Review by Mack Hassler “Sheriff George looked at Ashley and Franklin, ‘To begin with, Evangeline’s real father called me almost two months ago to ask me to find Evangeline.’” p. 59 Both the great New England poet Longfellow and the TV series Longmire, a crime drama based on the Walt…
Review by Mack Hassler “A doctor gave his patient six months to live, but he couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.” — Henny Youngman, comic (1906-1998) Recent Yooper writers of humor that I have reviewed may or may not know Henny Youngman’s one-liners, but I…
Reviewed by Sharon Brunner Nia To Go There’s matwân cî …wondering about now and then and everything everywhere poetry book portrays an innate intimacy between animals, birds, humans and inanimate objects between worlds. Stories, language, dances and visions exist and were experienced everywhere with everything. In other words, the time…
Review by Mack Hassler “Mark Twain’s Huck Finn underlies all American Literature” Character of Hemingway in Midnight in Paris (2011) by Woody Allen When he writes, produces, and directs film, Woody Allen can be brilliant. In the epigraph above, he captures an idea about Hemingway often found in scholarly work. …
Review by Mack Hassler “…the novel is a reflection upon its own nature” Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, 1963 Usually in good fiction there is an autobiographical impulse that may be seen in the mode of storytelling. In his later novels and stories, the great Romantic master of the…
Rescuing Crash, The Good Dog: A Novel By Sue Harrison Review by Deborah K. Frontiera ISBN 979-8-89656-015-9, Modern History Press, 2025, Ret. $18.95 paperback In Rescuing Crash, The Good Dog, eleven-year-old Britta had life smack her in the face. Her mother has left the family to chase her own dreams. Dad is…
Review by Mack Hassler “Therefore the land mourns… Together with the wild animals” Hosea 4:3 This first novel by Hinman has captured my interest so completely that I do not want to stop reading. Her editor at Superior Book Productions is Tyler Tichelaar, well-known for his own many books. In…
Review by Jon C. Stott “Travelling over the Mackinac Bridge always gives me a feeling of stepping back in time, where the pace of life slows a bit and folks wave as they pass on the road, whether they know you or not.” This is how Bob Otwell, who, with…
Review by Michael Carrier Peter Geye, in his novel A Lesser Light, has served up to his readers a well-constructed and entertaining chunk of his heart—and it’s a sizable chunk at that. Here Geye not only demonstrates his amazing ability to put words and sentences together in a deeply compelling fashion…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Steve Lehto’s “Death’s Door: The Truth Behind the Italian Hall Disaster and the Strike of 1913 (Second Edition)” offers a detailed account of the 1913 Christmas Eve mayhem and the corruption behind the strike in the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan. The peninsula is located in the northwestern…
Review by Mack Hassler “It is a poetry where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world” — Octavio Paz Booksellers and especially publishers hope that books may be part of commerce. So it seems only fair that commercial books may be reviewed as though…
Review by John Austin About a hundred pages into Craig Brockman’s recent thriller Dead Silence, the reader and the complicated “hero” of the story meet the book’s most splendidly rendered character: Ma’ii, the trickster coyote spirit who eventually resolves the plot, albeit in confounding fashion, and not necessarily to everyone’s…
Review by Mack Hassler “Therefore it was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all.” Genesis 11:9 A good scholarly writer is needed, especially when there are multiple voices on a topic. Willa Brown began working on Gentlemen of the Woods for her dissertation at the…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Evil forces trapped animate objects in a Misplaced Universe in M. Kelly Peach’s book The Adventures of ArgyLe Sock. The animate objects varied from articles of clothing and socks to metal items such as paper clips, scissors, and clipboards. These objects could speak, move around,d and have…
Review by Mack Hassler “…to tell the whole thing, going back to that first grisly night….back even further, in fact, to our days with Professor James at Harvard. Yes, to dredge it all up….” Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994), p. 5 Tichelaar has produced a comprehensive book loaded with…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner M. Kelly Peach told a tragic story of a puppet and its master, a story filled with mournful memories, creative endeavors, and deadly delusions. It is staged in Detroit with an unsure timeline, probably a time when puppet shows with marionettes were popular. Kyle, the main character,…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera The book’s title-poem, “Roots in Water” does not appear until close to the end of the book. It is about snipping a shoot from a bush and placing it in a pickle jar of water to grow a new plant. Simple, but also complex, since…
Review by Mack Hassler “…the novel is reflecting upon its own nature” Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, 1963 Gentle Spirits, this first book-length offering by Conlan, a retired shipmaster and poet, is not exactly an “Anti-Novel” in the tradition that Sartre describes above. It does not use the…
