Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron Alexia Nader’s debut novel, The Meaning of Daughter, packs a sweeping saga spanning three continents and as many generations into one modern, slim volume. The novel is broken into three sections, each chronicling one character’s journey towards self-actualization and self-acceptance amidst an evolving landscape of systemic oppression. Merjan starts the story: an elderly woman on an airplane leaving her past behind her to live and make amends with her adult daughter. Merjan’s tale is quickly retrospective as she narrates her childhood migration from Lebanon to Haiti, her marriage as a means of seeking safety, and…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Rebecca Jane Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead slams the reader awake to the emotional terrain of Armenian heritage, history, family, tradition, and sensibility. This is a father’s story, with his daughter accompanying him, journeying to what might have been a “motherland.” This father, as a child, was forced to leave toys, a pet, a home to walk and walk to… genocide. He survived, only to navigate humanity’s sea of identity, as neither Jew nor Arab, from Jerusalem. A compassionate reader must participate with full emotional engagement, to respond as a deep listener, to welcome the…
Review by Allie Rigby “I’m not being dramatic, but as women we are walking secrets,” said actor Kristin Stewart at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025. At the time, Stewart was referencing her film, “The Chronology of Water” based on the anti-memoir of the same title by Lydia Yuknavitch. Perhaps it takes anti-memoirs and hybrid memoirs to crack open the walnut secrets of the body: to lay open the flesh of one’s storied organs and blood. In María Mínguez Arias’s Naming the Body: A Queer Woman’s Restorative Mapping of the Self, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, the walnut…
Onna Solomon HEIRLOOMS Again this familiar window, again the bare trees and the dead grasses along the river’s curve the day after Thanksgiving. Doing dishes with my mother in the quiet after everyone has gone, she says, Eventually you’ll take this over handing me her mother’s antique serving platter. I am terrified by this clear view of how we inherit. The river, of course, is beginning to freeze, winter neatening fall’s confusion. One summer I had a fling with a gravedigger. He stole flowers from the dead and left these foolish offerings at my door. Every day he had…
Review by Mary Fontana Tina Kelley won a 2003 Washington State Book Award for her first book of poems, The Gospel of Galore. Her recently published fifth collection, the witty and observant Field Guide to North American Words, does for language what a good guidebook does for flora and fauna, presenting living specimens to seek out and marvel at, and drawing the reader toward greater intimacy with the world. Language and guidebooks are at their most useful, and exacting, when they tease out nuances between closely related things. Here Kelley explores the fine shades of meaning between this word…
Review by Jane Ward It was fitting to begin reading The Fall-Down Effect, Liz Johnston’s forceful debut novel featuring a family unraveling amid environmental crisis, at the tail end of a summer that saw much of the world baking and a wide swath of Canadian wilderness burning out of control. This was the second summer in a row that I took note of the smoke and haze of these fires drifting down and across the northern United States. The pervasive smell and particulate matter couldn’t avoided. The Fall-Down Effect shows us that these circumstances should not be ignored. The…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Chiara DiLello’s eloquent and determined debut collection has much to say about the personal and cultural complexities of being a contemporary woman without children. It also summoned a memory from my early writing years. In 1984, I was interviewed with a friend and writing colleague when we coedited an anthology of women’s poetry and prose, Island Women, published with a grant from the American Association of University Women. We were excited for the publicity this could bring to the book, which was a project of the Women Writers Alliance, a local group of female creatives…
Review by Jessica de Koninck When my husband died a friend of his who had also lost a spouse said to me, You will find you become the other person. True. I began to see things, to hear things the way my husband would have seen or heard them. In her beautifully felt collection, At the Hour of Now (Bordighera Press, 2026), Maria Lisella, former Queens poet laureate and author of three previous collections, “becomes” her late spouse. Like the small family of three the poems depict, the collection is divided into three sections. In those poems the poet…
Review by Justine Pechuzal Sadiqa de Meijer’s essay collection In the Field begins with loss—that of a writer’s cherished notebook—and thus frames a series of investigations into the finite. The scope is broad: from a medical student questioning the constraints of modern healthcare, to a Holocaust victim’s perception of humanity “[Etty] … possessed such a presence that even within a nightmare she could see the world,” (158) de Meijer observes and probes the world with laser-sharp finesse. Who are we? Where do we belong? How do we make meaning? Much of what de Meijer finds is unsettling. Returning to…
Review by Emily Webber Growing up with the Genesis story, Eve was always framed as either a cautionary example or the root of all human suffering, but B.K. O’Connor’s novel, Eve, takes a different path. From the start, the book steers away from moral condemnation and replaces it with something everyone should find compelling: curiosity about the world and what it means to be alive. O’Connor presents a woman on a journey to find answers and create a life on her own terms. She doesn’t want to be told what to do, and she doesn’t want to simply fill…