review

Book Review: Etaf Rum’s A Woman Is No Man

This book was excruciating. Rum centers the misogyny that runs deep in conservative communities like the Brooklyn neighborhood in which Isra lives, where women are beaten by their husbands and are thrust into traditional gender roles. … A Woman Is No Man is one of those works that sweeps you up and sets you down winded. You feel more alive, somehow, but you need to recover, especially when you remember there are so many who will never come down.

Book Review: Gavriel Savit’s The Way Back

This meandering delight of a book takes you from a tiny shtetl in the forest to the Far Country of demons, goblins, and the spirits of the dead. Bluma, the baker’s daughter, and Yehuda Leib, the town scapegoat and thief, both stumble into the Far Country after a near encounter with the Angel of Death. There, they must make pacts with demons, answer ancient riddles, and learn how to navigate the winding nature of the land in order to make it out alive — and, for the most part, intact.

Book Review: Donia Bijan’s The Last Days of Café Leila

From the Bolshevik regime to the post-revolution turmoil of the 1980s, the turbulence of the twentieth century serves as the backdrop for Donia Bijan’s sweeping tapestry of family, change, and homecoming, held together by food.

Book Review: Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho’s Meal

A black-and-white graphic novel with a sweet, wholesome queer romance, Meal is a friendly introduction to entomophagy as both a millennia-old source of protein and an integral part of the cuisine of many different cultures.