Freya Sachs

NonfictionGraphic Memoirs

Brittle Joints

Review by Freya Sachs

In Brittle Joints, Maria Sweeney illustrates the complexities of living with chronic pain, trying to find comfort when healing is impossible and as the medical system repeatedly fails her.

As a child, Sweeney started counting her broken bones. It seemed as if they would just happen. After she was diagnosed with Bruck Syndrome—a rare progressive disease—the fragility of her bones and the pain in her joints had an explanation, but no possibility of a cure. So, in beautifully colored, evocative frames that reflect her effort to adapt to her advancing condition, Sweeney takes the reader through parts of her journey as she looks for relief.

For Sweeney, doctor’s appointments are often frustrating: either doctors do not know what to do, or they seem unaware of the pain they cause her; traditional pain relief comes with severe side effects and risks; people question her use of a wheelchair as someone who can—painfully—walk when needed. Through it all, her relationships with her boyfriend and friends provide comfort and understanding. Sweeney includes the story of her adoption from Moldova, adding another layer to how she understands and communicates her sense of self.

The graphic memoir as a form proves effective here; the images—in particular as Sweeney illustrates herself from childhood to adulthood—reveal her emotions as words on their own could not. Each mark on the page seems defiant, showing all that she has overcome to use the pen, to tell her story in word and image.

In beautifully colored and evocative frames, Brittle Joints shares illustrator Maria Sweeney’s experiences living with a rare disability.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Black Butterflies

Review by Freya Sachs

Though the Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo may feel distant, they took place less than 30 years ago. Those terrifying moments in 1992 are vividly imagined in Priscilla Morris’ haunting novel Black Butterflies.

When the war is just beginning, Zora doesn’t believe it will last, and she stays in Sarajevo while her husband departs for England where their daughter’s family lives. As the shelling and attacks intensify, Zora—a painter and professor tied deeply to place—remains. Soon, leaving is no longer an option, and the city is divided by violence, hunger and cold. And yet, she finds ways to survive.

Black Butterflies is a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror. It is a story of art as a connector and community maker. Zora’s determination that there is always meaning and beauty to be found is compelling, as are her efforts to maintain relationships with neighbors and friends despite their differences and the circumstances. Some of the most powerful moments of the novel come when she is working on her paintings, in how Morris renders the horror and devastation of the war through Zora’s ways of seeing and describing.

By presenting the perspective of a civilian, Morris invites readers to engage with what it means to watch a war unfold around you, and to consider art as a mechanism of survival. This novel is both devastating and beautiful, infused with a sense of hope. 

Black Butterflies follows an artist’s life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, in a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror.
FictionLiterary FictionGothic FictionDebut Fiction

Smothermoss

Review by Freya Sachs

Alisa Alering’s debut, Smothermoss, is a novel of violence, trust and the landscape of Appalachia. The mountains and hollows, the moss, quartz, water and trees are all painted in their full aliveness.

In the 1980s, Sheila, Angie and their mother are trying to figure out how to survive. Working long shifts at the asylum, their mother is rarely present, and while the two sisters share a small room, their diverging curiosities, interests and ways of being make it hard for them to relate to and understand each other. Sheila goes to work, she worries, she feeds the rabbits. Angie explores, she knows the neighbors, and she draws mysterious creatures on her own deck of tarot cards which almost seem to self-animate.

The community shifts when two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and  worry arises that the murderer has yet to leave the area. The secrets of what happened hide in the landscape. As the novel progresses, the land takes over—the mountains crack and communicate, and the rocks and stones have stories to tell.

In many ways, Smothermoss resembles a Southern gothic fairy tale, with elements—like the invisible rope attached to Sheila’s neck—that require a certain suspension of disbelief, and the setting of the 1980s South, a challenging place to find one’s voice. Ultimately, the story carries you away, with brief chapters, crisp scenes and high stakes. Each scene builds in tension and a sense of wonder, surprising you with the direction these sisters’ future may take.

Alisa Alering paints the mountains, hollows, moss and quartz of the Appalachian landscape in all their full aliveness in Smothermoss, their gothic debut.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Bear

Review by Freya Sachs

As Bear by Julia Phillips opens, there’s a wildness that takes over, an immediate sense that control is elusive, that the landscape, not humans, is in charge. On an island in the Pacific Northwest, two sisters—Sam and Elena—spend their days working, caring for their dying mother and imagining future possibilities for their lives. Their routines are measured and predictable.

With limited employment available post-pandemic, Sam works in food service on the ferry to and from the island. She’s startled one day to see a bear swimming off the side—unusual for the area—and she shares the sighting with her sister, Elena. When the bear unexpectedly arrives outside their home, Sam is shocked, terrified; Elena is enchanted, curious. The bear disrupts their equilibrium, introducing questions they’re unsure how to answer. As the novel unfolds, the twin tensions of caring for their mother and of tracking and understanding the bear’s presence push against each other, forcing the sisters’ relationship to change. 

Bear takes light inspiration from the Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” but it would feel like a modern fairy tale regardless thanks to its sense of looking for wonder and magic in surroundings, of giving in to surprise and forces beyond one’s imagination in a world that feels hard. There’s a taut energy, a quickness to the language that contrasts the richness of landscape with the intensity of humans struggling in myriad ways to survive, let alone thrive. It’s a novel that asks to be read in a single sitting: it’s short, carefully paced, language-driven. Just as Elena and Sam can’t look away from the bear, it’s hard to look away from this story that unfolds in deft, surprising, unexpected ways. 

In Julia Phillips’ latest, sisters Sam and Elena spend their days working and caring for their dying mother on an island in the Pacific Northwest—until the arrival of a bear upends their equilibrium.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Whale Fall

Review by Freya Sachs

A dead whale is a harbinger of transformation in this mesmerizing coming-of-age story.

It’s 1938. Eighteen-year-old Manod lives on a remote island in the British Isles that is situated five to 10 hours from the mainland by boat, depending on the weather. Here, nature dictates how bountiful or brutal life will be for the isolated island community that lives off the land and sea. Men’s desirability is based on their ability to forage seaweed and the value of their livestock, while girls are married by 16 and often left widows by 25, because the sea is dangerous and none of the fishermen can swim.

The dead whale’s appearance is followed, about a month later, by an English couple, Joan and Edward, ethnographers from the mainland who are keen to gather content for a book about the island. Manod, literate in English and Welsh, and hopeful for an escape from social expectations, becomes their eager assistant. But her interactions with the idealistic Joan and the handsome Edward make her reexamine her dreams and her understanding of island life.

Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the community’s transformation. Entrancing descriptions illuminate the raw beauty of the island through seasonal changes. Manod is a memorable protagonist; her ability to live this challenging life while entertaining aspirations for herself and her sister beyond getting married and staying on the island shows great complexity and strength. Manod’s interactions with Joan and Edward are profound in their subtlety, demonstrating the cultural divides possible within the Commonwealth. Debut author Elizabeth O’Connor’s metaphoric use of the decaying whale masterfully depicts the gradual erosion of the island way of life, picked apart by scavengers.

Poignant and poetic, Whale Fall is a compelling read for fans of M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, Tove Janssen’s The Summer Book and Claire Keegan’s Foster.

Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the transformation of an isolated community in the British Isles.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

The Alternatives

Review by Freya Sachs

Caoilinn Hughes’ third novel, The Alternatives, follows four sisters, all doctors of various sorts. When one of the four goes missing, the others set out across the Irish countryside to find her.

With the COVID-19 pandemic and general global instability in the background, the Flattery sisters have a lot to navigate. Haunted by their childhood and the early death of their parents, they all feel isolated and alone, each finding her way in the world as a single woman in her 30s. When the oldest sister, Olwen, goes missing, the other three come together on a quest to find her. In the process, they discover more of who they are, the values they share and how they can connect.

While all four sisters are concerned with the future of the Earth, each has her own particular sphere of expertise: cooking, philosophy, geology and politics. They also share a concern about the patterns within their family history. Each sister’s voice is clear, purposeful, realistic and hopeful. When the sisters come together, The Alternatives becomes even more engaging as their stories overlap, growing increasingly complex and intertwined.

The prose is strong, with narrative shifts that allow the reader both internal and external access to these women and their concerns. A true strength of the novel is the way Hughes balances ordinary details with those that surprise and raise the stakes, keeping the reader hooked.

In Caoilinn Hughes’ The Alternatives, the Flattery sisters have a lot to navigate. When the oldest, Olwen, goes missing, the other three come together on a quest to find her.
FictionPoetry

Root Fractures

Review by Freya Sachs

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second collection of poems, the speaker is haunted by echoes of the past that reverberate into the present, and by generational, individual and collective traumas. In deft and surprising ways, the forms of the poems interact with their content, both shaping and breaking it.

The poems center on the speaker’s interrogation of her memory, which is inherently tied to a pattern of displacement and disappearance in her family history, through her parents’ emigration from Vietnam, Vietnam’s reform movement (Dổi Mới) and her childhood in California. Root Fractures begins in Vietnamese, and, as a non-speaker or reader of the language, I found myself drawn in, curious to see what I would discover even in moments where I was not the intended audience. The poems are deeply affecting. There’s a balance between fragmentation—both at the level of individual lines and of whole poems—and accumulative moments where the fragments coalesce. Some poems are layered over photographs, some are cut and rearranged, recalling how the speaker’s brother cut himself out of family photographs before eventually taking his own life. The spaces left on the page provide pauses that make the words sing in new ways, while the repeated formal motifs create patterns for reading and meaning-making that mirror the speaker’s experience of a desire for wholeness and understanding that can’t be fully realized.

These are poems worth returning to; each reading brings discoveries of new pathways of tension and connection.

The poems of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Root Fractures center on the speaker's interrogation of her memory, which is inherently tied to a pattern of displacement and disappearance in her family history.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

The Limits

Review by Freya Sachs

Pia’s divorced parents live disparate lives: Her mother is a marine biologist, diving to explore coastal reefs and track the impact of humans on the oceans of French Polynesia; her father is a New York City doctor with a large apartment in Manhattan, caring for patients in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has just gotten remarried to Kate, a teacher who finds herself confounded by remote teaching. When Pia returns to live with her father in Manhattan, she has a new relationship to build with Kate, even while she carries a secret with her from her time in Tahiti with her mother.

At each turn, the characters in Nell Freudenberger’s The Limits discover themselves to be connected more complexly than they knew. From New York City to a Zoom screen, from a hospital full of early COVID-19 cases to an island off the coast of Tahiti, Freudenberger brings the anxieties and challenges of the early pandemic days to vivid, engaging life.

The characters have full and fascinating inner lives, and real concerns—parenthood, a spreading virus, preserving the natural world—that layer with their interpersonal conflicts. Each chapter shifts our focus, holding our attention on one place and perspective before turning to reveal relationships from a new angle. The novel addresses race, class, education and access without coming off as heavy-handed; it feels reflective of how circumstance determines our real-world choices.

One of the unique strengths of Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science—as she did with physics in 2019’s Lost and Wanted—in engaging, relevant ways. In The Limits, Freudenberger deftly employs the questions posed by climate change, seafloor mining and the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown to shape the story.

One of the unique strengths of Nell Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science in engaging, relevant ways, from the questions posed by climate change to seafloor mining to the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Parasol Against the Axe

Review by Freya Sachs

To step into one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds, you have to give up control—accept that something magical and unpredictable is about to happen. Reading with a “yes, and” mentality will make your experience all the more dynamic, curious and surprising. Following up on 2021’s Peaces, Parasol Against the Axe uses place as character to question what, exactly, is true and can be trusted.

That place is Prague. The city is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for Sofie Cibulkova, her estranged friend. Hero has brought a book with her, Paradoxical Undressing, and she soon discovers that the book is a changing thing: Depending upon who is reading it, where, when and even why, the text alters. Its instability comes to reflect the ways that people appear and complicate what should be a celebratory weekend.

Stories within the story unfold, and there’s a particular satisfaction in following how they reflect the main narrative of the novel. At famous sights around the city, unexpected guests arrive, some from Hero’s past. They add to the tension between Hero and Sofie, and in each scene, these new characters raise doubts about the truth of the story, the past and the present.

Oyeyemi’s language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own. Readers will find themselves checking the various versions of Paradoxical Undressing against one another, to make sure they haven’t missed any echoes or revisions. The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imagined—and if, in Oyeyemi’s world, the difference even matters.

In Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe, the city of Prague is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for her estranged friend Sofie.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Fox Wife

Review by Freya Sachs

Foxes, trains, elaborate outfits, witty sayings, luck and chance, the last days of an empire. Told in two voices, Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife is a fitting follow up to Choo’s previous novels, The Ghost Bride and The Night Tiger.

Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife plays with Chinese myths about the fox gods: foxes with the ability to transform themselves into beguiling, beautiful and tormented men and women. Legend has it that these fox gods sometimes live among people, causing trouble through their trickery and slippery relationship to the truth.

Equipped with an extreme sensitivity to the presence of truth, Bao is a detective on a mission to figure out what happened to a woman found frozen to death on the doorstep of a restaurant. His chapters—told from a third-person perspective—enthrall with keen observations about the gods, his own past and the people around him.

Snow is on her own quest to understand the death of her only child. She begins working for a family who has been cursed: Their sons die young. Her first-person chapters are particularly intriguing, with a strong voice and sharp turns of phrase. Who is Snow? And what will her journey allow her to discover?

As the story alternates between Snow’s and Bao’s perspectives, the pull to solve these mysteries builds momentum. The voices are compelling; the secrets are rich. When the two tales begin to overlap and the gaps fill in, the surprise is worth the wait. Layers of meaning accrue, bringing together the past and the present, mythology and personal ambition, actions and reactions, control and fate, into a fascinating tale of foxes, foes and friends.

Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife combines Chinese myths about fox gods who live among people and the story of a detective determined to uncover the truth behind a woman’s mysterious death.
FictionPoetry

Give the gift of discovery with these 5 poetry collections

Feature by Freya Sachs

★Personal Best

Even well-loved, familiar poems can be mysterious. What if you could ask a poet to walk you through the why of one of their poems: why it matters, why they chose to share it, what’s at stake? Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips do just that in their delightful anthology, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most. Including a remarkable and diverse array of contemporary poets, Phillips and Belieu assemble a collection of singular poems, each selected by its poet and accompanied by an explication of how it came to be written, illuminating the choices that make each poem sing. With poems by Danez Smith, Victoria Chang, Ada Limon, Jorie Graham, Ocean Vuong, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ilya Kaminsky and many more, there is something to appeal both to novice explorers of poetry and to writers and students hoping to deepen their appreciation for others’ work.

The anthology is full of gems. It was a welcome gift to reencounter poems I knew in fresh contexts, and it was equally enjoyable to explore poems and poets new to me and discover what I might read next. If someone you know is looking for some guidance in reading poetry, or seeking a deeper understanding of the poetic process, Personal Best would make an engaging, thoughtful gift.

Sukun

Poems of faith and doubt, wounds and wonder: The moments collected in Kazim Ali’s Sukun: New and Selected Poems are surprising and approachable. Ali moves between subjects—from prayers, fairy tales and myths to baggage claims, yoga classes, boats and rain—with an honest, searching voice. Equally engaging is the formal range of the poems. From sonnets to prose poems, from open-ended lines that propel you forward to tightly compacted end-stopped lines, the form and content come together. Mundane details are made surprising in new combinations: “a black and white film” in which “the water glows white.” Part of the wonder comes from Ali grounding these details with a sense of place, setting them against large scale images of the natural world.

“There’s an old line of Robert Frost’s—that a poem ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom.'”

In “Exit Strategy”—part of the triptych that opens the book—Ali writes “Here’s the hardest geography quiz I’ve ever taken: / How does one carry oneself from mountain to lake to desert / without leaving anything behind?” This collection reveals the answer, taking us through real and metaphorical landscapes as the speakers gather images, moments and ideas, letting each build on the last, collaging something wholly new.

The Asking

In the first poem of Jane Hirshfield’s The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she begins: “ My life, / you were a door I was given / to walk through.” This beautiful opening is the door we readers walk through to discover and rediscover this retrospective collection of Hirshfield’s poetry. Throughout, her attention to and celebration of minute details brings readers into a space of awareness that continues even after our eyes leave the page.

The new poems that open the book examine our fractured planet and imagine better possibilities. Next, beginning with 1982’s Alaya, we move through 50 years of Hirschfield’s work, observing the ways that our planet and the interrogation of our relationship with it have evolved. Hirshfield writes in awe of the world, of science and of imagination, and she threads these ideas together with a specificity and power of observation that demands our attention. She notices the nuance of the world; so must we. There’s an old line of Robert Frost’s—that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Hirshfield’s The Asking moves through both together, compelling the reader to wisdom and delight at interlocking, interconnected turns.

All Souls

All Souls, the posthumously published final volume of poems by Saskia Hamilton, conveys a richness of stories in beautifully captured vignettes. As Hamilton writes, “Why retell the stories of those before us? They already spoke them, or held their tongues—fell silent. . . . To say something sincerely yet inauthentically is the danger.” In this work, she avoids that danger, telling each poem in a way that is searingly authentic and resolved.

Hamilton takes bits of history and image, of story and sensory experience, and weaves them together to express something new. The poems organize around the painful, impossible moment when a mother must leave her young son. This devastation circles through the collection, asking the reader what is remembered, retold, forgotten. Remarkable shifts occur between seemingly fragmented moments—between the lyric and narrative, past and present. As you continue to read, the disparate images connect and begin to speak.

Razzle Dazzle

Traveling through Major Jackson’s Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2023 opens a new window to his work. The poems are vibrant and engaging, examining life in America, racial injustice, and the ways that humans and nature intertwine and connect. The poetic influences and legacies that echo through the poems are clear, and there’s a rich sense of community and conversation.

From the fresh images of Jackson’s latest work, like “My mouth puckered whenever lemon-colored / arches appeared five stories above the city / like golden gates to an unforeseen heaven,” we travel into the past to excerpts from Leaving Saturn (2002) before moving forward through the 21 years in between. In addition to the subjects and questions that complicate as they recur, Jackson’s voice and sense of form are impressive. Each line is carefully chosen; each stanza break opens up something new. Selections from Jackson’s The Absurd Man (2020) prove to be particularly compelling as a bookend to the opening section of new poems, titled “Lovesick.” To see Jackson’s recent poems surround and grow out of the earlier ones is a joy.

In each of these collections, from the wide-ranging anthology Personal Best to career-spanning looks at some of today’s most prominent poets, there’s something to surprise and delight every reader, as well as chances to gain insight into the writing process.
FictionPopular Fiction

Really Good, Actually

Review by Freya Sachs

Have you ever had an awful day that you’d love to forget? And then another, and another? Yet you don’t want to admit the pattern to yourself, let alone to anyone around you, so you keep pretending that everything is OK? We’ve all been there, and this empathy is at the heart of Monica Heisey’s debut novel, Really Good, Actually.

As she approaches 30, Maggie has been busy as a graduate student in Toronto, building a life with her new husband—until that disappears in a moment, with the shock of a breakup. She can’t figure out how to move forward, even as everyone around her, from her graduate school adviser to her friends, tries to help her see a way through. She can’t quite pick up the pieces, which readers witness in obsessive emails, Google searches, group chats and conversations. Instead, she tries to convince everyone (particularly herself) that actually, she really is good—even great. 

Maggie’s voice is engaging, allowing readers to feel her pain, cringe at her adventures and communication attempts, and root for her to find her footing. She’s a quintessential mess, making decisions that aren’t what anyone would advise, and yet she doesn’t wallow (at least not for too long). We cheer her on, hoping that she’ll figure it all out, or at least some of it. 

There’s humor and grace in Really Good, Actually—a lightness of touch, a wry wit. Maggie is a woman disembarking from traditional romance to find herself. And while her marriage might have been short, her voice is enduring, and her journey is engaging, surprising and fresh.

There’s humor and grace in Really Good, Actually—a lightness of touch, a wry wit. Maggie is a woman disembarking from traditional romance to find herself, and her journey is engaging, surprising and fresh.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Dog of the North

Review by Freya Sachs

If the title of Elizabeth McKenzie’s third novel (after The Portable Veblen) were the strangest thing about it, it would still be remarkable. Luckily for readers who like their books odd, haunting, strange and surprising, it isn’t. 

As The Dog of the North begins, narrator Penny Rush is recently separated from her husband and heading from Salinas to Santa Barbara, California, where she knows she has problems waiting for her. Penny’s story intertwines with that of her grandmother, Dr. Pincer, a quirky, cantankerous hoarder who values privacy above all; and Burt, a lonely man who shares his toupee with his brother and loves his Pomeranian. Burt’s van is the titular Dog of the North, and it becomes Penny’s home and the place from which her adventures spring. 

Penny is searching for connection, for meaning in her life after quitting her marriage and job. Throughout her episodic travels, there are missing parents, a grandfather ready for an adventure, strange objects that perform mysterious and surprising functions, Dr. Pincer’s science experiments, shared meals, injuries, ailments and bits of hope.

Penny’s voice is curious and kind; she’s empathetic and reserves judgment from both herself and others. Her route—through places and among people, through landscapes both internal and exterior—surprises her. She doesn’t know what she’ll find or who she’ll meet, and her openness allows experiences to take shape that otherwise simply could not. Her presence unsettles some characters, forcing them to share more than they might have intended, and this enables a deeper connection between McKenzie’s characters and the reader, illuminating challenges we could’ve missed. 

Through Penny’s eyes, we see the beauty in the seemingly broken, in the flawed stories we tell ourselves—and what happens when those stories delightfully shatter.

Through Penny’s eyes, we see the beauty in the seemingly broken, in the flawed stories we tell ourselves—and what happens when those stories delightfully shatter.

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