Book Review
Friday Night Cocktails
Perfect for budding mixologists or seasoned professionals in search of inventive twists, the sleek cocktail book "Friday Night Cocktails" is replete with creative beverages to slake your seasonal thirsts. A bit of history on cocktails...
Book Review
The Fascination
Essie Fox’s novel "The Fascination" is a scintillating cabinet of curiosities. Theo—whose mother died in childbirth and whose father is, for him, a question mark—grows up love-deprived, hidden on a country estate whose grandeur...
Book Review
The Berry Pickers
While working as migrants, a Mi’kmaq family is rent by their daughter’s disappearance in Amanda Peters’s decades-spanning, heartrending novel "The Berry Pickers". Even before Ruthie disappeared from the Maine field where her...
Book Review
The Trials of Madame Restell
A sobering dispatch from a past marked by familiar prejudices, "The Trials of Madame Restell" is Nicholas L. Syrett’s consequential biography of a woman who defied changing norms to protect women’s health. Ann Trow—later known as...
Book Review
Bare Witness
A paean to beauty, honor, and truth, "Bare Witness" is an expansive poetry collection that delights in experimentation. A fifty-year career retrospective, Joseph Small’s "Bare Witness" gathers beautiful images that attest to a lifelong...
Book Review
Jewish Space Lasers
Mike Rothschild’s "Jewish Space Lasers" is a cutting exposé of centuries’-worth of antisemitic scapegoating, often done with one influential family at its center. “Where myth and mystique meet outsized wealth and great historical...
Book Review
Hazardous Spirits
A secret-keeping woman from polite society enters spiritualist circles somewhat against her will in Anbara Salam’s glittering historical novel "Hazardous Spirits". In the shadows of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, everyone in...
Book Review
Yara
A young woman with voracious appetites wonders if she is a victim, vixen, or somewhere in between in Tamara Faith Berger’s libidinous novel "Yara". At fifteen, Yara’s mother gifted her a new nose; she was ungracious. Two weeks later,...