Story Circle Book Reviews

Marcie Maxfield’s debut novel Em’s Awful Good Fortune is a hoot. The first sentence, “Sometimes I wish he would hit me,” quickly grabs my attention. Narrator Em’s wit describes the life of a devoted wife and mother as she gives up her own dreams and career to advance […]

Erma Bombeck once said, “When humor goes, there goes civilization.” Tassie Kalas’s comedic memoir, YaYa’s(Grandmother’s) Big Black Purse, provides hilarious, spontaneous glimpses into her extended Greek family’s attempts to navigate modern life in a big Texas city. Kalas writes, “I never questioned who I was or where I […]

When you meet a mentally sharp person closer to 100 than to 90, you’re apt to ask a lot of questions, especially if that nonagenarian is a black American woman who lived through “segregation, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Civil Rights movement and […]

Jo-Ann Vega’s latest anthology, Wolf Woman, presents a moving testament to her gift for illuminating and confronting human emotions in their simplest form. Her collection of fifty free-verse poems speaks tenderly of familial connections, while at the same time revealing a struggle to find that same sort of […]

Untold: defining moments of the uprooted is a collection of true stories edited by Gabrielle Deonath and Kamini Ramdeen, and collected by Brown Girl Magazine. Divided into sections by the overarching themes of Identity, Being, and Relationships, each story presents a deeply personal, brave, and authentic slice-of-life from […]