Reviewed by Frankie Martinez

A powerful story of humanity, nature, and the fight for truth.

In a world where most of humanity has fled to live deep in Earth’s underground, Violet Murphy refuses to leave her family’s farm on the surface. Located in Fulminara, one of two habitable islands left on Earth, the Murphy estate is home to Violet, her horse Firestorm, and the relics of her family’s agricultural research.

Life is peaceful until one day, officers of the government’s Science Bureau arrive to conduct the annual census and invite Violet to visit their facility underground in the capital of Apricus. What is supposed to be a presentation on the Murphy family’s developments in food generation devolves into an unsettling interrogation—one which leaves Violet drugged and imagining the voices of what she believes are trapped animals in the stark hallways of the Bureau, pleading for help.

When Violet returns home and feels an unusually close sense of comfort from Firestorm, she is convinced that the voices she heard were real.

Meanwhile, there are others experiencing a strange connection with animals. Emily Steuben, an Earth preservationist, discovers ducklings at her home for the first time in three years after being led there by other animals’ insistence. Jack Collins, a retail director, is hunting a doe on the surface when he is suddenly struck with the deer’s fear, so much that he leaves and decides to swear off hunting for the rest of his life. Mason Agu, a computer programmer for the government’s Infrastructure Bureau, is spending a quiet evening at home in Apricus, until he gets a strong feeling from his cat that something has happened next door to his elderly, beloved neighbor.

The four strangers come together after responding to Violet’s vague online forum post about a “special connection to animals” and quickly become fast friends. As their bond grows, so do their questions about the government, especially after learning about Violet’s interrogation there.

The organization’s increasingly strange activities—starting with the census and leading to the announcement that they’d be evacuating Aprica permanently for an unknown, habitable land—lead the friends to start an investigation into the Bureau, one that leads them down a dangerous path to the truth.

Imber is about the light and dark in the world, highlighting both the comfort of the bonds between living things, as well as the strength to fight against overwhelming odds.

Mistina’s debut is filled with expansive, dynamic descriptions of nature and humanity. The novel’s quiet opening is moving and immersive—Violet walks through her family’s estate, remembering the day she found a dead hawk, only to find Firestorm peeking through the windows of the greenhouse in search of Violet’s mother after her untimely death.

Mistina is also playful with her portrayal of gestures and movement. Each character interacts with one another in unique ways: Jack can’t keep his eyes off of Violet’s freckles; Mason’s deep voice contains a childlike innocence when he’s around his cat or Firestorm.

Because descriptions are so detailed and plot details are so heavily focused on the government’s secret plans, the pacing of the story can be quite slow. There is something comforting about it, especially in the first parts of the novel that are more focused on worldbuilding and the friendship between Violet, Jack, Emily, and Mason, but it also does not quite match the content in the novel’s latter half with its somewhat shocking violence. A lot of information is jammed into the last half of the novel because of this. While Imber does reach a satisfactory, open-ended conclusion in the larger story about evacuating humanity from Earth, I longed for more important plot threads between the four friends.

But that’s also because I wanted to linger in Mistina’s world for just a little bit longer without the government’s evil plans. While lies, deceit, and the end of the world run underneath the surface of the novel, Imber is a gorgeous portrait of humanity, rich with the warmth between people and their chosen companions, whether they be family, friends, or animals.

Thank you for reading Frankie Martinez’s book review of Imber by Deborah Mistina! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

An out-of-the-box murder mystery with some seriously intriguing twists

The Last Case is an unconventional but wholly satisfying specimen of the murder mystery form. Set in a coastal town in New England during the early 1980s, this novel opens with a body: a man in a Dungeons and Dragons costume found beheaded on the beach. This brings the lighthouse-dwelling detective Joseph Tey out of his isolation and back into the game. As he works at solving the case, Tey also works on himself, battling identity issues and a sense of mental deterioration.

Our protagonist’s inner conflict, his doubts about his past and his capabilities, are a constant presence in the book. This is accomplished with an ingeniously selected alternative to inner monologue: interjections of passages from Joseph Tey’s journal. In addition to fresh approaches to the genre, the plot is sprinkled with familiar mystery tropes as well, like annoying police colleagues, Cold War rhetoric, and a large corporation of unclear morality.

Every single character in this book, however minor, feels alive and breathing. Manners of speech, contents of speech, and little actions meticulously described all work toward the painting of people who feel vibrantly real, accentuated with sparse brushstrokes of the caricatural.

The attention to detail and resulting characterization is in every nook and cranny of this book, and it defines every aspect of the writing. Through particular, descriptive, and expressive detail, this novel is both fully excavated and polished like a jewel.

“The journal may tell him, if he dared read it. Something made him reluctant. Something made those memories unpleasant. He’d written them down as though putting them on paper removed them from his mind, making room for other things. His curiosity pulled and his apprehension pushed, so the diary remained on the coffee table.”

The novel rises to real thrills but also plunges to profound psychological depths. At its center, it is concerned with why people do what they do, the senselessness of bad actions, and redemption. It’s a thought-provoking thriller—and a strong one at that.

Some readers will notice that the protagonist’s name is taken from the pen name of an older mystery author. The reference doesn’t seem to carry more meaning than just being a simple homage to Josephine Tey, and it has no connection to another popular book series which has a fictional Josephine Tey. Delauder may have gone tongue-in-cheek with titling this novel, The Last Case: A Joseph Tey Mystery, but he also could be leveraging for a sequel or prequel to follow. DeLauder admits in the back matter of the book that this is his first foray into the murder mystery genre, but he writes with enough skill and expertise to make it feel like he couldn’t have done a better job. Until next time, I hope.

Thank you for reading Nikolas Mavreas’s book review of The Last Case by Sean DeLauder! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Josie Prado

An unpredictable story of the mysterious deaths of top Democratic candidates

Fast-paced and a real shock to the system, Mystery of the Poison Cups is rather self-explanatory. During a secret emergency meeting of the National Democratic Party’s Election Committee, Bertha Bagley, a top contributor to the party, drinks from a cup laced with cyanide and dies. This event sets the stage for the avalanche to come, focused mostly on Senator Mudbuttom, another member of the Committee, and his family.

Unbeknownst to many, Bertha and Senator Mudbuttom are planning a coup to have Mudbuttom replace the current top candidate, Nix, as the Democratic Presidential election pick. With Bertha’s murder and more deaths from cyanide poisoning happening during the campaign trail, Senator Mudbuttom may face a detour from the White House into a jail cell.

The investigation begins with local police, but as the number of cyanide-related deaths rises following a watch party at the hotel, the FBI steps in to take over. Agents Lewis and Shelton Ledbetter, along with their boss Bob Cummings and his daughter Phyllis, form a task force to identify those responsible and prevent any future attacks. For every rock they lift, though, nefarious political snakes slither out and complicate their case. They would gather evidence and come close to an arrest, only for their prime suspect to be killed. In a room with corrupt politicians, who is actually willing to be cutthroat in the literal sense?

Mystery of the Poison Cups is a compelling exploration of the ultra-wealthy and the political underbelly that prioritizes power over morality. The story is filled with affairs, backstabbing, and complicated family dynamics, all while the characters struggle to maintain a respectable image. Senator Mudbuttom, for example, has a mistress and is simultaneously searching for evidence of his wife’s infidelity to justify divorcing her. The text does not attempt to dulcify any character’s actions; rather, it portrays them naturally and unapologetically. The Mudbuttom family feels like a real, tense family that has learned to survive with one another as opposed to loving each other.

I enjoyed traveling down this winding road of twists and turns, but sometimes I did find myself wanting more of a foundation in the setting to make the plot clearer. The text is primarily in dialogue with limited exposition and description, which is great for the pacing, but leaves some to be desired when it comes to building the conflict. Since everything is happening so quickly with no time reference, it can be difficult to feel impacted by the deaths other than Bertha’s. The shifts between FBI agents to campaign events can also sometimes feel jarring.

For readers looking for a fun, novel approach to murder mystery and politics, Mystery of the Poison Cups would be a great choice. It’s a fast-paced whodunnit for a rainy day, a mystery to solve with the soundtrack of a storm.

Thank you for reading Josie Prado’s book review of Mystery of the Poison Cups by D.K. Caldwell! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Frankie Martinez

A compulsive story of how aimless travels can become a meaningful life journey

David LeBrun was twenty-four and working at a broccoli farm in Ontario, Canada in 2011. At the same time, he was working on a manuscript about his past part-time jobs, Curriculum Vitae, and getting ready to send it to the editor-in-chief of Edifice Books in Toronto.

In order to finish his manuscript, LeBrun heads to Costa Rica to stay with a childhood friend for some well-needed work and isolation. However, after his stay in Costa Rica comes to an abrupt, sudden end, Lebrun finds that he’s willing to go anywhere. With money slowly dwindling and the vague direction of his friend’s farm in Mexico guiding him, LeBrun finds himself on a wayward, knife-edge adventure, hopping from the bus to the backs of trucks, to befriending strangers, and to busking (badly).

Told in expressive detail, LeBrun’s memoir, Delirium Vitae is a compelling story about trying to find your way in a world that sometimes feels woefully meaningless and ordinary. With his father’s death from cancer and his mother’s disability from a stroke hanging over him, Lebrun is on a mission to make his mark, not only with his manuscript, but also in his travels: “It was at seventeen, after watching his cancer devour him, that I knew I wanted nothing in my life to be ordinary.”

In many ways, Delirium Vitae is a successful product of this mission. LeBrun’s journey through Central America and Mexico is evocative of a real-life Alice in Wonderland. It’s easy to see him: a young man drifting around the open road with a broken family and no agenda; who is French-Canadian with some knowledge of Spanish, has fifty pages of his precious manuscript shoved at the bottom of his bag, and uses a recorder to gather voice notes from people he meets. Though locations, names, and faces are fleeting, his descriptions of places and people are fond and sharp. Even if LeBrun doesn’t have particularly good memories of certain people, tidbits of their words seemed to hold an impact.

One memorable example is LeBrun’s recollections of his interactions with Antonio, an unscrupulous musician he meets right after entering Mexico, who can’t seem to keep a steady relationship or stay in one place. There are several times LeBrun is sure that Antonio has abandoned him, only for him to show up once again to travel together: “Fuck it, David. You know what? My old friends always ask me how I stay slim, why I look this young… And I tell them it’s because I keep moving. I keep rolling, you see?”

While Delirium Vitae succeeds in portraying the uncertainty of travel and the multitude of perspectives you encounter, it can be difficult to find footing in LeBrun’s emotional journey. There are hints of it throughout, particularly of how emotionally taxing it is to have his father die at an early age and to see his mother in a hospital bed, but there isn’t much introspection on the topic to make me feel like I knew exactly how it all connected.

Of course, not all stories, especially memoirs, should be expected to follow a linear path or project a direct meaning. It’s impossible to know the right thing to do in a certain time, or for people to do and say the right things to keep a story moving. However, Delirium Vitae shows that with time and space, perhaps meaning can be gleaned from the biggest of adventures across countries to the smallest of interactions over a beer.

Thank you for reading Frankie Martinez’s book review of Delirium Vitae by David LeBrun! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Toni Woodruff

A warmhearted picture book about healing through grief together

How do you explain loss to a child? Especially big loss. The biggest. Little Bear and the Big Hole has lost his Papa Bear, and there’s a hole where Papa used to stand. A real, literal hole. He sits at the edge of the hole and cries, looking into it and hating it day after day.

Nobody seems to see it other than him either, until Squirrel comes along. She walks carefully past it, sits down beside him, and glares into it. It turns out—she’s seen it before too, back when her sister died. Little Bear and the Big Hole by Jennifer Seal is the story of how Squirrel shows up for Little Bear, how Little Bear learns to accept the hole and pour love into it in order for life—new life—to emerge.

Children experience deep, complicated sadness even when we don’t think they’re ready for it. Life comes at everyone, unfortunately, and the possibility of death will greet them in stories, movies, and life early on. So how can we show them that there is hope and love beyond this sadness and grief?

If you’re going to read a book to your child about grief, make it this one. This is a powerful story with bighearted characters and concepts that demonstrate how grief isn’t the end of the road. It does hit you with the death of Papa Bear right away, so be ready to tackle it on page one.

The whole concept of the big hole is done to perfection. There’s something missing inside, and it’s almost impossible to avoid it. And yet, we look the same on the outside; no one can even tell you’re dealing with something so big.

But at least we have each other. This book is an important reminder that, even when it feels like we’re alone, we can still lean on other people. Squirrel is a terrifically loving character who doesn’t ask anything of Little Bear. She just sits with him, plays with him, talks with him, and tells him that what he’s doing is okay. She doesn’t say it’s going to get better. She lets time heal the big hole.

They create art and write letters and sing songs to the hole, filling it with the love\nthat’s missing now that Papa Bear is gone. There are real lessons to be learned in this moving story. Death and grief are big topics that will have to be broached at some point. If you or your little one feel ready, it’s important to read the right books and stories about it. Like this one.

The illustrations are colorful, creative, and clean, and they provide context to a story that depends on a metaphor to understand it on the deepest level. Jennifer Seal and illustrator Mirjam Siim have conjured up a special kind of magic with Little Bear and the Big Hole.

Thank you for reading Toni Woodruff’s book review of Little Bear and the Big Hole by Jennifer Seal! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Peter Hassebroek | Content Warnings: School shooting

A compelling novel about the ironies of the Second Amendment and rationalizing stricter gun legislation

Austin McGuirk gets bullied frequently at the fictional Brushy Ridge High School. Simmering rage prompts the purchase of an AR-15 through a private advertisement. He keeps the gun in his locker, ready to enact his revenge when he boils over. It happens with the ultimate humiliation that’s compounded by being recorded and shared online:

“. . . but none of it was as bad as this, none had ever stripped him so mercilessly of his dignity, had laid it out so blatantly for all to exploit and take delight in. Nothing sank his heart so deep into his bowels, no one had so mockingly exposed both his feelings and his self.“

He targets the bullying ringleader and girlfriend, isolating them in a hallway. He starts shooting. And then the moment overtakes him. He ends up killing eleven in all, including other unintentional innocents like his guidance counselor and, when cornered, himself.

While obvious blame lies with Austin for the shooting and Blake for its provocation, it’s not enough for the grieving parents and husband of the guidance counselor. They feel it could have been prevented and determine a root cause: the ease with which a boy like Austin could acquire such a powerful weapon.

It becomes their mission to thwart future occurrences by tightening the gun laws. In this, they have much support, including from their congressman and the US president. But not the resolute Speaker of the House, Fred Grantham. A formidable obstacle who would never consider tabling any bill encroaching on the Second Amendment. This he makes directly clear by spurning their appeal in Washington.

Thus is born the eponymous Brushy Ridge Militia, consisting of most of the parents and others. They scout the logistics and design an elaborate, costly months-long plan to kidnap the speaker to compel him to see the light. Ironically, the same Second Amendment Grantham uses to deny them provides rationale for the group:

“Why is it perfectly legitimate to use that ambiguous set of words to support the premise that a bullied eighteen-year-old youth can legally purchase a semi-automatic weapon, while the Brushy Ridge Militia’s actions are considered illegal, even though much more consistent with the Amendment’s original intent?“

To add further irony, the members must acquire guns and take NRA training. It’s a risky plan. A low percentage plan. Success depends on so many factors falling in place as expected. However, their collective grief has coalesced to overcome initial and ongoing doubts. Their resoluteness equals Grantham’s. And what the militia’s leader, Hank Patrick, a former DC lawyer, argues is highly persuasive and inventive. Will it work?

This is a well-paced read where the writing is economical yet complete; cohesiveness is one of its strengths. Readers will become easily invested in the militia’s efforts and whether they’ll succeed or not. The three stages of the plot—the mass murder, the kidnapping, the trials—are given thorough treatment, and the progression from one to the next is consistently smooth and logical.

The points-of-view shift from omniscient to close third person for many characters, from the murderer to the militia members to the FBI to the kidnapped speaker and more. This provides a broad perspective of events while remaining solicitous to each character. It also retains objectivity and avoids bias. Considering the number of characters, it’s impressive how all but the most minor are relatable and real.

For a story grounded in such heartbreaking sadness, The Brushy Ridge Militia is tastefully entertaining. The ironic use and cogent interpretations of the Second Amendment highlight this absorbing novel.

Thank you for reading Peter Hassebroek’s book review of The Brushy Ridge Militia by Roger Chiocchi! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Timothy Thomas

An inspired commentary on life’s unpredictability and the beauty of second chances

Moment by moment, day by day, we rarely know how or when people will enter or exit our lives or how influential they could become. Our acceptance of this most erratic characteristic of life may give us the courage to embrace the unexpected changes in things, circumstances, and people, giving potential to great joy even in the midst of great loss. While not strictly a treatise on the uncertainty of life, Michael Kahn’s The Gourmet Club poignantly illustrates how our most rewarding moments and meaningful connections can be birthed from the unpredictable.

The year is 1981. Four first year associates at Chicago’s prestigious Abbot & Windsor (Gabe Pollack, Eric Cameron, Susan Baker, and Norman Greenberg) have bonded because of their chance inclusion in their orientation’s Words of Welcome presentation. Norman’s wife, Esther, comes up with the idea of a potluck dinner for the small group and their respective spouses to get to know each other. After a delightfully successful evening with great food, conversation, and entertainment, the group agrees to get together for four dinner parties a year, with each couple hosting once a year. Thus, the Gourmet Club is born.

Over the years, this quarterly tradition plays host not only to the Club’s growing friendship, but also to the navigation of major decisions, career changes, and celebrations of life. As their paths diverge, these dinner parties keep them linked together by a shared desire for and need of community that offers support and encouragement.

Though Kahn writes in his author’s note that he simply followed the lead of the characters, the narrative conveys a strong sense of intentionality and wisdom. There is a thoughtfulness in the approach to each of the main characters. Their paths connect to an overarching theme of ceaseless change and community, and this connection results in a narrative landscape that is recognizably realistic with characters to match.

The difficulty in creating such a landscape and telling a story that spans decades, however, is that details can sometimes get lost. As the story gains momentum, there are lengthy gaps in the timeline that gloss over significant moments in the characters’ lives. The narrative tends to focus more on their careers, which means that less attention is given to their interpersonal lives and the changes happening within them, like parenting and marriage.

Still, this story does exactly what it sets out to do. Armed with an eclectic cast and a thoughtfully familiar world, The Gourmet Club is a confident, engaging book that prompts a reflective look at one’s own past and a hopeful look toward the future through eyes of wonder at life’s fortuitous paths.

Thank you for reading Timothy Thomas’s book review of The Gourmet Club by Michael A. Kahn! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Victoria Lilly

A collage of dreamlike, visceral images—an experimental arthouse movie in shifting literary form

VHS is an eclectic patchwork of forms, styles, and formats—an array of vignettes loosely tied to the narrator’s experience of growing up a second-generation immigrant in the United States.

The narrator’s father immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. His mother moved from socialist Poland to America, and the two met in a toothpaste factory in the industrial zone of Long Island City. The narrator, driven by a mix of ennui and homesickness for a home he never knew, drifts from career to career, town to town, on a vaguely planned trek east to his mother’s native Poland.

Among those chapters with defined settings, most take place in Berlin, Germany; another prominent locale is New York City. Over the course of the collection and the narrator’s journey, he shares snippets of his life—events, sensations, musings—and intersperses them with vignettes from the lives of his friends, lovers, acquaintances, parents, and absolute strangers.

The narrator is a great fan of the visual medium, so the microfiction-style chapters are named after movie classics, such as Only Lovers Left Alive, Total Recall, The Lives of Others, and more. The fragmented, stream of consciousness style blends the essay form with that of diary entries, letters, and poetry—often within the same short chapter.

Boundaries of said fragments are muddled—melted down, one could say—and pieced together without seams or needlework through the use of an even more dizzying array of techniques. Single-sentence paragraphs, graphically broken-up text, ellipses and enjambments, strikethroughs and caesuras, all are deftly utilized to create the stream of consciousness effect. And a stream it is, as the reader has no choice but to surrender to the meandering, confusing, language-breaking and language-loving voice of the narrator.

Some stories are funny despite the overall serious and contemplative tone of the collection. One such section is “Vision Quest,” in which the narrator obtains special newly tinted glasses which he dubs “Tinman Elite,” complete with a “heavy-duty double-lock ‘High Performance Resin Case'” with a handle on it. His students (in this chapter, the narrator is working as a college professor) remark that he looks like “the Matrix;” the narrator muses on the nature of vision and the (dis)advantages of having one’s eyes so concealed as he heads for a rave party in an East Berlin nightclub.

On the other end of the spectrum are dry, grey, melancholy stories such as “Only Lovers Left Alive:” a brief piece about a girl (presumably the narrator’s mother) waking before dawn in a windowless room with bare walls. The girl heads to the immigration office to present her “white card,” dreading the strangeness of the new country she found herself in, bereft among the unfamiliar language and unadorned walls.

As is always the case with experimental writing, summary of individual tales within VHS is a shadow of the true depth of the text, which lies in the playful use of language (even if the author has a sometimes overbearing fondness for the use of parentheses). The immigrant experience is a theme as old as time in American literature, but Campanioni breathes fresh life into this tradition through clever turns of phrase, surprising depths of the narrator’s inner life, and a steady hand with prose and genre alike.

VHS is not a rollercoaster but a contemplative train journey—a shifting, colorful, and surreal landscape of cities, persons, and memories going by—to bring you out of the grey dullness of everyday life.

Thank you for reading Victoria Lilly’s book review of VHS by Chris Campanioni! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt

A pirate captain with the soul of a poet. A mission born from vengeance that becomes something far greater.

Author Daniel McKenzie launches readers into a richly imagined, cross-continental epic that sails from the West African coast to the South China Sea in Silken Dragons, the third installment of the Seafourthe Saga.

Captain Lucien “the Wolf” commands the Vengeance, an Ottoman-built warship turned rogue, crewed not by mercenaries but by men of conviction. When the crew rescues a near-dead African chieftain, Azumah, adrift off the coast of Dakar, they are pulled into a mission of vengeance that soon expands into a sweeping campaign against slavers, colonizers, and the machinery of empire itself. What begins as a rescue spirals outward into secret alliances, midnight raids, and an audacious plan aimed at the Spanish stronghold in Maynila.

The novel unfolds in deliberate, sweeping arcs: a jungle-bound lagoon serves as a hidden pirate haven; a tense naval standoff gives way to an unlikely friendship with the clever and calculating Chinese pirate, Captain Hong Lim Ahn; and moments of battle are balanced with long passages of stillness and spirit. McKenzie’s writing is deeply immersive, carving space for both the epic and the intimate. A dolphin named Argos gets nearly half a chapter, and it works (somehow) beautifully.

Lucien is a commanding presence, not so much a pirate as a warrior-poet with a strategist’s mind and a soldier’s heart. He leads with quiet certainty, justice over ego, restraint over spectacle. And then there’s Lady Lynden Seafourthe. She may remain physically out of the action, but her presence is everywhere. She is Lucien’s spiritual anchor, the compass that keeps him from drifting into legend without purpose. She is not a passive figure, but rather the force that steadies his hand, the private devotion that allows him to move through public violence without becoming hollow. In a world of veils and shifting loyalties, her truth is the one constant he never questions.

McKenzie’s prose is often poetic, sometimes archaic, and fully committed to the world it builds. It doesn’t rush, but it never loses its sense of direction. Every chapter serves the story, even when it pauses for tea, or ritual, or a quiet conversation beneath foreign stars. A Chaldean seer named Nur-Mena drifts in and out of the narrative, offering visions, riddles, and a sense that fate—like the sea—is always moving beneath the surface. That tonal balance between the brutal and the lyrical, the playful and the profound, is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Silken Dragons is for readers who want their adventures with bite, their heroes with depth, and their storytelling rich with both tension and tenderness. One note for readers: many characters go by multiple names or titles, which adds texture but may briefly disorient. It’s a minor hurdle in an otherwise engrossing read, and one that fades as the cast settles into rhythm.

This is not a book of easy heroics. It’s about the cost of honor, the weight of grief, and the quiet resilience of love. McKenzie delivers a tale that is as mythic as it is human and one well worth the voyage.

Thank you for reading Melissa Suggitt’s book review of Silken Dragons by Daniel McKenzie! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Eric Mayrhofer

Chip Cater’s short stories shine with compassion, wisdom, wit, and warmth

Memories don’t play out like feature-length movies. They happen in flashes, fits, and starts. Sometimes a memory can bubble up to the surface of your mind with a very clear point, and sometimes they ramble or roll by for no other reason than to remind you of something pleasantly familiar.

Those are characteristics that Chip Cater’s collection Capers and Switcheroos embodies beautifully. Transforming his memories into short stories, he lets readers into his mind and gives them the joy of experiencing his admiration and love, his childhood mischief, and the quiet humility that comes with age.

And it truly does feel like each story is a little door into Cater’s mind. That’s partly due to flourishes like the quick, easy nicknames that pepper his writing. When recalling his wedding in “Blue Velvet,” the opening story, he says, “We were married in the Congregational Church, which stands on the hill over the tiny string of stores and restaurants in Wellfleet. The Congo’s tall steeple towers over the town and is what you aim for when sailing back in from the outer reaches of Wellfleet harbor.”

Those small but irreverent choices, nestled in an otherwise matter-of-fact tone, help readers see that Cater doesn’t take life too seriously, even as he regards it with a sharp eye respectfully studying everything it lands on.

That matter-of-fact voice could also be called openness—even earnestness. In the same story, Cater’s wife winds up having to change into a borrowed dress, a dazzling blue number with sparkling stones. The incident is briefly the talk of the restaurant, and when Cater and his wife leave, “twelve to fifteen ‘fans,’ who had watched the drama unfold, rushed up…They wanted Mary’s autograph. After the scenes in the bar and dining room and the changes of costume, they were positive she was a celebrity. She still is.” Then later, in the story “Something Noticed,” he and Mary find themselves in Vietnam and notice there are no birds; the Vietnamese ate them into scarcity due to food shortages that began in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Cater reflects, “We have hundreds of beautiful birds, many of whom sing…it is our palette and our symphony.”

In just a few words, Cater reveals so much: his bounding love for his wife Mary. The couple’s quiet awareness of all their blessings, humble in the knowledge that so many have far less.

There are one or two stories that err on the rambling, rolling side of memory. “Saved by the Belle,” for example, may luxuriate a little too long in the technological details of early digital publishing for some. Even then, however, readers glimpse our narrator’s open-hearted kindness as he remembers a workplace rival. “Dan left and went to our largest competitor,” Cater writes. “He did well and we stayed in touch over the years…we had a shared interest.” Even in adversity, obstacles never become permanent barriers to good relationships, politeness, or decency.

Capers and Switcheroos is a quietly moving piece, a comforting blanket of a short story collection.

Thank you for reading Eric Mayrhofer’s book review of Capers and Switcheroos by Chip Cater! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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