How do you feel fear? Do you freeze as the world around you slows to a blur? Do you run, hoping that your feet can keep up with the ground beneath them long enough? Do you fight either to protect yourself or those around you, ignoring the consequences of bruises that will last days after the fear stops? In the Hope Juvenile Treatment Center, knowing how you feel fear is synonymous with staying alive. Fear is taught on day one of being inside Hope, with guards that snap like twigs breaking off in the wind. That is, until one night when all the guards disappear and fear takes on an entirely new name.
This poetry collection is Tishani Doshi’s eighth book. The collection is separated into five sections and covers everything from war and the inevitability of death to systemic misogyny, most of it being inspired by events, people, or other published pieces from the past and present.
The Sentence is the latest novel from Louise Erdrich, a prolific, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Ojibwe descent. It is a sprawling work that chronicles main character Tookie’s journey from one-time body smuggler who wanted to impress a girl and earn $26,000 to incarcerated person to bookstore employee and wife. While The Sentence sells itself as a ghost story and is certainly not lacking in the ghost department, it is primarily a pandemic story, illustrating how the onset of COVID-19 affects Tookie, her husband and her stepdaughter as well as her family of bookstore co-workers.
What would you do if, on a random Tuesday morning, you came across a video showing police body cam footage of a werewolf being shot? Would you believe it? Would you care? Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters poses the question: what if everything that goes bump in the night were real and how would we treat them?
“You ever wake up in bed and feel like you’re not...alone?”
Shadows pass through the hallways and rooms. Kitchen cabinets open and dishes show up in places they weren’t before. Voices seep through the walls. And if she hears one more creak in this old, dusty house, she’s going to scream. She tries to brush her fears under the non-existent rug, but a much more sinister truth awaits her.