Mary Odden’s Blog
Date: June 4, 2020
https://www.maryodden.com/neighborsblog
News & Reviews
News:
Lithub: Finding My Story in the Colonial Past of the Andaman Islands
Date: June 3, 2020
My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy […]
Caroline Leavitt’s Blog Interview with Aimee Liu
Date: June 3, 2020
Aimee Liu talks about GLORIOUS BOY, the excruciating process of writing, creating a memorable silent character, her shapeshifter dad, and so much more.
Ms. Q&A: Authors Aimee Liu and Cai Emmons Talk Motherhood, Shame and Releasing Books Mid-Pandemic
Date: June 3, 2020
Some 30 years ago, an established nonfiction writer and a screenwriter decided to write their first novels. They met in a fiction writing class, and have been friends ever since, […]
NY Times: Percival Everett Has a Book or Three Coming Out
Date: June 3, 2020
Featured mentioning of Percival Everett’s Colonel Hap Thompson!
OutSmart: National Poetry Month 2020 Reading List
Date: June 3, 2020
Presented in five poetic sequences, the poems in Hold Me Tight by gay poet Jason Schneiderman focuses the reader’s attention on the subjects of anger, real and metaphorical wolves, the work of the late […]
Washington Independent Review of Books: An Interview with Donna Hemans
Date: June 3, 2020
At 15, Plum Valentine is banished from her Brooklyn home and sent back to Jamaica by parents nervous about the pernicious effects of the American lifestyle. Once there, her trust […]
Electric Lit: I Can Only Save My Grandparents’ Home by Preserving It in Fiction
Date: June 3, 2020
In the bedroom of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, there’s a mural depicting a well-dressed crowd at a cocktail party pasted to the wall. Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, points to […]
Amherst Bulletin: The price of protest: New novel looks at the consequences for two sisters caught up in the anti-war movement
Date: June 3, 2020
Family relations can be fraught in the best of times, even when people care deeply for one another. So what happens when you throw those family members into a situation […]
CrimeReads: Excerpt from Her Sister’s Tattoo
Date: June 3, 2020
It’s Detroit, 1968. Sisters Rosa and Esther march against the war in Vietnam with their best friend, Maggie. As they reached the rally site, double rows of blank-faced National Guard […]
Reviews:
Don’t let your child get the “summer slide”: TREE SPIRITS by Louise Wannier Reviewed in She Scribes
Date: August 7, 2025
This is not a reading book, however, it does encourage children to use their imaginations and “think outside the box.” That skill will help them later in life with critical […]
CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO by Tom Lutz Featured in Publishers Weekly
Date: August 5, 2025
Troubled lives intersect in the Indian Ocean with explosive results in Lutz’s tantalizing follow-up to Born Slippy. Frank Baltimore worked in construction until one of his employees started laundering money and […]
Kirkus Reviews THE RE IN REFUGE by Adrianne Kalfopoulou
Date: August 4, 2025
A poignant and profoundly relevant examination of society’s safe places. In this essay collection, Kalfopoulou explores the notion of refuge in all its varied facets. “Embedded in the word refugee […]
CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO by Tom Lutz Reviewed in Kirkus Reviews
Date: July 24, 2025
Four stories merge into one in this tale of politics and greed set in the Indian Ocean. No one can trust anyone in this incendiary tale of murder, espionage, and […]
This Isle Is Full of Noises: World Literature Today On Andrew Lam’s STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA
Date: June 30, 2025
Twelve years ago, Andrew Lam, a writer and journalist who left Vietnam as “a plane person” at the end of the Vietnam War at the age of eleven, published Birds of Paradise […]
Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network Reviews STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA by Andrew Lam
Date: June 18, 2025
In Stories from the Edges of the Sea, Andrew Lam writes not from the center of trauma but from its quieter afterlives. These are not conventional Vietnamese refugee stories. They emerge […]
Necessary Fiction Remarks on the Interplay Between “the Weird and the Mundane” in Their Glowing Review of Molly Olguín’s Debut Collection THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD
Date: June 17, 2025
The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Molly Olguín’s debut collection, are remarkable for the ways in which they skate between the weird and the mundane, the ordinary and […]
Didi Jackson’s MY INFINITY Featured in Seven Days’ Writeup On Vermont Books
Date: June 12, 2025
In her second poetry collection, Didi Jackson shifts among lyrical strategies, sometimes earthy and elsewhere mystical. An assistant professor at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, she spends part of the year in […]
Kirkus Reviews and Lara Ehrlich’s BIND ME TIGHTER STILL
Date: May 27, 2025
The relationship between Ceto—a siren who left her sisters and the ocean behind—and her 15-year-old daughter, Naia, is tested when Sirenland, their seaside burlesque attraction, is threatened by the untimely […]
Chapter House Journal Reviews Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen
Date: May 22, 2025
In James, Percival Everett’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the character James writes, “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.” By doing […]