reviews

On Grief, and Evil Mermaids, and Myth Author: John Langan After losing his wife, Abe is forced to go through his days alone, seeking respite from the grief and a touchstone to evoke the woman he loved. As life trickles by, he finds his wife again in nature; in the peaceful moments of fishing a connection is forged between the living and dead. She is not lost, not truly. She is merely other now. Years go by and Abe survives with his quite evenings, his fishing pole, and his strange hopes and sentiments. When a young man at Abe’s job begins [...]

When Heroines Go Rouge Author: Dennis Lehane Rachel has always been a seeker. Seeking meaning, seeking love, seeking connection, seeking answers. As a young woman, she sought the answer for her famous mother’s coldness. She sought a father and found a friend, and later, she sought the love she had always wanted in a marriage that left her, once again, feeling worthless and alone. Only as a journalist does her bravery, her promise, exist, but when an assignment to Haiti breaks her emotionally, her promising career ends. Rachel has become a meme – that journalist who broke down on air – [...]

He Let Her In; He Can't Make Her Leave Author: Caroline Overington On the brink of Australia’s Covid-19 lockdown, Don Barlow, an elderly widower, opens his door to new chances and devastating revelations. Alone in his now empty house, unvisited by his busy, business-building daughter and son-in-law, Barlow doesn’t think twice before letting the young girl with the pink tinged hair into his home, his lockdown, his life. Morgan claims to be his erstwhile son’s only daughter – his granddaughter – and Barlow remembers his youth: giving the baby away, the chances, the opportunities, the sad triangle and years of [...]