Contemporary Fiction Book Reviews

A years-long tale of connection, loss, and the emotional minefields of youth, Yesteryear’s Wish by Zixiao Yu is a striking portrait of unfulfilled love and the uncertainties of life.

When the narrator’s stable home is disrupted by the arrival of his cousin, Yunyun, their childish clashes soon shift to an inseparable bond, but age and distance quickly pull them apart. New chapters of life bring new responsibilities, pressures, and infatuations, but the lingering past is rarely far from their minds.

Broken into three sections of connection, displacement, and reflection, this is a story of young hope written with the wisdom […]

An intensely personal drama, Fury in Her Eyes by Phillip Vega is a thrilling and unpredictable portrait of connection, resentment, and romance that refuses to die.

Ollie Morales is living out his high-stakes dream as a professional photojournalist when a mob of Trump supporters nearly beats him to death on January 6^th, 2021, sending his life into chaos. While he assumes that the explosion of violence was random, it gradually becomes clear that what happened to him was no accident.

Thirty years earlier, Ollie had been a normal high school senior, a photographer on the school paper, and […]

In the dark and lonely spiral of grief following the death of his beloved wife, Aaron returns to old comforting demons, even as his friends and children try to pull him back from the brink of crushing sorrow in Diary of the Broken by Malachi Lambert, a raw and relentless tale of loss.

From the bottom of the bottle to the tops of hiking trails, Aaron gradually finds a new lease on happiness with a community who cares, but the journey to get there is marked by tears, blood, self-reflection, and more than a few hangovers. Through Aaron’s dark internal […]