Book Review: The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley
Emma Sloley’s, The Island Of Last Things, pulls no punches. It is a warning without hesitation, a tragic imagining of an end that is far too plausible, too close to …
Fiction
Habitat, by Case Q. Kerns
Black Lawrence Press, August 2025 In Habitat, a delectably creepy novel-in-stories, set slightly in the future, Case Q. Kerns imagines how late-stage capitalism plays itself out in the worst possible …
Book Review Flashback: Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
In 2014, Midge Raymond reviewed a novel that paved the way for contemporary eco-literature, a powerful indictment of the horrors of mountaintop removal mining. Ann Pancake’s powerful novel Strange as This Weather …
Book Review: Little Great Island
A Novel, by Kate Woodworth Sibylline Press, 2025 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest… the trees commingle their …
Book Review: Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley
This fun, witty novel opens on author Jane Brooks being questioned by police, not only as a witness to a crime but also because her novel was found in the …
Book Review Flashback: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Midge Raymond reviewed this iconic book back in 2012, with a unique take: I recently revisited Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—the original edition published by a socialist newspaper in 1905, not the …
Book Review: There Are Reasons For This
A novel by Nini Berndt Tin House, June 2025 Desire is the driving force of any story. What do the characters want? In There Are Reasons For This, Nina Berndt’s …
New and forthcoming environmental books (March 2025)
I’m happy to share a new selection of environmentally themed books — including poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Please check them out… Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology Edited by Ian …
Book Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
In Charlotte McConaghy’s lovely new novel, Wild Dark Shore, Dominic Salt and his family—eighteen-year-old Raff, seventeen-year-old Fen, and nine-year-old Orly—moved to Shearwater Island eight years earlier, when Dominic “needed a …
Book Review: Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch
Christina Lynch’s Pony Confidential is a light, highly readable mystery co-narrated by murder suspect Penny and her childhood pet, Pony, who comes to her rescue despite his lingering resentment that Penny sold …
Book Review: The Skunks by Fiona Warnick
In Fiona Warnick’s novel The Skunks, recent college graduate Isabel moves back to her hometown to housesit, babysit, work at a yoga studio, and try to avoid thinking about boys. She …