
Suspected for murdering their parents, Lily and her beastly sister, Della, escape to the God-Forgotten, a remote island inhabited by the fearful Folk, who worship the Warden, the devil they believe lives underground. Plagued by the bloody myths abundant throughout the God-Forgotten and Della’s terrifying stories, Lily finds solace with Silas, the Folks’ de facto leader. Both hiding secrets, they later work together to protect Moss, a newcomer, from the God-Forgotten’s lurking dangers, including Della.
In this dark fairy tale, macabre stories rule the Folk’s daily lives. Grotesque local folklore is revealed to Lily about the Singing Bridge’s children sacrificed to the Warden, the Forest of Eyes’ screaming witch’s children, and the Bleeding Tree’s hanging beads, which contain blood from the deceased. Befitting the gothic morbidity of this storied world, the prose is lyrical if menacing. One Folk woman explains, “This land is a vein, and if you are curious enough, it will bleed for you. But be sure you want the blood on your pretty, pale hands.”
Lily and Silas also recount their childhoods, resulting in chilling depictions of sibling abuse. Their personal torments melt into the God-Forgotten’s collective hauntings. Lily remembers Della’s sadistic stories, which were used to punish her for containing “bad feelings.” Silas recollects how his sister, who was resentful of him being the favored firstborn son, often tried to drain away his blood and life. With Moss’s arrival in the book’s second half, there are accelerated revelations. Their buried, twisted stories are powerful, challenging any sense of knowable, stable self-identity.
Nightmarish yet beautiful, Small Fires is a stirring novel that excavates the interpersonal and community-inflicted violence within an isolated community.
ISABELLA ZHOU (June 22, 2025)
Witch Cat
Lucy Rowland
Laura Hughes, illustrator
Bloomsbury Children’s Books
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-5476-1671-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Whimsical watercolor and ink illustrations enliven this cheeky story that proves the grass is rarely greener on the other side. Pippin has always been a witch’s cat, but he grows discontent; he sets out to see what other kind of cat he could be. He sails on a pirate ship, walks a tightrope at the circus, and parachutes out of a plane before realizing that being a witch’s cat might be the perfect fit after all.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 22, 2025)
I Watched You from the Ocean Floor
Erin Cecilia Thomas
Modern Artist Press
Softcover $16.95 (208pp)
978-1-964403-02-1
Struggling with tragedy, fear, and uncertainty, the characters of Erin Cecilia Thomas’s entrancing, woman-centered short story collection I Watched You from the Ocean Floor find hope through human connection and resilience.
Easing through a range of perspectives, the stories take place in small, penetrating worlds. In one story, an “upscale organic grocery store” employee becomes jealous of an ethereal cashier; undertones of quirky humor lighten the narrator’s increasing obsession and self-admitted crisis of conscience. In “A Rapture Coming,” a nurturing woman and her geophysicist partner lose their home to the “dragon’s breath” of climate change-related fires. And in “I May,” a woman whose parents were killed in a car accident is troubled by her first pregnancy. Despite fears of leaving her own child orphaned and traumatized, she visits a baby boutique; as she contemplates racks of tiny outfits, she is awed by the sight of a “magnificently pregnant” woman, serene and “glowing like a lightning bug.”
In “So You May Sleep Again,” a widow embroiders an intricate likeness of her deceased husband to assuage her grief. Also compelling is “Washington Avenue,” which follows an arc of anguish and emergence as a young Italian woman comes to Boston to attend an acclaimed music school. She rents a room in a welcoming “gabled Victorian,” filled with the lively energies of other students. But after the arrival of COVID-19, the tenants begin to leave and one of the landlords is hospitalized with the virus. Details of constrictive face masks and contagious fears heighten the woman’s isolation; she later finds release and renewed expression by playing her violin, practicing with “racing passion” until music again echoes through the house.
With supple complexity, the stories of I Watched You from the Ocean Floor explore unique intensities of emotion and healing.
MEG NOLA (June 22, 2025)
Lost Songs of Nature
Nature’s Symphony in the Age of Noise Pollution
Michel Leboeuf
Great Plains Press
Softcover $25.95 (216pp)
978-1-77337-135-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Michel Leboeuf’s Lost Songs of Nature is a thought-provoking study of “acoustic ecology,” or the natural and human-made sounds of the world, that carries warnings about contemporary threats to biodiversity.
Organized into five “symphonic movements,” the text includes a meditation on the music of Canadian forests, marshes, swamps, bogs, tundra, seashores, and cities. Lyrical passages describe the “dawn chorus” of whistling robins, squeaking voles, and humming mosquitoes; the evening “repertoire” of a hermit thrush chanting its ethereal song on a lakeshore; and the “grumbling” of post-hibernation black bears. Also considered are the lost songs of extinct species such as great auks and passenger pigeons.
The book also probes scientific research on the significance of sounds in nature. For instance, biologists have used specialized microphones to record vibrations generated by ants, nematodes, and other microfauna found in healthy soil, rich in organic matter. A fascinating chapter entitled “How Plants Hear” summarizes research on plant acoustics, including evidence suggesting that plants have a type of consciousness that responds to sound.
Evocative and poetic, the text includes an account of a wood turtle rhythmically tapping the forest floor to imitate the sound of raindrops and encourage earthworms to come to the surface. The book emphasizes that the “growing din” of human societies, combined with habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and invasive exotic species, is overwhelming wild species’ ability to live and reproduce. Multiple studies document species’ decline in environments overwhelmed by human-caused noise. The book calls for conservation and a reduction in human influence to preserve the diverse sounds essential to a healthy planet: “When the ecosystem breaks down, the natural harmony of nature’s orchestra is lost.”
Highlighting the diverse sounds of wild places, Lost Songs of Nature is an engrossing, haunting book with an urgent environmental message.
KRISTEN RABE (June 22, 2025)
Tiny Vices
Linda Dahl
She Writes Press
Softcover $17.99 (256pp)
978-1-64742-930-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Siblings reunite for a weekend in Linda Dahl’s Tiny Vices, a wise novel about navigating midlife in which tense relationships and a woman’s self-protectiveness collide.
On a spring break trip to Rincón Bay, Mexico, Kathy experienced trauma that she later repressed. As a married adult in Tucson, she’s encouraged by her therapist to face her lingering fears. Kathy thus convinces Corina, her sister with dementia; Pete, her pill-addicted brother who is undergoing dialysis; and Becca, their youngest sibling who struggles with her son, to return to the same beach under the pretense of recreating their childhood vacations. In Mexico, the siblings’ domestic problems threaten to overwhelm them.
The busy, alternating cast includes spouses and a housekeeper; their characterizations are taut. Many funnel their aches into creativity, and their interests include art, poetry, and jazz. Kathy’s marital malaise mixes with her social activism, hinting at her need to rescue others because she can’t help herself. Some secondary plot lines distract from the novel’s progression, though, as with the housekeeper’s sexual awakening.
Arizona’s stifling summer heat intensifies the siblings’ desire to get away. Throughout, people make allowances for themselves while pretending to manage their challenges: Pete bristles over his sisters’ support of him and undermines his diabetic diet, and Kathy’s husband dives into a book project to distract himself from their problems. Indeed, people’s efforts to avoid burdening others often result in emotional withholding, which becomes its own burden. Later, Kathy’s preoccupation with others’ lives results in an irreparable rift in her own. Further, little progress is made regarding Kathy’s traumas, whose tolls on her life are heartbreaking.
Tiny Vices is a simmering novel about the consequences of denying the past for too long.
KAREN RIGBY (June 22, 2025)
Kathy Young
