Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Jim Bolone’s Zombie Seagulls: And 13 Other Bite-Sized Nightmares! offers spooky tales that will have any reader bracing for ultimate suspense and surprise. This book was meant for young readers. This collection of horror stories prepares even the less avid readers to embrace the written word, with…
Review by Mack Hassler “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve ofthem,whom he also designated apostles [special messengers]” Luke 6:12-13 I particularly like reading nonfiction storytelling…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Helen Mitsios’ (Editor) “Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland” offers a variety of the island’s personal realities concerning life, love, and family. Twenty Icelandic Authors wrote the stories, which are filled with mystery and culture. The stories took place in Iceland and other parts…
Review by Deborah K Frontiera Edd Tury has been writing short stories for many years, published in several different anthologies, but until now, not collected in one volume. The Boy Who Growled at Thunder has two sections, The Big Woods, and Urban Legends, each reflecting the setting of the stories…
Review by Mack Hassler A beautifully-designed chapbook by Amy Hansen, Superior Stories is the product of workshopping for creative writers and chosen by chief judge Brian Gruley as the latest of this long series of chapbook winners. I have not reviewed any of the series previously, but the work of…
Review by Mack Hassler Scott Fitzgerald published and sold to mass-market and glossy magazines that paid well in order to maintain the expensive life style that his debutante wife Zelda expected. As a major American fiction writer, he also published four financially successful novels. This substantial collection gathers 43 of…
Review by Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak has captured the essence of the Deaf experience with all of its complications in his book The Language of Home: Stories, which took approximately 40 years to write. The time the stories took place varied from the 1970s to perhaps present time and it…
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…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera If you have not read Sharon Kennedy’s first two in this series, The SideRoad Kids, and The SideRoad Kids: A Summer of Discovery, it won’t matter since the final volume has plenty of backstory to pull you into these characters as adults. It has been…
Review by Jon C. Stott. Near the end of Sharon Kennedy’s The SideRoad Kids: Tales from Chippewa County, one of the characters muses: “It’s hard being 12. It’s like we’re in between.” Kate, who is in sixth grade, realizes that when the school year ends, an important stage in their…
Review by Jon C. Stott Roadkill Justice: Featuring Yooper Woodswoman Nettie Bramble is set somewhere in the north-central section of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (I think, maybe, in Baraga County), there’s a place called Budworm. Residing there are such people as Sammy Snert, Miss Linda Figgy (aka Miss Figgy), Tag Elder,…
Review by Mack Hassler Two texts in the general literature far from the UP come to mind as the reader listens to the strong first-person opening of Roadkill Justice: Featuring Yooper Woodswoman Nettie Bramble here, “Me and Ma live off the land. That and her government check. My name’s Nettle…
Review by Brad Gischia You never know what you’re going to get when you open up a book of short stories. That’s part of the fun of it. If they’re good you’re golden, you find yourself turning pages and wishing for a little more of these characters or situations, however,…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak’s book “Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories” presented tales of courageous women who lived in Ironwood, Michigan, a small town located at the west end of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.). Many young men, during the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, fled to this community…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Sharon M. Kennedy has mastered the art of telling short stories due in part to her history as a columnist for the Sault News in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the articles she has written for the Mackinac Journal and her collection of short stories in View from…
Reviewed by Hannah Brinza Deborah Frontiera’s new book Superior Tapestry sets itself the task of weaving together the history of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Those of you familiar with Deborah’s work may recall her novella Midnight in the Pawn Shop, in which objects at the pawn shop come to life and…
Review by Brad Gischia There are many books that detail the history of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. These are often rigorously researched and documented (some may be less so) and they represent an important aspect of the way we understand this strange little corner of the world. The SideRoad…
Review by Victor R. Volkman Although I count myself a lifetime resident of Michigan, I confess that, for the better part of six decades, I had never heard the appellation “Sea Stacks” until this year, when I picked up the eponymous anthology of short stories by John (“J.L.”) Hagen. This…
