Author: Nicole
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Book Review: Shadow Chaser by Angela Armstrong
Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. Shadow Chaser is a coming-of-age novel about a young girl named Faye Moana Delaney who lives with her parents, Tai and Abbey*. Not in a single home, though. To set the record straight, from page one, Faye explains that…
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Book Review: “Lifeline to a Soul” — A Memoir on Prison Education and Reform
People still need lifelines, even when they don’t realize they are drowning. “I’ve never taught a class before,” I told them. “And I’ve never been in a prison before, so it’s safe to say I’m going to learn a lot more from you over the next eleven weeks than you could possibly learn from me.”…
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Book Review: Boy Wander – A Coming of Age Memoir
Jobert Abeuva’s sensual coming of age memoir fearlessly recounts the passions and pitfalls of living a double-life as boy wonder and boy toy.
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Book Review: Dating in Berlin – Tales of Modern Love and Relationships
A refreshing online dating manifesto that smashes our fairy-tale expectations of love and primes us to recognize red flags and narcissists. “I’m not everyone’s shot of whisky. But I hope you have learned something from it, and from my mistakes.” Lulu Johnson Do we need another book on how to manage the trials and tribulations…
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Book Review: Just Another Meat-Eating Dirtbag – A Graphic Memoir
Using the charm of graphic memoir, this Trojan “tofu horse” of romp and reality elevates how we talk about love, war, and eating meat. Michael is a young war vet who had a rough time re-entering civilian life. After finding his purpose through a weirdly insightful dating class, he meets Coconut, the love of his…
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Book Review: Enough – A Memoir of Mistakes, Mania, and Motherhood
A powerful memoir that confronts the scars of sexual abuse, familial separation, and mental illness as the author emerges into motherhood. Content warning: bipolar disorder, rape, relationship abuse, substance abuse, suicidal ideation. The word “enough,” when attached to certain situations, can leave one feeling either unfulfilled or perfectly content. In the span of one person’s…
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Book Review: “This World is Not Your Home”
An adventurous thought journey of a former Seventh Day Adventist-turned-Episcopalian’s pivotal musings on faith, family, and survival. In this collection of essays, stories, and reports, essayist and fiction writer Matthew Vollmer treats his latest assemblage like an astronomical map, charting out the steps from his past to trace the trajectories of things to come. Vollmer…
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Book Review: Mikołaj Grynberg and the Inheritance of Oppression
Reading Mikołaj Grynberg in a time of war. “We have jokes because we haven’t got any hope. But we sure know how to laugh, don’t you think?” UNKNOWN Polish photographer and oral historian Mikołaj Grynberg emerges into the English publishing space with his collection of short stories inspired by the stories of Polish Jews across…
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Book Review: Judgment Day & Other White Lies
A sharp-edged collected fiction on American values that blends the certainty of mythology with the horrors of distorted revisionist history. Judgment Day takes the shape of seven stories ranging in form, reality, and aspects of Greek mythology to illustrate how tragedy becomes desensitized for our cast of narrators and contributing witnesses. Some stories here use the…
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Book Review: The dying breed of the cycling courier
“You’ve Got the Gig!” shares what life really looks like when you push your body to the limits to survive in the gig economy. You’ve Got the Gig!: 100,000 Miles as a Cycle courier in the Gig Economy chronicles the span of Ryan Murphy’s tenure as a cycling courier for Deliveroo in England. His origin story…