Seasoned authors know that the best way to get readers invested in their characters is to make them as relatable as possible. Highlighting the flaws of central figures is essential in creating a story that sticks with readers long after the last page. Romance author (and Iowa native) Rachelle Chase accomplishes just that in Hot […]
Book Reviews
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Fully Booked: Send your mind on a hike
I want summer weather. I want sweat on my brow and aches in my legs. July backpacking is on my list of goals this year: spending five days hiking for miles on an island with no wifi. I wish to filter away the brain-eating amoebas and drink a river with a straw. To sleep under […]
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Plain Spoken: Iowa’s conservative despots police the power of song-flight in this 1979 sci-fi fantasia
When you crack open a ’70s sci-fi/fantasy paperback like On Wings of Song, you expect to slip into a world wholly unlike your own. For an Iowan living through Inauguration Week 2025, this particular novel isn’t too much of an escape — and not just because it’s set in Iowa and penned by a Des […]
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Book Review: ‘The Wilderlands’ by R.E. Bellesmith
I have apparently never read fantasy before The Wilderlands by R.E. Bellesmith (November 2024). I didn’t know that. I thought the various books I read involving magic and the like were fantasy. Apparently there are levels. For folks like me who see themselves more often reading literary fiction, I hope this review will act as […]
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Book Review: ‘The Monsters We Make’ by Kali White
IÂ grew up in the era of stranger danger. I was a generally anxious child even on my best days, a veritable nightmare on my worst; my family loves to tell the story of my weeping refusal to approach Santa Claus at a school event, unable to recognize the costumed man as my own father.Â
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Book Review: Ben Miller — ‘Pandemonium Logs’
We don’t talk about the tolls the pandemic has taken on each of us. In Ben Miller’s new book Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020-2022 (Rutgers University Press, November 2024) he says the quiet part aloud.
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Book Review: Vince Gotera — ‘Dragons & Rayguns’
Although Iowa Poet Laureate Vince Gotera’s collection of speculative poetry, Dragons & Rayguns (Final Thursday Press), is a panoply of allusions (and although I’d boldly state that I understood many of them), it is also in turns sincere, self-deprecating, thought-provoking and tender.
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Book Review: ‘My Father Called Us Monkeys’ by Mario Duarte
When my friend Mario Duarte asked me to read his latest book, a series of connected short stories about a Mexican-American boy growing up in western Illinois called My Father Called Us Monkeys published by Ice Cube Press, I was both excited and a tad apprehensive.
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Book Review: ‘(Re)present: Racism and Resistance in Iowa’
Important books exist. They are written and published every day. There are people dedicated to creating and publishing work that changes and educates people. Sometimes, they put out important work that is accessible and educational and aimed at helping the youth in Iowa understand their home and their histories. (Re)Present: Racism & Resistance in Iowa […]
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Fully Booked: Novels that shake skeletons from their closets
I love narratives where the past, a past, any past, comes screaming into the present. It doesn’t matter if what happened is relevant to the heroes of the story or deeply woven into their family tree — it is their problem to face and they have to contend with it now. “The past is never […]
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Book Review: ‘Brazos’ by Justin Carter
This January, while visiting Tulsa with a friend, I made an effort to reconnect with my redneck roots. We went firing at an indoor gun range. Across the street was a church with a sign announcing the coming of its gun sale. Later, at the tattoo parlor, as his own gun pierced me with a […]
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Book Review: ‘Such Lovely Skin’ by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
Never in my memory has a book kept me from sleep or made me avoid everyday objects. Officially, Such Lovely Skin (Page Street Publishing) by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is the most unsettling book I have ever read, full stop. The novel follows the narrator, a teen girl named Viv who is a relatively well-known video game […]
