Editorial Reviews for Nominees
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 Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)
There is a moment in The Logistics of Survival: A Breast Cancer Survivor's Guide to Self-Advocacy when Lis Richardson is essentially offered two doors. Behind one is a lumpectomy, followed by radiation and the possibility that the surgeon may not achieve clear margins, sending her back into the operating room. Behind the other is a mastectomy. Technically, she has a choice, but Richardson doesn't see it that way. To her, it feels more like being forced to walk a pirate's plank and then being politely asked whether she would prefer a cigarette or a blindfold before being pushed over the edge. The one option she actually wants, keeping her body exactly as it is and simply not having cancer, has already disappeared. That analogy captures much of what makes The Logistics of Survival such an effective book. This is certainly a memoir about breast cancer, but we would argue that it is really a book about decision-making when every available decision is frightening. It is about how quickly an ordinary person can be transformed into a patient, how much information can suddenly be required of someone who is already terrified, and how important it can be to remain an active participant in one's own care rather than simply surrendering every decision to the machinery surrounding you. Richardson makes that purpose explicit from the beginning. She describes the book not merely as a patient memoir, but as a kind of field manual centered on logic, research, self-advocacy, and the principle that patients should remain equal partners in their own medical care. And Richardson practices what she preaches. Long before her eventual cancer diagnosis, she was already learning how important it could be to ask questions. In the 1980s, after suspicious imaging, a surgeon proposed removing roughly golf-ball-sized amounts of tissue from both breasts because the exact areas of concern could not be clearly isolated. Richardson read the consent form instead of automatically signing it, realized the extent of what was being proposed, refused the operation, and sought additional opinions. Two other specialists ultimately recommended monitoring rather than the much more invasive procedure. That experience becomes one of the foundations of the book: being a good patient does not mean being a silent patient. Years later, Richardson pushes the concept considerably further. When another suspicious area requires a lumpectomy, she asks to remain awake because general anesthesia tends to make her extremely sick. What follows is probably one of the strangest surgical stories we have encountered in a memoir. Richardson lies fully conscious in the operating room, studies the people working around her, notices the staff becoming suddenly more restrained when they remember that their patient can hear them, and eventually discovers that the polished surface of an overhead surgical light gives her a distorted reflection of the procedure itself. So naturally, she watches. At one point, she has to resist the temptation to ask the surgeon to move because he is blocking her view. It is bizarre, funny, unsettling, and completely consistent with the woman we have come to know by that point. Richardson does not merely want medicine performed on her. She wants to understand what is happening to her. That particular lumpectomy proves benign. The next time, Richardson is not so lucky. In 2016, after another routine mammogram and an unusually aggressive biopsy, she receives the call confirming Infiltrating Lobular Carcinoma. What makes the diagnosis particularly disturbing is that Richardson feels perfectly healthy. There is no obvious lump, no pain, and no warning from the body she had spent decades trying to care for properly. One of the most frightening elements of the book is Richardson's explanation of how difficult lobular cancer can be to detect. Rather than forming one neat, obvious mass, the malignant cells can spread through tissue in thin patterns that obscure the tumor's actual size. That becomes critically important later. Initially, Richardson's mammograms, ultrasound, and MRI all suggest a tumor of approximately one centimeter. After her mastectomy, pathology reveals that it was actually 3.8 centimeters. That discrepancy is one of the most powerful moments in the book. The visual on page 126 makes it even more striking, contrasting what Richardson and her doctors thought was a small one-centimeter tumor with something approaching four centimeters, roughly the difference between a pea and a large walnut. Suddenly, Richardson's obsessive research does not seem obsessive at all. It seems prudent. Before reaching that revelation, however, she must decide what to do about the cancer. Her surgeon offers her something she values immensely: honesty without coercion. He explains the advantages and disadvantages of lumpectomy and mastectomy and makes clear that the final decision belongs to her. Richardson ultimately chooses the mastectomy, but what we particularly appreciate about this book is that Richardson does not pretend this decision becomes easy simply because she has researched it. In fact, the more she learns, the harder it sometimes becomes. She reads studies, weighs probabilities, considers radiation, recurrence, clear margins, reconstruction, lymph-node surgery, and quality of life until she eventually arrives at a brutally simple realization: there is no good option. That emotional honesty matters. Too many stories about adversity retroactively transform every difficult choice into something inspirational and inevitable. Richardson remembers the confusion. She remembers changing her mind. She remembers fear. She remembers wanting two contradictory things at once. She also remembers the extraordinarily mundane details that medical literature often overlooks, and this may be where the title becomes most meaningful. The “logistics” of survival include questions like: How do you shower when a drainage bulb is attached to a tube sewn into your chest? Where should the surgery be performed if pathology samples on Maui must be flown to Oahu? Is an 8:00 a.m. surgical slot preferable because the team may be fresher? How do you swim with only one breast without an empty swimsuit cup collapsing? Do you want reconstruction? Do you want a prosthesis? Do you actually care whether strangers notice that your body is asymmetrical? These may sound secondary compared with removing cancer, but they are not secondary to the person who has to continue living afterward. Richardson is especially effective when exposing that gap between clinical success and human practicality. Her surgeons can successfully remove a breast, but nobody adequately prepares her for the mechanics of showering with a drain. Richardson has to research the problem herself and discovers a neoprene holder that makes the process manageable. Then comes what she calls her Pink Floral Armor, the post-mastectomy compression garment she wears around her chest. Even something as medically ordinary as a compression binder becomes part of the strange new geography of her life. We also found the book surprisingly funny. That may sound like an odd compliment for a breast cancer memoir, but Richardson's humor is one of the reasons the story remains so readable. She jokes about being “radiant” after receiving a radioactive tracer. She imagines a temporary knitted breast absorbing enormous amounts of pool water and dragging her downward like an anchor. She becomes attached to the idea of “Chair #5” at the infusion center even after discovering that there really is no designated Chair #5. And we will probably remember for quite some time the infusion nurse who tells Richardson that she learned to improve her IV technique by practicing on earthworms. We certainly did not expect earthworms to make an appearance in a breast cancer memoir, but they are welcome guests. Richardson's relationship with her body after surgery is another major strength. Initially, she is encouraged toward the traditional routes of reconstruction or prosthesis. She even purchases a realistic silicone breast form. At first, seeing herself symmetrical again is emotionally powerful. But once the prosthesis arrives at home, she begins viewing it differently. Its weight and physical resemblance to what was removed transform it into what she calls the “silicone ghost.” Eventually, her mother cuts through much of Richardson's anxiety with one wonderfully direct question. When Richardson worries that going out in public without the prosthetic breast may make other people uncomfortable, her mother essentially asks her when she started caring so much about what strangers think. Richardson decides to test the theory. She goes shopping without the prosthesis. Nobody screams. Nobody flees. Nobody apparently cares. The world keeps spinning. That ordinary little experiment becomes one of our favorite moments in the book because it represents a profound shift. Richardson stops asking how she should make her body acceptable to other people and begins asking what actually makes her comfortable. Eventually, she undergoes another procedure to smooth the remaining tissue and create the flat chest wall she actually wants rather than reconstructing the breast she lost. Interestingly, Richardson's fierce devotion to autonomy nearly backfires during that procedure. Once again, she chooses to remain awake under local anesthesia. The surgery lasts much longer than expected, additional anesthetic is required, and the medical team becomes concerned about the possibility of Local Anesthetic Systemic Toxicity. Richardson later concedes that, in this instance, her determination to remain conscious may not have provided enough benefit to justify the risk and discomfort. We think that admission makes the book considerably stronger. Without it, this book could easily become a simplistic argument that patients should distrust doctors and trust themselves instead. That is not ultimately Richardson's message. Her message is partnership: research, ask questions, get another opinion when something does not make sense, understand what is being done to your body, but also recognize that good doctors possess expertise you do not. In fact, Richardson closes the memoir by saying that her experience with the healthcare system overall was excellent. She credits doctors and nurses with acting quickly, navigating bureaucracy, avoiding unnecessary procedures, and ultimately saving her life, even when she disagreed with some of them. That balance gives the book credibility. We also appreciated that surviving surgery is not treated as the ending. Richardson's Oncotype DX score is only 7, allowing her to avoid chemotherapy, and the mastectomy means she avoids radiation. She nevertheless spends years taking Letrozole and receiving Zometa infusions while monitoring the effects of hormone suppression on her bones. Eventually, she reaches the coveted five-year milestone and is discharged from oncology. And then something else happens: she becomes afraid. Every headache can suddenly mean cancer in the brain. Every unfamiliar sensation can become evidence that another hidden enemy is growing somewhere inside her. The original tumor had reached nearly four centimeters without producing symptoms, so how does a person completely trust her body after learning what it managed to conceal the first time? That may be the book's most mature observation. Survival is not necessarily restoration. Richardson puts it powerfully when reflecting on why the question “Are you all better now?” can be difficult. She did not feel sick before cancer. Surgery did not make an illness she could feel disappear. Instead, treatment permanently altered her body in order to save her life. Ten years later, she can simultaneously be healthy, cancer-free, enormously grateful, and still changed forever. That is far more interesting than a conventional “I beat cancer” ending. There's a lot of metaphorical language in this book, which strengthens it. Richardson clearly loves the language of warfare and navigation. Cancer is an invader. Treatment is a battle. Doctors become strategists. Bodies become fortresses. Choices become weapons. Patients walk planks, navigate storms, seek harbors, command vessels, and fight sieges. Many of these comparisons are excellent. There are simply too many of them. By the middle of the book, almost every medical development is another ambush, battle, tactical operation, storm, shadow, or nautical maneuver. Richardson also occasionally gives relatively ordinary medical moments the dramatic treatment of a thriller. This works brilliantly in places where she deliberately wants us to feel how fear distorts perception, particularly her visit to Nuclear Medicine. There, frightening stories she has read online turn a hospital hallway into something resembling an execution corridor in her imagination. After the painless procedure is over, the same environment suddenly looks completely ordinary. Elsewhere, we think a little more restraint would create greater contrast between routine medical inconvenience and genuine danger. Richardson's reaction to the women whose online accounts frightened her before the nuclear medicine procedure. Her larger lesson is excellent: do not assume someone else's worst experience predicts your own, and do not substitute frightening internet anecdotes for reliable medical information. But Richardson goes further and accuses some of those women of exaggerating their suffering for likes, algorithms, sympathy, and attention. However, it might be good to note that different patients can have different anatomy, pain tolerance, medical teams, complications, injection techniques, and experiences. Her painless procedure demonstrates that the frightening stories were not universally predictive. It does not necessarily demonstrate that those stories were dishonest. We would also encourage careful sourcing or slightly more qualified language around some of the manuscript's more definitive medical statements. Richardson responsibly includes a clear disclaimer explaining that she is recounting personal experience and research rather than providing professional medical advice. Maintaining that same degree of caution throughout the clinical explanations would make an already useful book even stronger. In any case, those online horror stories have frightened her so badly before she enters the hospital that she practically expects to walk into a medieval torture chamber. Instead, the physician uses local anesthetic and ultrasound guidance, and the procedure turns out to be quick, manageable, and almost completely uneventful. We think Richardson makes an extremely important point here about the modern information environment. The internet can be an extraordinary resource for patients, but it can also become a breeding ground for fear-mongering, sensationalism, exaggeration, and misinformation. Frightening stories attract attention. Extreme experiences are more likely to be shared than ordinary ones, and dramatic headlines and posts can make rare or highly individual experiences appear universal. The whole episode actually reminded us of the blogger in Contagion who exploits public fear and the reach of the internet to promote dubious health claims while frightened people desperately search for answers. Richardson's situation is obviously far less extreme, but the underlying danger is similar: when people are scared and vulnerable, alarming online claims can gain enormous power simply because they sound urgent and authoritative. For someone who has just received a frightening diagnosis, that distorted picture can create tremendous unnecessary anxiety. Richardson herself realizes afterward that she had allowed online narratives to shape her expectations more powerfully than reliable clinical information, and she becomes determined to provide other patients with a calmer account of what she actually experienced. For someone who has just received a frightening diagnosis and is desperately searching for answers, that distorted picture can create enormous unnecessary anxiety. Richardson herself realizes afterward that she had allowed online narratives to shape her expectations more powerfully than reliable clinical information, and she becomes determined to provide other patients with a calmer account of what she actually experienced. That does not mean patients should ignore the experiences of other survivors. Personal stories can provide comfort, practical advice, and a sense of community that clinical literature cannot always offer. But Richardson's experience demonstrates why anecdote should not be confused with evidence. One person's worst day should not automatically become another person's prediction of what is coming. In an age when dramatic content is rewarded with clicks, likes, shares, and attention, this book offers a valuable reminder to separate useful firsthand experience from online noise and to ground major medical decisions in credible information rather than whatever frightening story happens to appear first in a search result. The manuscript's visual presentation is generally effective. Photographs and illustrations break up the text considerably, which also means the 199-page count makes the book look substantially longer than it feels when actually reading it. The yellow legal pad, Alaska imagery, tumor-size comparison, and later personal photographs are particularly useful because they reinforce important moments rather than simply decorating the pages. The author also transparently identifies personal, public-domain, design-software, and AI-generated images in the photo credits. And perhaps that briskness is an advantage. The Logistics of Survival contains plenty of medical terminology, but it is not a difficult book to read. Richardson writes like the educator she repeatedly describes herself as. Complicated concepts are translated into ordinary language, chapters are manageable, the prose moves quickly, and the memoir never feels like a medical textbook disguised as a personal story. By the end, we understood why Richardson chose the title. Survival is not one triumphant moment. It is logistics: the Friday-night phone call, the yellow legal pad filled with questions, refusing to sign something you do not understand, choosing Maui over Oahu, deciding between lumpectomy and mastectomy, learning what a sentinel node does, figuring out where to put the drainage bulb while taking a shower, stretching scar tissue, finding something you can swim in, deciding whether you want another breast, a silicone breast, or no breast at all, swallowing a pill every morning, sitting in an infusion chair, and learning that “cancer-free” does not automatically mean “exactly who I was before.” Richardson begins the book frightened that she may become a passenger in a medical system moving faster than she can comprehend. She ends it with a different philosophy: gather the information, ask the questions, listen to expertise, trust your instincts, make the choices that belong to you, and remain the captain of your own life. We highly recommend The Logistics of Survival. It is informative without becoming clinical, emotional without drowning in sentimentality, frequently funny despite its subject matter, and unusually attentive to the practical realities that exist between diagnosis and the phrase “cancer survivor.” Most importantly, Lis Richardson does not merely tell us that she survived. She shows us the hundreds of decisions that survival required. What also immediately separates this book from almost every other cancer memoir we have encountered is its tone. Many books about cancer read almost like prolonged funerals. Understandably, they are saturated with doom, grief, fear, sadness, loss, and the emotional devastation of confronting mortality. Richardson's book is remarkably different. She certainly does not pretend that cancer isn't frightening, and some of the most affecting passages reveal just how terrified, uncertain, or psychologically exhausted she becomes. But she spends considerably less time asking us to feel the tragedy of what happened to her and considerably more time showing us what actually happened, what she learned, what decisions she faced, and how she navigated them. Different readers may respond to that approach very differently. Someone opening a breast cancer memoir expecting an emotional tsunami, something designed to sweep them away in heartbreak and leave them sobbing by the final chapter, may find this book surprisingly restrained. Depending on what that reader wants, that could be disappointing or wonderfully refreshing. Richardson is much more matter-of-fact than most memoirists writing about similarly devastating circumstances. She describes fear, bodily loss, uncertainty, and the possibility of death, but she rarely luxuriates in them. The emotions are present because they were part of the experience; they are not the entire experience. In that sense, the book is different not just tonally but structurally and philosophically. Richardson is less interested in constructing a dramatic cancer narrative than in reconstructing the sequence of events that taught her how to advocate for herself. Mammograms, consent forms, second opinions, surgical schedules, pathology reports, treatment choices, drainage tubes, prostheses, medications, and even swimsuits receive attention because those were the practical realities of surviving. There is very little emotional manipulation here. Richardson generally refuses to turn cancer into spectacle. If there is one thing that stood out to us more than anything else in this book, it is Richardson's description of what it actually feels like to be a patient inside the healthcare system. At various points, she is poked, prodded, compressed, injected, biopsied repeatedly, exposed, and handled in ways that may be clinically routine to the people performing them but are anything but routine to the person lying on the table. During one awake surgery, her gown is simply removed and her body exposed and draped as the staff go about their normal routine. Technicians casually discuss restaurants, golf, and weekend plans until somebody suddenly remembers that Richardson is conscious and can hear everything. The entire atmosphere changes once they realize there is an alert human being underneath those surgical drapes. Elsewhere, she encounters a doctor whose bedside manner is strikingly blunt while delivering a terrifying cancer diagnosis, medical personnel who speak around her rather than to her, and a surgeon who mutters “Not as advertised” in frustration while Richardson is lying awake with an open surgical wound, instantly leaving her to wonder what has gone wrong. None of these people are necessarily bad healthcare professionals. In fact, Richardson ultimately praises her medical team and credits them with saving her life. But that almost makes the point stronger. Competent healthcare can still feel profoundly dehumanizing when the people providing it temporarily forget what the patient is experiencing. A gown being removed may be routine to a nurse who has done it thousands of times. A dozen biopsy samples may simply be necessary tissue specimens to a radiologist. A side conversation may be harmless workplace chatter to a surgical technician. But to the person frightened, exposed, vulnerable, and wondering whether she is going to die, those moments can feel enormous. Richardson's account is a powerful reminder that bedside manner is not some decorative extra added to medical competence. Sometimes simply explaining what you are about to do, acknowledging the patient's fear, protecting their dignity, or remembering that the body on the table belongs to a conscious human being can profoundly change the experience of care. Check it out on Amazon!
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 Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)
It's strange... usually we don't particularly like books like this. It's sexually explicit, crude, vulgar, frequently outrageous, and filled with characters making decisions that had us wondering what on Earth they were thinking. And yet... we really liked this book. Perhaps that's because underneath all the sex, nudity, drinking, breast implants, body counts, bizarre adventures, and questionable life choices is actually a surprisingly sincere story about a woman who realizes, at nearly forty years old, that she has spent most of her adult life living according to somebody else's expectations. At the beginning of Kangaroo Is My Safe Word, Valerie Stewart is thirty-two years old and living in Houston with her longtime boyfriend, Rod. She wants many of the things people traditionally associate with adulthood: marriage, children, a house, financial stability, and a meaningful career. She also wants to finish her accounting degree. Rod, however, seems perfectly comfortable with their stagnant existence and isn't particularly supportive of Valerie becoming anything more than what she already is. His assessment of her is especially brutal: as far as he is concerned, she's basically just a cocktail waitress. Seven years pass, and Valerie is now thirty-nine. Something remarkable has happened without Rod even realizing it. She has quietly finished her accounting degree, earning a 93 in her final class, graduating summa cum laude, and placing among the top five percent of her class. This is one of our favorite parts of the entire book because it represents the first undeniable proof that Rod's assessment of Valerie was wrong. More importantly, Valerie begins realizing that her own assessment of Valerie was wrong too. That realization becomes the foundation of virtually everything that follows. Valerie starts losing weight, changing her appearance, buying different clothes, improving her career prospects, and even getting breast implants. Some readers will undoubtedly have mixed feelings about the degree to which physical attractiveness becomes intertwined with confidence and professional success in this story, and we did too. At one point, Valerie explicitly recognizes that looking better may give her an advantage in business. Still, the more important transformation isn't happening in her chest, her hair, or her wardrobe. It's happening inside her head. We also need to emphasize just how funny this book can be. Kangaroo Is My Safe Word is frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, and much of the comedy comes from Celia's internal commentary and the ridiculous people and situations she encounters. Thomas White has a knack for slipping jokes into scenes that could otherwise be uncomfortable, awkward, or completely absurd. Celia refers to Costco as the "impulse-buy store," compares her old truck to something rejected from Storage Wars, and at one point celebrates what she calls a "revenge orgasm." Even relatively mundane observations can become punchlines. The humor is crude, unapologetic, and very much in keeping with the personality of the novel. Dean Scota might provide the funniest sustained example. His attempt to pick Celia up at a bar becomes an escalating parade of terrible jokes. He tells her that he's a drug representative selling an Alzheimer's drug but has "forgotten the name," offers her samples of prescription-strength laxative, asks whether her name is Visa because she's "everywhere I want to be," and finally reaches the absolute bottom of the pickup-line barrel with the old chloroform gag. Celia practically grades his attempts in real time, and the whole exchange is wonderfully stupid. Dean himself ultimately turns out to be considerably less funny once they leave the bar, but his spectacularly cheesy attempts at flirtation are hilarious. Then Rod gives her the push she needs. Valerie catches him with another woman at Tequila Barb's, but interestingly, her reaction isn't simply devastation. There is also relief. His betrayal gives her permission to finally do something she has apparently wanted to do for years: leave. And when Valerie leaves Rod, she doesn't merely leave the relationship. She essentially leaves Valerie behind too. Inspired by a suffragette ancestor, she renames herself Cordelia Barlow, usually going by Celia, and even creates an elaborate C-O-R-D-E-L-I-A plan for rebuilding her life. The individual letters correspond to goals involving her identity, organization, residence, determination, employment, leaving Rod permanently, investing in happiness, and, hilariously, allowing herself to increase her "body count." That final goal tells you quite a bit about where this book is headed. We also love the little kangaroo image that quietly follows Celia's story. Early in the book, when Valerie finally looks at herself in the mirror after completing her degree, we learn that she has a tattoo above her right buttock of a bouncing kangaroo wearing red boxing gloves. It's such a bizarrely specific and charming image that it's hard to forget. In retrospect, it almost feels like a miniature mascot for Celia herself: cute, slightly ridiculous, but also ready to fight. By the time the kangaroo reappears in the book's final safe-word joke, that silly little image has acquired considerably more meaning. Celia moves to Austin, lands a better job involving CAPPS HR and payroll analysis, earns considerably more money, gets her own place, buys herself a Nissan Z, dates, travels, experiments sexually, and begins saying yes to experiences the old Valerie probably would have dismissed immediately. There is a genuine wish-fulfillment quality to much of this, but that is part of the fun. Celia isn't merely rebuilding her life cautiously. She is almost speed-running a midlife reinvention. She eventually finds herself returning professionally to the very workplace where she had once been undervalued, except now she is returning from a position of greater authority. We particularly enjoyed this because it gives the transformation something more substantial than sex and appearance. Celia has become genuinely competent, educated, successful, and professionally respected. In fact, we think the book is at its strongest whenever Thomas White reminds us that Celia's greatest accomplishment isn't becoming more sexually adventurous or physically attractive. It's becoming someone who trusts herself. Her relationship with Carter helps reinforce this. There is genuine affection between them, and there are moments when it would be easy for Celia to simply fall into another conventional relationship and reorganize her life around another man. But she recognizes that returning to Houston and restructuring everything around Carter would threaten the independence she has fought so hard to establish. That doesn't make Carter a villain. It makes the decision harder, and we appreciated that. And while we're discussing Carter, we have to mention the sex scene. Good gosh. Celia and Carter's first night together might be one of the most epic sex scenes in the history of sex scenes. Thomas White doesn't exactly fade to black and leave the rest to our imaginations. This thing practically needs an intermission. What begins with an extremely nervous Celia debating whether she should even follow Carter home turns into an extended sexual odyssey involving oral sex, multiple orgasms, changing positions, Celia discovering sensations she apparently didn't know existed, Carter getting his turn, more experimentation afterward, and both of them somehow still having enough energy left to hold a conversation. By the time Celia finally decides that she is "pretty fucking satisfied," we were exhausted just reading about it. Then the book becomes considerably stranger. Celia's adventures with Garrett Tyler open the story into a world of extraordinary wealth, New Orleans indulgence, elaborate properties, sexual experimentation, and eventually a potential business idea involving fantasy suites. Garrett's staggering wealth makes parts of this section feel almost like a different novel, but it also contributes to the escalating sense that Celia is experiencing more life in a relatively short period than she did during the previous two decades. Thomas White is clearly having fun here, perhaps sometimes too much fun. This is probably our biggest criticism of Kangaroo Is My Safe Word: at 464 pages, it is simply too long. The middle of the novel can become episodic, with Celia meeting someone new, trying something new, noticing someone's body, having sex, reflecting upon the experience, and then moving into another adventure. Individually, many of these scenes are entertaining. Collectively, however, some begin to feel repetitive. The "body count" concept in particular probably gets more attention than it deserves. Celia initially treats increasing that number almost as evidence of liberation, but we think the book's deeper and more interesting idea is actually about choice. Liberation isn't sleeping with more people. Liberation is being able to say yes when you genuinely want to say yes, no when you want to say no, and changing your mind without allowing somebody else to dictate what your life is supposed to look like. That theme becomes increasingly important when Celia meets the people who eventually form something resembling a chosen family. Her experiences at Hippy Hollow introduce her to an eccentric, sexually open, unconventional group of friends who nevertheless become some of the most emotionally supportive people in the novel. Among them is Parker, a divorced nurse practitioner and father who works in a neurosurgical practice. Parker is particularly interesting because he arrives after Celia has spent so much of the book pursuing excitement. With him, she begins discovering something different: safety. That may be the most important development in the entire story. Celia initially equates freedom with movement, novelty, sex, travel, independence, money, reinvention, and the ability to do whatever she wants. Parker doesn't necessarily take those things away from her. Instead, he introduces the possibility that freedom can also include trusting another person enough to feel safe around them. That distinction gives the later portions of the novel considerably more emotional weight than we expected. Then Kangaroo Is My Safe Word suddenly decides that being a comedy-drama about sex, relationships, reinvention, and middle age is not enough. It becomes a thriller, and Rod returns in spectacularly disturbing fashion. He drugs Celia, abducts her, strips her, restrains her in a room resembling something out of Dexter, wraps her in plastic, threatens her with a cleaver, and essentially demands that she return to him or die. The shift is extreme. Rod certainly establishes himself as selfish, controlling, resentful, and unfaithful earlier in the story, but transforming him into a full-blown kidnapping psychopath is such an enormous escalation that it almost feels as though he wandered in from another genre. We're somewhat torn on this because, on one hand, it is ridiculous. On the other hand, we couldn't stop reading it. The escape itself also pays off something that initially seems like a throwaway joke from much earlier in the book. Rod has an extreme disgust for feces. Celia remembers this and convinces him that she is about to suffer explosive diarrhea. His disgust becomes stronger than his caution, and he loosens her restraints enough for her to eventually escape. She gets outside, grabs an enormous piece of wood from a corral, and smashes him with it. Then she hits him again. The Zombieland-style "double tap" mentality is wonderfully absurd considering how horrifying the situation is, and we have to give Thomas White credit for turning one of Rod's most ridiculous personality traits into the mechanism of Celia's survival. That is actually clever setup and payoff. We do have considerably more difficulty with some of Celia's thoughts afterward. She begins wondering whether Rod somehow became "collateral damage" of her transformation, almost as though reinventing herself contributed to his destruction. We understand why a traumatized character might think this way, but we don't particularly like the implication. Celia did not make Rod kidnap her. She did not make him restrain her, threaten her, stalk her, drug her, or attempt to force her back into a relationship. Those were Rod's decisions. If anything, his inability to accept that Celia could leave him represents the ugliest possible version of the controlling mentality she has spent the entire novel escaping. Fortunately, the book ultimately lands somewhere much healthier. Five years later, Rod has received a lengthy prison sentence. Celia has recovered, built a home and life of her own, and remained with Parker. Importantly, the house is in her name. We love that detail because Celia doesn't conclude her journey by surrendering everything she fought for and disappearing into somebody else's identity again. She can love Parker while still remaining Celia. She can share her life without surrendering ownership of it. That might actually be the book's most mature idea: independence does not have to mean isolation. The old Valerie was dependent without being particularly happy. The newly liberated Celia sometimes swings almost comically far in the opposite direction, treating independence as though nobody should ever be able to influence her again. By the end, she has reached something more balanced. She has Parker, friendships, security, professional success, financial stability, and a chosen family of people who showed up for her during one of the worst periods of her life. And then we finally get the title. During a surprise trip to Jamaica with her friends, Celia tells everyone, "Just remember, if I'm ever in trouble, kangaroo is my safe word." It's a wonderfully strange final line for a wonderfully strange book. The title initially sounds like nothing more than a sexual joke, and for much of the novel we assumed that was exactly what it would be. But by the end, the concept of a safe word actually fits Celia's entire journey surprisingly well. A safe word means that you have a choice. It means there is a boundary. It means you can participate willingly, but you can also stop. It requires trust, and perhaps most importantly, it means somebody is supposed to listen when you say you've had enough. That is basically Celia's entire character arc. There are things about Kangaroo Is My Safe Word that ordinarily would have turned us against a novel like this. It's too long. It's frequently crude. The sexual content can become repetitive. Rod's transformation into a Dexter-style psychopath is extreme. The obsession with "body count" occasionally makes sexual liberation feel more numerical than meaningful, and some of the book's ideas about beauty, attractiveness, and empowerment deserve more scrutiny. But somehow, the whole thing works far better than we expected, perhaps because Celia is so easy to root for. She isn't a twenty-two-year-old discovering adulthood for the first time. She is a woman approaching forty who looks around at her life and realizes that the future she once imagined simply never happened. She isn't married. She doesn't have the house she wanted. She doesn't have children. Her career hasn't become what she hoped it would become, and the man she spent years with seems to have quietly convinced her that she isn't capable of much more. Then she earns that degree. She gets the 93. She graduates summa cum laude, and suddenly the assumptions begin collapsing. That's the part of Kangaroo Is My Safe Word that stayed with us more than the sex, nudity, Garrett's money, Hippy Hollow, fantasy rooms, breast implants, Rod's plastic-covered murder room, or even Celia beating him with a giant piece of wood. She discovers that her life isn't over. In many ways, it has barely started. Kangaroo Is My Safe Word is messy, vulgar, funny, sexually uninhibited, occasionally ridiculous, unexpectedly disturbing, and much more heartfelt than its title suggests. Thomas White could have tightened the middle considerably, and the final thriller turn won't work equally well for every reader, but Celia's transformation gives the novel an emotional center strong enough to survive all of its wild detours. By the time we reached Jamaica and finally understood why the heck a kangaroo was Celia's safe word, we realized something equally strange: we had become genuinely attached to her. This book is not yet released. Stay tuned!  Score: 95+/100 (9.5+ out of 10)
What a journey we've been on with the folks over at Story Monsters--seeing Cate and the Garden Bandits grow from a cute, beautiful, charming children's book into a FULL-BLOWN MUSICAL with hit song numbers and stellar performances! Cate and the Garden Bandits: The Musical is charming, funny, imaginative, educational, wonderfully performed, and surprisingly sophisticated children's musical theater from Studio Story Monsters, based on the award-winning children's book Cate and the Garden Bandits by Betsy Coffeen. With a script and musical adaptation by Zachary Simpson, executive production by Linda F. Radke, and performances featuring Erin Rementer, Kalen Kelly, and Zachary R. Simpson, this is not merely a collection of cute songs about butterflies and bumblebees. It is a complete little musical world. Outstanding Creator Awards has had the unusual privilege of watching this project come together piece by piece over a period of nearly two years. We first reviewed Zachary Simpson's script and awarded it 91+/100. We later reviewed individual musical numbers as they were completed, awarding 91+/100 to “Who Are These Bugs?”, 93+/100 to “The Magical Garden,” and 94/100 to “The Bumblebees.” Now that the fourth and final released song has completed the Original Cast Recording, we finally get to consider the project as it was ultimately intended: not as four isolated songs, and not merely as words on a page, but as one unified musical experience. Rather fittingly for a story about a garden, we have essentially watched this musical grow, and it has blossomed beautifully. The story begins in the titular Magical Garden, a whimsical miniature paradise where flowers tower over the insect inhabitants and leaves are large enough to sleep on. Cate, a beautiful blue butterfly, awakens at sunrise and begins tending the garden she loves. The opening number, “The Magical Garden,” immediately establishes the setting as more than a pretty backdrop. The garden is an ecosystem, a workplace, a community, a playground, and a home. Cate explains that its residents care for the garden with water and love, while the garden gives them a peaceful place to live and dream. This reciprocal relationship is one of the smartest ideas in the entire production. The insects are not simply anthropomorphic decorations tossed into the story because bugs look cute in children's books. Davey the Dung Beetle improves the soil. Pete the Potato Bug trims flowers. Walter the Earthworm helps the flowers breathe. Each resident contributes something different, introducing elementary ecological concepts without making children feel as though someone has suddenly interrupted the musical to administer a science quiz. When we originally reviewed “The Magical Garden” by itself, we praised how effectively Simpson makes us care about this place before anything threatens it. Hearing the number within the context of the complete musical confirms just how important that accomplishment is. If the garden were merely a colorful background, disappearing petals would hardly matter. Instead, the opening makes the Magical Garden feel like a real community worth protecting, and Cate is very clearly at the center of that community. Cate is cheerful, encouraging, organized, occasionally corny, and a natural leader. She gives community announcements, congratulates residents, recognizes Patti the Pill Bug as Insect of the Month, thanks the ladybugs for controlling the aphid population, and unleashes enough plant-related puns to make every father in the audience furious that he did not think of them first: “Don't stop be-leafing,” “YOU GROW GIRL!,” and “You need to stop that once and floral.” Oh, Zachary. The production understands something that many works for children forget: kids enjoy jokes, but adults sitting beside them need something too. The result is a script filled with verbal jokes, physical comedy, exaggerated reactions, absurd personalities, and moments that can entertain several age groups at once. Cate's community meeting alone establishes much of the musical's personality before the central plot even begins. That conflict arrives when residents finally confront Cate about flower petals mysteriously disappearing from the Daisy District, Rose Beds, and Lilac Lane. The garden panics. Cate, as its unofficial leader and caretaker, promises to stay awake and investigate. Naturally, almost everyone else explains that they cannot possibly help because they need a good night's sleep so they can sing “The Magical Garden” again the following morning. Cate face-palms, and so did we. It is a great little piece of self-aware theatrical humor. The mystery leads beautifully into the “Magical Garden Reprise,” and this is where Simpson's use of recurring music deserves special recognition. The opening melody initially represents safety, familiarity, routine, and community. Bringing it back as Cate prepares to investigate the missing petals creates musical continuity while changing the emotional circumstances around the melody. The familiar garden is still there, but something is wrong inside it. Of course, Cate's masterful investigative strategy consists of deciding she can squeeze in one tiny daydream before nightfall and immediately falling asleep. Enter Buzz and Bob, two bumblebees who quickly become some of the production's funniest characters. They arrive to collect pollen and petals, only for Bob to unleash an enormous sneeze because, apparently, he is a bumblebee with allergies. There is something wonderfully Story Monsters about that sentence. Buzz responds by asking whether Bob forgot his allergy medicine again and insists the pharmacy will be their first stop once they return to the hive. It is completely ridiculous and completely appropriate for the world Simpson has created. That sneeze awakens Cate and launches “Who Are These Bugs?" one of the most narratively important songs in the musical. When we reviewed “Who Are These Bugs?” independently, we gave it 91+/100, praising its mysterious, almost detective-like quality while noting that, as an individual competition song, its approximately one-minute runtime limited how much vocal fireworks Erin Rementer could demonstrate. In the context of the completed musical, however, that brevity makes substantially more sense because the song is essentially a musicalized internal monologue. Cate sees strangers taking petals. She knows her community is depending on her. She becomes frightened, frustrated, protective, suspicious, and determined within a remarkably short period of time. She labels the newcomers “bandit bumblebees,” tells herself she must be strong, and prepares to take a courageous stand. Then she walks toward them and manages, “Hey... Uhm... I'm Cate?” Her confidence evaporates at precisely the moment she needs it most, and that joke actually reveals one of the production's best character-writing decisions. Cate is courageous, but she is not fearless, and there is an important difference. She talks herself into doing difficult things, gets scared when she actually faces them, and keeps going anyway. That is a far healthier and more useful depiction of courage for children than creating a protagonist who never doubts herself. Erin Rementer's work as Cate has been one of the consistent highlights across these recordings. We previously praised the unusually high, bright, animated character voice she gives the butterfly, and the complete musical demonstrates why that characterization works so well. In “The Magical Garden,” Cate sounds bubbly, comfortable, optimistic, and utterly at home. In “Who Are These Bugs?”, that same recognizable voice becomes apprehensive, suspicious, frustrated, tentative, and increasingly determined. Rementer is not simply singing children's songs in a cute voice. She is acting through music. We have previously compared her Cate voice to something one might expect from an animated fantasy character or a Disney princess, and that remains apt. Yet what makes the performance work is not merely sweetness. Rementer gives Cate personality. She can be adorable without becoming passive, energetic without becoming exhausting, and vulnerable without making the character weak. The musical becomes even more entertaining once Cate recruits Pete, Davey, and Walter and follows the bumblebees toward the intimidating oak tree. Pete, Davey, and Walter are a wonderful little supporting trio because they are loyal enough to accompany Cate while being spectacularly unenthusiastic about potentially dying in the process. When Davey says the tree is scary at night, Walter notes that it is scary during the day too. Davey's conclusion is, naturally, “It's scary all the time!” And yet they go. Once again, the story quietly reinforces courage through action rather than speeches. The confrontation sequence contains some of Simpson's funniest stage writing. Walter finds a suspicious petal, at which point Pete dramatically orders, “Davey... Analysis.” Davey inspects it, smells it, measures it, waves it around, apparently tastes it, identifies it by its scientific name, estimates its age, and begins explaining its status as the national flower of Malaysia. Pete essentially has to interrupt him and ask whether it came from their garden. Yes. Yes, it did. The whole exchange is visual, educational, ridiculous, and perfectly suited to children's theater. Then the bees arrive, and keep arriving, and keep arriving. Cate begins her confrontation confidently, only to become increasingly nervous as the group grows to nearly fifteen bumblebees. Pete, Davey, and Walter are ready to flee, and the musical briefly allows the situation to look genuinely intimidating from Cate's perspective. But this is where Cate and the Garden Bandits reveals that its real conflict is not heroes versus villains. It is assumption versus understanding. Buzz explains that the bees need pollen and petals. When those words send the other bees into a frenzy, Buzz orders Cate and her friends to hit the deck while Bob hilariously takes command of the swarm. Moments later, Buzz apologizes for frightening Cate and explains that he takes the bees' work very seriously. This is an excellent choice for a children's story because Cate's original conclusion was not irrational. Someone was taking the petals. The flowers were being damaged. Cate did have a legitimate reason to investigate. Her mistake was assuming that seeing what somebody was doing meant she automatically understood why they were doing it. That distinction gives the story more depth than its cheerful bug characters might initially suggest. Buzz then brings Cate and her friends to the colony, and “The Bumblebees” transforms the entire situation. The supposedly sinister outsiders are revealed as another functioning community. They are making petal beds for baby bees, moving pollen, working together, and helping flowers grow. Their song explicitly emphasizes “community and harmony” and explains that the bees and the Magical Garden need one another. When we reviewed “The Bumblebees” as an individual song, we awarded it 94/100, making it our highest-scoring previously reviewed component of the musical. It deserved that score. Musically, it is wonderfully different from “The Magical Garden” and “Who Are These Bugs?” It has a wonky, energetic, jazzy, swingy quality, with an almost retro dance-music flavor. Jim Derrick's trumpet work adds another instrumental personality to the score, just as Jimmy Sweeden's acoustic guitar helped define the gentler sound of “The Magical Garden.” Those changing instrumental textures help prevent the production from feeling like the same children's jingle repeated four times with different lyrics. The bumblebee ensemble also commits completely to sounding like, well, bumblebees. Their buzzing, exaggerated group vocals could theoretically be too much if treated as conventional pop singing, but they are not conventional pop singers. They are bees. They're supposed to sound like that. Haven't you talked and sung with bees before? The cool people have. The vocal eccentricity becomes character work, particularly when contrasted against the clearer individual voices within the recording. The arrival of Queen Qira gives the second half another memorable personality. She is warm, commanding, humorous, and considerably more relaxed than one might expect from royalty. Cate bows. Qira basically tells her to knock it off and just call her Qira. The two leaders then come to understand what happened: the bees were gathering materials for their colony, the garden residents interpreted those actions as theft, and nobody had actually taken the time to speak to the other community. The solution is not battle or exile, and nobody gets sprayed with insecticide. They communicate. Cate understands the bees' role. The bees understand how their behavior affected the garden residents. Buzz apologizes. Cate welcomes the colony. Qira agrees that the two communities should work together. That is a remarkably constructive resolution to build into children's entertainment. Then, because apparently peacefully resolving a community dispute through ecological cooperation was not entertaining enough, Queen Qira starts rapping. Yes, rapping. She proceeds to introduce a magnificently absurd number of bees whose names overwhelmingly begin with B: Brandon, Becky, Barrett, Bailey, Benjamin, Bently, Bryce, Brady, Betsy, Benny, Bodie, Billie, Bridget, Bernie, Betty, Barry, Bruce, Beau, Brian, Buzz, Robert... Wait. Robert? There is always one. The script explicitly calls for this section to be rapped, and it is exactly the kind of unexpected comedic flourish that gives the musical an identity beyond its educational intentions. That balance is critical. Cate and the Garden Bandits certainly wants children to learn about teamwork, environmental stewardship, insects, pollination, courage, communication, prejudice, and conflict resolution. But it remembers that children did not buy tickets to a seminar. They came for butterflies, bumblebees, music, jokes, dancing, silly voices, gigantic flowers, exaggerated sneezing, terrified earthworms, bug puns, and a queen bee dropping bars about her enormous family. The lessons work because the entertainment carries them. The production also deserves considerable credit for its practicality as children's theater. The principal characters have distinct identities without requiring young actors to memorize enormous monologues. Dialogue is generally concise. Musical phrases use repetition. Many jokes can be communicated physically. Meanwhile, townspeople and bumblebee ensemble roles make it possible to involve a larger group of children without forcing every participant to carry a major speaking part. That makes the musical particularly appealing for elementary schools, children's theaters, libraries, camps, youth programs, and community productions. A smaller group could emphasize the principal characters, while a larger class could populate the Magical Garden and bee colony. In other words, Simpson appears to understand that writing theater for children to watch and writing theater children can actually perform are not necessarily the same skill. This musical attempts both. Another strength is the way the individual numbers serve different dramatic purposes. “The Magical Garden” establishes the world and emotional stakes. “Who Are These Bugs?” places us inside Cate's suspicion and fear. “The Bumblebees” reveals the supposedly threatening outsiders from their own perspective and resolves the central misunderstanding. The concluding “We Are ALL The Magical Garden” then brings the musical full circle. That finale may contain the smartest structural idea in the score. At the beginning, everyone sings about living in the Magical Garden. At the end, after the residents and bees learn about one another, the language changes to “We are all the Magical Garden.” That is not merely a reprise for the sake of getting one more use out of a catchy melody. It changes the meaning of the original song. The garden at the beginning is a place. The garden at the end is a community. Cate even acknowledges that things being different can be good, while Qira emphasizes teamwork. The bees explain their contributions, the townspeople welcome them, and the entire cast joins together in the transformed refrain. The story begins with a community that believes it already understands harmony. Then strangers appear, the residents become frightened, the strangers are labeled “bandits,” Cate investigates, both groups finally communicate, and the definition of the community expands. When everyone finally sings “We are all the Magical Garden,” the phrase has been earned. The final image is equally sweet. After the celebration, Cate and Qira remain behind, exchange a smile and wave, and simply promise to see each other tomorrow. Nothing explodes. Nobody saves the universe. The great triumph is that two neighbors who previously misunderstood one another will wake up tomorrow and work together. There is something wonderfully wholesome about that. The project also demonstrates just how much talent exists within the broader Studio Story Monsters creative family. Linda F. Radke has repeatedly impressed us with her ability to shepherd children's books into multimedia experiences rather than allowing them to remain confined to a printed page. Betsy Coffeen's original story and characters provide the imaginative and thematic foundation. Zachary Simpson, whom we have previously jokingly called the “Benjamin Franklin of the Story Monsters brand,” once again demonstrates an almost unreasonable number of creative abilities through writing, composition, lyrics, production, performance, and adaptation. Erin Rementer brings Cate vividly to life, Kalen Kelly contributes another important vocal presence to the production, and Jimmy Sweeden and Jim Derrick add instrumental character that helps different numbers develop their own identities. It feels collaborative because it is collaborative, and that is especially fitting for a musical whose entire message is about people with different abilities contributing to something larger than themselves. There are still reasons we stop at 95/100 rather than awarding a near-perfect score. The project is deliberately compact. Some songs are extremely short, and listeners approaching the album strictly as standalone music rather than as children's musical theater may wish certain ideas were developed into longer numbers. The score is charming and memorable, but it is not attempting the compositional complexity, vocal demands, orchestral scope, or dramatic magnitude of the greatest works in musical theater history. A listener expecting Wicked, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, or another massive theatrical spectacle is going to find something much smaller and simpler here. But judging Cate and the Garden Bandits primarily against productions it never intended to resemble would miss the point because its simplicity is frequently functional. A one-minute song is easier for a young performer to remember. A recurring melody helps children recognize thematic connections. Straightforward lyrics allow younger audiences to follow the story. Broad characters are easy to understand on stage. Ensemble roles allow more children to participate. A compact runtime makes the production manageable for schools and families. The proper question is therefore not whether “Who Are These Bugs?” can compete with “Defying Gravity” as a vocal showpiece. The question is whether it effectively takes a young audience from “Something is happening to our garden” to “Cate thinks she has discovered the culprits and must find the courage to confront them.” It does, and that philosophy applies throughout the production. What makes the finished work particularly satisfying is that the whole is greater than the scores of its individual parts. The script earned 91+. “Who Are These Bugs?” earned 91+. “The Magical Garden” earned 93+. “The Bumblebees” earned 94. Simply averaging those numbers would completely misunderstand what Linda F. Radke submitted here because those scores evaluated components, while Cate and the Garden Bandits: The Musical lets us evaluate relationships between components. Now “The Magical Garden” does not merely sound cheerful. It establishes what is at stake later. “Who Are These Bugs?” does not merely sound mysterious. It dramatizes Cate's mistaken assumptions. “The Bumblebees” does not merely sound jazzy and fun. It changes our understanding of the supposed villains. And “We Are ALL The Magical Garden” does not merely reprise the opening. It answers it. That is why the completed musical deserves a higher score than any one piece received alone. Studio Story Monsters has taken Betsy Coffeen's children's story and expanded it into something playful, theatrical, musical, educational, and remarkably sincere. It teaches without lecturing. It celebrates nature without becoming dry. It encourages courage without pretending fear does not exist. It promotes inclusion without reducing its characters to a message. And it resolves conflict through communication without making that resolution boring. Most importantly, it understands that a good children's musical still needs to be a good story. There has to be something children want to protect, a mystery worth solving, a misunderstanding that creates genuine conflict, characters worth following, jokes worth laughing at, and songs worth remembering. There apparently also has to be a bumblebee who forgot his allergy medication and, if you're lucky, a queen bee who suddenly starts rapping. Cate and the Garden Bandits: The Musical is one of Studio Story Monsters' most ambitious and complete multimedia accomplishments we have reviewed. It brings together the strengths we have seen scattered across their previous work: Linda F. Radke's creative leadership, Betsy Coffeen's storytelling, Zachary Simpson's extraordinarily versatile writing and musical talents, Erin Rementer's charismatic character performance, Kalen Kelly's vocal contributions, talented instrumentalists, memorable ensemble work, educational substance, theatrical imagination, and an enormous amount of heart. After following this project from its script through individual recordings and finally to its completed musical form, we can confidently say that the Magical Garden has finished growing, and it is a beautiful place to visit. Commendable work by everyone involved! We're so proud of all the thought, effort, and work they put into this outstanding little-big musical! It's a monumental achievement in creative production!  Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)
In Hawaii, there used to be a famous and acclaimed ghost storyteller named Glenn Grant who made waves with his Obake Files (Obake is a Japanese term associated with shapeshifters, spirits, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. Grant collected and retold eerie stories rooted in Hawaii's own history, culture, and folklore. Some of those spooky tales still haunt us to this day! With that in mind, there is something fascinating about traveling thousands of miles away, at least through the pages of a book, and discovering that people in an entirely different part of the world have their own stories about ghosts, monsters, strange creatures, cursed places, unexplained disappearances, and things lurking in the darkness. The details may change with the landscape and the culture, but apparently human beings everywhere have looked into the night and wondered what might be looking back. That is part of what makes Dark Canadiana such an interesting collection. Edited by James Seamone and featuring twenty-six authors, this enormous anthology essentially takes us on a horror road trip across Canada. We encounter abandoned ski hills, lonely highways, frozen wilderness, old railways, mines, lakes, cemeteries, historical settlements, maple farms, and familiar Canadian landmarks, only to discover that practically none of them are safe. Canada might have a reputation for politeness, hockey, maple syrup, breathtaking scenery, and people apologizing when someone else bumps into them, but Dark Canadiana would like to remind us that the forests are enormous, the highways are lonely, the winters are brutal, the legends are hungry, and apparently even the maple syrup can't be trusted. The best way to describe the book is almost as a horror road trip across Canada and across Canadian history. “Slash Mountain, Saskatchewan” by John Adam Gosham is an excellent opener because it immediately establishes the book's mission. A group of students visits the abandoned Blackstrap ski hill and discovers that the legend of the horribly injured Curty McIntyre might be more than a legend. It eventually becomes a full-on ski-themed slasher, with skis, ski poles, ski boots, a red lift ticket, and the mountain itself incorporated into the carnage. Emily ultimately survives Curty and escapes Saskatchewan. It is gruesome, knowingly pulpy, and unmistakably regional. “This Godless Endeavour” by Steve Stred transports us to Lac la Biche, Alberta, in 1898 and mixes frontier horror with religion, damnation, demonic corruption, and doomed love. It immediately demonstrates that the collection isn't going to remain in contemporary slasher territory. “The Guelph Gryphon” by K.A. Mielke is one of the welcome tonal changes. Its cryptid hunt becomes a funny, charming, queer monster-romance adventure around Guelph. It proves the anthology can be playful without abandoning its monsters. “I Believe in Treasure” by Leonard George was one of the more emotionally interesting stories to me. Jesse follows the treasure map left by his missing son through Niagara-on-the-Lake, only for grief, family tragedy, and recognizable local landmarks to give way to bizarre aquatic cosmic horror. The transformation from something almost sentimental into something surreal and nightmarish works very well. “Maple Tree Farm” by Dana Gricken may be the purest example of Dark Canadiana as a concept. It gives us a school sugar-shack excursion complete with maple taffy, poutine, Tim Hortons, hockey, snow pants, and O Canada, and then reveals the horrifying secret ingredient in the maple syrup. The wonderfully demented Mr. Meeks even invokes the stereotype that Canadians are supposed to be polite while punishing people he considers rude. This one practically weaponizes Canadiana. “Facts Concerning the Late John Power and His Family” by Anthony Michael Murphy is one of the strongest pieces if we're judging atmosphere and ambition. It moves into Labrador and Inuit folklore, particularly the Qalupalik, while a family's northern expedition disintegrates into disappearance, death, madness, and something increasingly cosmic. The remoteness actually matters. This horror could not simply be moved to a generic American town without losing much of its identity. “The Trouble With Bullies” by James Seamone is uncomfortable in a completely different way because there is no monster required. A bullied boy named Jamie responds to cruelty with escalating and eventually lethal revenge, then years later tells the story to his own bullied son as an instructional tale. The ending is nasty precisely because Jamie appears to have learned the wrong lesson and is passing it to another generation. “Ravage” by Kristal Stittle turns a rabid polar bear loose around a tiny Manitoba airfield in 1970. The aviation setting, isolation, animal threat, and classic-rock soundtrack make it an unusually energetic survival story. “The Dead Squad” by Stephen Coghlan takes us into outright post-apocalyptic science fiction. A mutated rabies treatment has created a world in which people need sealed cities and armour simply to go outside; infected Canadian soldiers who know they are essentially doomed form “Dead Squads” for dangerous missions. Ottawa, the Rideau Canal, Canadian military units, and even the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are folded into the apocalypse. “George and the Dragon” by Dwain Campbell is another one I'd seriously consider highlighting. It turns Canadian railway history into monster mythology, with a seemingly malevolent locomotive becoming the “dragon” and a young railway worker becoming a wonderfully literal Canadian St. George. That's exactly the sort of creative transformation of Canadian history that makes the anthology feel purposeful rather than merely themed. “A Deep Dark Place” by Jon Gauthier has one of my favorite reversals. A frightening northern Ontario cryptid initially seems like it will be the monster, but Amber's real predators are the men who drug and abduct her into an abandoned mine. The enormous creature kills the men, bites through Amber's restraints, and directs her toward safety. That inversion makes the story much more memorable than a straightforward monster attack. “Just A Quick Little Question” by Daniel Fox is probably one of the funniest stories in the collection. It is structured as letters from an irreverent nineteenth-century Vatican vampire hunter wandering around Toronto during the early Dominion era, reporting to the Pope as though they're old buddies. He falls in love with the vampire he's supposed to kill, gets turned into one himself, and ultimately announces that he and his vampire lover are heading for the Vatican. The running absurd questions he asks the Pope make the voice especially memorable. “But There Are No Hunters” by Dean Italiano is one of the most unusual. We experience captivity primarily through genetically manipulated deer raised on an Ontario farm. The humans provide food and safety, but they also control, breed, manipulate, and grotesquely exaggerate the animals' antlers. When Captain and Zeus finally escape, the genuinely wild forest feels dangerous but honest. The last realization is essentially that wilderness contains threats, but at least it contains “no scent of deception.” I liked this one considerably. “Enchanteresse of the Damned” by Angelique Fawns is almost a supernatural comedy about unwanted desirability. Céline, cursed to inspire obsessive attraction, flees through Montréal and ends up in a pub run by Lucifer. Lucifer wants her too, so she essentially stages a demonic workplace coup, turns Hell against him, and winds up happier among demons because she finally finds someone who isn't attracted to her. The ending, with the demons partying while Lucifer gets tossed into the River Styx, is gleefully ridiculous in a good way. “Visit to the Lost Lagoon” by Spencer Keene gives Vancouver a gentler kind of ghost story. Two students researching a historical serial killer encounter a decomposing apparition at Lost Lagoon, which leads investigators to the remains of three missing victims. What could have been a simple zombie scare becomes a story about giving families closure. “Just a Quick Bite” by Carson Fredriksen takes the predator-becomes-prey idea and makes it thoroughly Canadian. A serial-killer trucker working the long Thunder Bay-to-Vancouver route picks up the wrong hitchhiker. The creature eventually reveals itself as a Wendigo, specifically drawn to his corrupted heart. He manages to call 911 from the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere near Banff before the creature literally tears into him. “Spare Parts for Sale” by C. K. DeLeskie takes us into historical Montréal and McGill, where medical students steal corpses from cemeteries to supply anatomy classes. What begins as grisly grave robbery becomes worse after Vincent and Julius accidentally kill a professor and simply decide that, well, they need a body anyway. By the end, Vincent has become so desensitized that when Julius dies too, his reaction is essentially to prepare him for sale. “A body was a body.” That's a cold ending. “A Close Reading of Malcolm Fontaine's Final Letter” by Justin Allec is one of the cleverest structurally. A professor lectures students about early Canadian Gothic literature, analyzing the writings of Malcolm Fontaine at Fort William and treating his alleged monster encounter as literature. Unfortunately, one of the “students” appears to have firsthand knowledge. The classroom itself begins transforming into the nineteenth-century setting as the lecture continues, and the supposedly lost history turns out to involve something vampiric, colonial, and very real. Eventually the professor meets the grotesquely transformed Fontaine himself. There's also a sharp meta-point here about scholars “exhuming” the dead and turning people's suffering into material. “And Then She Is The Darkness” by Nadia Steven Rysing surprised me because beneath all the witchcraft and eclipse horror is a tragic story about friendship and trust. Rhiannon secretly possesses actual inherited magic while her closest friends believe they're all learning together. She finally reveals her power to prevent Carol from being sacrificed, but magic always takes more than it gives. She saves their lives and gains a daughter, yet loses the trust of her three closest friends. The final explanation of magic's cost is devastating: “Because it has to hurt.” “Remedies of Flesh and Blood” by Kevin Cull is short but surprisingly tender. A father desperately tries to cure his terribly ill daughter, Anna, only for us gradually to understand that her “infection” has turned her into something vampiric. His solution is horrifying: he lures an innocent man back to the cabin and murders him so his daughter can feed. What sticks, though, isn't merely the blood. Anna is crying and does not want to do it, while her father comforts her and keeps promising they'll find a cure. It is parental love warped into something awful. “Do You Believe in Ghosts?” by Alix Kampen closes the collection differently again, with a series of seemingly personal haunting recollections in Alberta and Saskatchewan. We get a ghostly miner reflected in a cat's eyes, a music box apparently playing by itself, a batteryless singing lobster, and finally a child in a sailor suit haunting a Moose Jaw home. The last incident receives a chilling historical explanation: a toddler had been accidentally run over by his father outside the house, after which the father killed himself. It is a good closer because it brings the anthology back from extravagant monsters and apocalypses to the simplest horror question imaginable: what if the thing you thought you saw really was there? Another thing worth recognizing is the level of experience behind this anthology. These are not simply twenty-six random people who decided to try writing a spooky story. The contributors include award-winning and bestselling authors, extensively published short-story writers, educators, university instructors, journalists, and creators whose work has already appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Robert Dawson, for example, teaches mathematics at a Nova Scotian university and has published fiction in outlets including Nature Futures and Amazing Stories, while Joe Powers teaches through the University of New Brunswick's College of Extended Learning. Angelique Fawns has a journalism background, worked in television, and has sold more than eighty short stories. Konn Lavery and Steve Stred are both award-winning authors. There is some serious writing experience represented here, and that helps explain why even the stories we liked less generally feel polished and purposeful. At the same time, twenty-six horror stories built around a shared theme inevitably create some repetition, and this is probably the anthology's biggest weakness. After a while, some of the stories begin to blend and blur together. Someone is driving down an isolated road, wandering through the wilderness, exploring a strange place, investigating an old legend, or simply going about life when some mysterious creature, ghost, monster, killer, or other supernatural presence begins watching, following, haunting, hunting, or stalking them. Obviously, that is Horror 101 to an extent, and there are only so many ways to get a poor Canadian alone in the woods with something that wants to eat them. Still, when those basic rhythms repeat across more than two dozen stories, we occasionally found ourselves thinking, Wait, which horrible thing is chasing which unfortunate Canadian this time? Fortunately, the best stories are usually the ones that break away from that formula. “But There Are No Hunters” puts us inside the perspective of captive deer. “Spare Parts for Sale” gives us historical medical horror and grave robbing. “Just A Quick Little Question” becomes an absurd correspondence between a vampire hunter and the Pope. “Enchanteresse of the Damned” practically turns Hell into a supernatural workplace comedy, while “The Dead Squad” goes full post-apocalyptic military science fiction. Those stories help reset the reader's palate and keep Dark Canadiana from becoming twenty-six variations of “something scary followed me through the forest.” Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 90+/100 (9.0+ out of 10)
Over the years, we have become very familiar with the wonderfully imaginative work coming out of Studio Story Monsters. We have reviewed their books, musicals, individual musical numbers, theme songs, and other creative projects, and we have repeatedly been impressed by just how much personality, professionalism, warmth, and genuine affection for children's storytelling goes into their work. That continues with "Saul the Baseball in the Big Game Theme Song," a lively, energetic, and wonderfully playful musical companion to Kim LeBlanc's children's book Saul the Baseball in the Big Game. We previously reviewed LeBlanc's book and awarded it 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10). We particularly enjoyed its unusual premise. Instead of following the baseball players themselves, LeBlanc personifies the individual baseballs that enter and leave the game, allowing each one to experience a different type of play while teaching young readers about baseball along the way. Ted serves as the warmup ball. Ruth becomes a fly ball. Joe gets bunted. Rico becomes involved in a double. Lynn gets smacked for a triple. David becomes part of the frantic action surrounding a ground ball. Finally, there is Saul, who spends much of the story waiting patiently while the other baseballs receive their opportunities. When everything is on the line, his moment finally comes. Saul enters the game, gets pitched toward the batter, gets absolutely clobbered, and becomes the ball responsible for a walk-off home run. That's a terrific premise for a children's theme song because baseball already has such a distinctive rhythm and soundscape. There is the windup, the pitch, the pause, the swing, the crack of the bat, the cheers from the crowd, and the reset before everything begins again. Baseball also has an entire musical and auditory culture of its own, from stadium organs and crowd chants to roaming vendors and, of course, the immortal "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." The creators wisely lean heavily into that atmosphere. Before the song has really gotten underway, we're already being transported into a baseball stadium. There is crowd chatter in the background, voices coming from around the ballpark, what sounds like a vendor selling peanuts, and even the instantly recognizable type of stadium-organ flourish associated with the familiar "Charge!" cheer. You almost expect somebody sitting three rows behind you to spill a soda while reaching for a foul ball. The opening is certainly busy, perhaps even slightly busier than necessary, but it also creates an immediate and convincing sense of place. There is no mistaking where we are. This isn't a generic children's pop song onto which somebody happened to paste lyrics about baseball. We are at the ballpark. The crowd is here. The game is underway. The organist is ready. The peanuts are apparently for sale. That attention to atmosphere is one of the song's greatest strengths. Once the song settles into itself, the backing track carries an energetic, swinging, somewhat jazzy quality. There's also something about its electric sound that reminds us of upbeat children's entertainment from the mid-to-late 1990s, and we mean that affectionately. It has some of that playful television-theme-song energy from an era when bright electronic sounds, exaggerated enthusiasm, and funky rhythms helped make children's programming feel colorful and larger than life. That slightly retro flavor works particularly well here because Saul the Baseball in the Big Game is already such a playful and visually expressive story. These are anthropomorphic baseballs getting tossed, bounced, smacked, caught, thrown, and launched around a stadium. The music matches that sense of constant movement and gives the entire track plenty of spunk. Zachary Simpson deserves a great deal of credit for the vocal performance. He is 100% committed to the funkiness of this song, embracing the playful premise and throwing himself into the performance with enthusiasm. Simpson is always coming up with new, fresh, and creative ways to add pizzazz to these songs! Jimmy Sweeden also deserves considerable credit for the music itself. We previously praised his acoustic guitar work on "The Magical Garden," and here he helps create something completely different: a lively, funky, swinging musical backdrop with a slightly retro children's-TV quality. The music has movement from the beginning and fits the quirky energy of Kim LeBlanc's anthropomorphic baseballs remarkably well. Combined with the stadium organ, crowd sounds, and other ballpark touches, Sweeden's music helps turn the track into more than a song about baseball; it actually sounds like something unfolding inside a baseball stadium. There is absolutely no sense that he is embarrassed to be singing a children's tune about an anthropomorphic baseball. Why should he be? Baseball is cool! Simpson embraces the concept completely, throwing himself into the performance with enthusiasm and giving the track plenty of personality, movement, and forward momentum. That's especially important in children's entertainment. If you're going to sing about a talking baseball dreaming of getting into the game, you have to go for it. Half-heartedness would destroy the fun almost immediately. Simpson seems to understand that and performs with enough exuberance to make the song feel animated and alive. We've previously praised Erin Rementer's wonderful work on several Studio Story Monsters productions, and her performances have brought a distinctly theatrical, character-driven quality to songs such as "Hey Mommy," "The Magical Garden," and "Who Are These Bugs?" Simpson brings a different kind of energy here. His performance feels funkier, more playful, and perhaps a little more like the enthusiastic host of a children's television program inviting everyone into the game. That distinction actually suits the material rather well. This is not a gentle or dreamy story. It is baseball. The song needs someone willing to throw himself into the rhythm, sell the silliness (and silly fun!), and keep the momentum moving, and Simpson does exactly that. We also really appreciate how strongly the song establishes the baseball identity of the story. Some adaptations could theoretically swap out a few lyrics and work for practically any children's book. This one could not. The stadium ambience, crowd reactions, organ flourishes, rhythmic phrasing, and familiar baseball language all make the subject immediately recognizable. Even if you heard the opening without knowing the title, it wouldn't take long to figure out that you had wandered into a ballpark. There's also some cleverness in the way the song plays with one of baseball's most famous musical traditions. Everyone knows: "Take me out to the ball game..." But Saul doesn't need somebody to take him out to the ball game. He's already there! What Saul wants is to be put in. It's the universal feeling of wanting to be included and wanting to feel of use. That makes the recurring idea behind "Put Saul in the baseball game" a cute and fitting reversal of language practically embedded in American baseball culture. It's simple enough for children to understand immediately while giving adults familiar with the famous song another little layer to appreciate. More importantly, the idea connects directly to the emotional heart of LeBlanc's story. When we originally reviewed the book, we spent a great deal of time discussing the different baseballs and the educational function each one serves. Beneath all the information about bunts, triples, ground balls, fly balls, stitches, baseball construction, and muddy river clay, however, there is a much more universal little story about waiting for your opportunity. Saul watches everybody else get their turn before he gets his. Another baseball enters the game, and Saul waits. Someone else gets their moment, and Saul waits some more. Eventually, his opportunity finally arrives, and when it does, Saul makes the most of it. That's something children can understand even if they know absolutely nothing about baseball. Think about being the kid waiting to get picked for a game at recess, waiting for your turn on the playground, watching classmates receive opportunities while wondering when yours will arrive, or sitting on the bench during a sporting event hoping your coach will finally call your name. Saul's story quietly communicates a worthwhile message: stay ready, keep hoping, and when your opportunity comes, make the most of it. The theme song captures that desire to participate particularly well. It keeps returning to the idea that Saul wants his chance, which gives the song a natural connection to the character rather than merely celebrating baseball in general. If we have one wish, it would be that the musical arrangement explored Saul's waiting and eventual payoff a little more dramatically. The book provides such a naturally cinematic progression that there was an opportunity for even more contrast between anticipation and triumph. Imagine the arrangement pulling back slightly while Saul waits, becoming a little more restrained as the game continues without him. Then Saul's opportunity arrives. The percussion begins building, the crowd becomes louder, the pitch comes, the bat connects, and suddenly the entire arrangement bursts open with the home run. That might have given the song an even stronger musical climax. Still, the track chooses a different approach: it maintains a high level of enthusiasm and forward movement throughout. For a children's theme song, that's hardly a bad decision. Younger listeners often respond best to something immediately energetic, easy to follow, and fun from beginning to end, and this song certainly checks those boxes. It also has enough repetition and recognizable baseball phrasing to invite participation. We can easily imagine children joining in with the strike count, shouting along with familiar expressions, pretending to swing bats, or bouncing around the room while the song plays. And perhaps that is one of the most useful ways to evaluate a children's theme song. Does it make kids want to participate? We think this one probably will. We've previously praised several Studio Story Monsters songs for being extraordinary earworms. "Hey Mommy" has an especially sweet and sticky melodic quality, while the "Story Monsters Theme" became so lodged in our heads that we actually went back and increased its score after several days. "Saul the Baseball in the Big Game Theme Song" has a somewhat different kind of appeal. Rather than relying quite as heavily on a single irresistible melodic hook, it leans into rhythm, atmosphere, personality, and baseball spectacle. That distinction is worth emphasizing because not every successful children's song has to succeed in exactly the same way. "The Magical Garden" thrives on character interplay and worldbuilding. "Who Are These Bugs?" uses mystery and emotional progression. "Hey Mommy" succeeds through warmth and sweetness. "The Great Animal Escape" barrels forward with humor, adventure, and Erin Rementer's exhilarating vocals. Saul brings us somewhere else entirely. It brings us to the stadium. And that's arguably exactly where it should bring us. The book itself provides the educational depth. It introduces the individual baseballs and explains what happens to them. It includes baseball history, trivia, terminology, and a glossary. It teaches readers that professional games can go through enormous numbers of baseballs, that regulation baseballs contain 216 red stitches, and that game balls are treated with special mud before use. The song doesn't need to repeat all of that. In fact, please don't give us a chorus about 216 stitches. The musical adaptation is better served by capturing the feeling of the story, and in that respect it does a very good job. It is bright, busy, excitable, slightly goofy, and overflowing with enthusiasm for baseball. That's important because adaptation isn't simply a question of whether every plot point gets transferred from one medium into another. A successful adaptation should also ask what the new medium can accomplish that the original one cannot. A children's book can show us colorful illustrations of anthropomorphic baseballs. A song can make us feel as though we're sitting in the stadium with them. The crowd noise, vendor calls, organ flourishes, rhythmic backing track, and enthusiastic vocal performance accomplish exactly that. Those details give the song a real identity and create an atmosphere that complements LeBlanc's illustrations and storytelling rather than simply repeating them. We also think the roughly two-minute scope is appropriate for what this is trying to accomplish. We've occasionally criticized children's musical numbers for being so short that they barely have enough time to establish themselves, but Saul doesn't feel dramatically underdeveloped in terms of runtime. Besides, a six-minute progressive-rock interpretation of an anthropomorphic baseball's existential struggle to enter a sporting event might be hilarious, but we suspect that's a fairly limited market. Instead, this song gets in, establishes its personality, creates its ballpark atmosphere, introduces Saul's desire to participate, has some fun, and gets out. For its young audience and promotional purpose, that's probably the right decision. Ultimately, we think the greatest compliment we can give "Saul the Baseball in the Big Game Theme Song" is that it genuinely feels like a musical extension of the book. It has energy, charm, personality, humor, and a convincing sense of place. Zachary Simpson commits wholeheartedly to both the music and performance, while the lively, swinging, slightly retro arrangement gives the track a distinctive flavor. The stadium organ, crowd chatter, vendor calls, and other environmental touches demonstrate thoughtful sound design and immediately immerse the listener in the setting. Most importantly, the song respects the cheerful, imaginative spirit of Kim LeBlanc's original story. Does it make us smile? Absolutely. Does it sound like baseball? Definitely. Does it make sense as a musical companion to Saul the Baseball in the Big Game? Without question. And if a child finishes reading Kim LeBlanc's book, presses play on this song, starts bouncing around the room, yelling along with the strike count, and pretending to swing for the fences, then Studio Story Monsters has accomplished something worthwhile. One of the things we've come to appreciate most about these creators is that they rarely seem satisfied with allowing a children's story to exist only on the printed page. They keep finding new ways to turn books into experiences through music, performance, narration, and other forms of storytelling. "Saul the Baseball in the Big Game Theme Song" is another fun example of that creativity. This is an energetic, playful, wonderfully atmospheric children's theme song that brings Kim LeBlanc's baseball world to life through sound. Jimmy Sweeden's lively music, Zachary Simpson's enthusiastic lyrics and performance, Linda F. Radke's executive production, and Studio Story Monsters' immersive ballpark presentation work together to make us feel as though we've stepped directly into the stands. Saul spent a long time waiting for his chance to get into the game. Now he has a theme song too! We'd say that's a pretty good day at the ballpark! Check it out on YouTube!  Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)
Sometimes the cruelest disease imaginable can reveal things that were hidden for decades. That strange contradiction sits at the heart of Tanya A. Taibl's deeply moving memoir The Words She Left Behind, a book about Alzheimer's disease, family resentment, buried memories, caregiving, loneliness, forgiveness, and the complicated question of how well we ever truly know the people in our own families. At the beginning of this story, Taibl does not particularly like her aunt Toni. Actually, that is putting it very mildly. She hates her! And that adds an extra layer of intrigue and fascination with this book. In almost every other book about Alzheimer's that we've read about, the author sounds absolutely enamoured with the sufferer. In this book, there's a tug-and-pull, love-and-hate twist to it all. We have encountered Alzheimer's from a very different perspective before, particularly in Richard Lui's outstanding Enough About Me. Lui's father, Stephen, develops Alzheimer's, and much of that book examines the extraordinary changes Lui makes in his own life to help care for a father he already deeply loves. The Words She Left Behind almost flips that emotional equation upside down. Taibl isn't beginning from a place of adoration and then grieving as Alzheimer's takes someone away. She begins with nearly two decades of anger and resentment toward an aunt she believes has terrorized her mother. In Lui's story, Alzheimer's threatens to take away someone he already loves. In Taibl's story, bizarrely and tragically, Alzheimer's becomes part of the reason she learns how to love Toni again. That distinction makes this book feel remarkably different from many dementia and caregiving memoirs we've encountered. For years, Toni has tormented Taibl's mother, Mary, with increasingly bizarre accusations. Toni believes Mary and her husband Victor have broken into her apartment, stolen important documents, taken possessions, interfered with her finances, vandalized things, hacked into her technology, and even poisoned her food. She leaves hostile messages, writes accusatory letters, documents perceived offenses, and gradually distances herself from virtually everyone who might have loved her. This really hit us between the eyes because we have someone in our lives who is like this: constantly making bizarre accusations like this and sending threatening/discomforting messages. Taibl watches what all of this does to her mother and develops an understandable conclusion: Toni is cruel, selfish, paranoid, and poisonous to the family. Then comes the phone call. Toni is confused, injured, and repeatedly visiting the same medical facility because she cannot remember that she has already been there. Police become involved. Doctors determine that she can no longer safely live independently. A psychiatric hospitalization follows, and the aunt Taibl hasn't seen in nearly two decades suddenly becomes one of the most important responsibilities in her life. What follows is not simply a memoir about Alzheimer's disease. It is almost a family mystery, with Toni herself becoming the mystery Taibl is trying to solve. While cleaning out Toni's apartment, attic, storage units, paperwork, and belongings, the family begins finding the physical remnants of an entire hidden life. There are boxes upon boxes of documents, old correspondence, carefully preserved records, cassette tapes, letters, financial statements, strange notes, handwritten accusations, and, most importantly, decades of journals. Those journals transform the book. Suddenly, Taibl isn't merely looking at the difficult elderly woman who caused her mother years of pain. She is listening to Toni speak from decades earlier. She meets the young Toni, the adventurous Toni, the insecure Toni, the romantic Toni, the angry Toni, the lonely Toni, the frightened Toni, and the relentlessly self-critical Toni. The woman who seemed incapable of empathy had spent much of her life privately wondering why she couldn't connect with anyone. The woman who pushed people away desperately wanted to be loved. The woman who accused everyone else of hurting her frequently hated herself more than anyone. That tension gives The Words She Left Behind tremendous emotional power. We were also repeatedly reminded of Ann Mracek's excellent Unpacking the Attic, another memoir in which the physical act of going through an aging family's belongings becomes the process of unpacking an entire life. In Mracek's book, a thermos, a decaying stuffed monkey, birdhouses, doll furniture, slippers, photographs, and countless other ordinary objects become portals into cherished memories. Taibl does something remarkably similar here, except the discoveries are considerably darker and more mysterious. She isn't simply finding sentimental reminders of the aunt she knew. She is finding evidence about an aunt she didn't know at all: journals, letters, cassette recordings, locked boxes, supposedly stolen documents, accusations, romantic correspondence, and decades of private thoughts. In Unpacking the Attic, objects help preserve memories that are in danger of disappearing. In The Words She Left Behind, objects and writings actually correct, complicate, and reconstruct the family's memories of Toni. Both books understand something profound: sometimes emptying a house isn't really about deciding what to keep and what to throw away. You're dismantling a life, one object at a time. One of the strongest aspects of this memoir is that Taibl does not make the easy choice of turning Toni into a saint after discovering her suffering. Toni remains enormously complicated. She could be absolutely exhausting. Her relationship with a downstairs neighbor, Melissa, is a perfect example. Toni becomes fixated on incredibly minor grievances involving cleanliness, objects near the entrance, noise, leaves, and other shared-space irritations. Things eventually escalate into letters, confrontations, police involvement, and a level of hostility that would make most apartment dwellers start browsing Zillow immediately. Taibl is fully willing to acknowledge that her aunt could be, in her own words and observations, the neighbor from hell. Then there is Kyle. Oh, Kyle. The Kyle storyline might be one of the strangest, funniest, saddest, and most revealing parts of the entire memoir. Toni meets Kyle through a personal advertisement in the early 1990s and becomes involved in an intense romantic relationship filled with letters, phone calls, gifts, trips, affection, arguments, breakups, reconciliations, and secrecy. There is only one slight problem. Kyle has a wife. What begins as something resembling an old-fashioned romance gradually turns into a fascinating psychological portrait of Toni's approach to love. She desperately wants companionship and affection, yet she also tries to control the relationship. She wants Kyle to prove her value through expensive gifts, money, attention, and elaborate demonstrations of commitment. At one point, the relationship becomes so transactional that Toni essentially decides that if Kyle wants continued access to her companionship, he needs to pay for it. It is difficult to know whether to laugh, gasp, shake our heads, or feel sorry for everyone involved. Probably all four. Yet Taibl gradually recognizes something important beneath the absurdity. Toni wanted desperately to be someone's princess. She wanted someone to choose her. Kyle, however imperfectly and problematically, gave her moments when she felt attractive, valued, desirable, and loved. That desire becomes even more heartbreaking when Taibl explores Toni's childhood. Among Toni's writings is a recollection of her father telling her that she had been an ugly baby and that he was disappointed she was a girl because he wanted a son. That is brutal. Toni would later describe herself as effectively becoming the son her father never had, working alongside him outdoors on the family farm. Taibl begins wondering whether Toni spent much of her life trying to prove something that had been embedded inside her from childhood: that she deserved to be wanted. Importantly, The Words She Left Behind does not present this interpretation as a perfectly tidy psychological equation. Mary remembers their childhood differently. She remembers family gatherings, dancing in the kitchen, traditional meals, neighborhood celebrations, religious traditions, laughter, and community. Two sisters can grow up in the same house, raised by the same parents, and emerge with dramatically different interpretations of what happened there. That is one of the memoir's most thoughtful observations. Memory is unreliable even before dementia enters the picture. Once Alzheimer's does enter the picture, memory becomes something even more fragile. Taibl gradually learns that many of the accusations that once seemed deliberately malicious may have emerged from Toni's deteriorating ability to understand reality. Things Toni believed were stolen turn up in her own attic and storage units. Documents supposedly taken by Mary and Victor are discovered carefully filed away in locked containers. Toni had moved things, hidden things, forgotten things, and then constructed explanations for their disappearance. Perhaps the most effective symbol in the entire book is Toni's beloved rutsjak, the Croatian word for backpack. This backpack becomes practically another character. Toni carries it everywhere. It contains important documents, identification, financial papers, keys, notes, and other objects that make her feel secure. Because she is terrified that people are stealing from her, keeping these belongings physically close becomes a ritual. Then she repeatedly loses the bag. And because Toni cannot remember losing it, someone else must have taken it. The rutsjak becomes a wonderfully effective physical representation of dementia. Toni is desperately carrying her world around with her because her mind can no longer reliably hold that world together. Eventually, after moving into memory care, Toni no longer feels the need to carry a bag everywhere. There is something beautiful about that. She finally feels safe. There is also something devastating about it. Eventually, she forgets the bag exists at all. That combination of relief and grief appears throughout the memoir. Alzheimer's sometimes removes the very fears that once made Toni miserable, but only because it is removing Toni herself at the same time. Taibl's depiction of Alzheimer's progression is often heartbreaking because she concentrates on ordinary moments rather than constantly searching for enormous tragedy. Toni cannot find her pants. Then she cannot remember how to put them on. She holds a sneaker and cannot understand what she is supposed to do with it. She forgets where her bathroom is. She forgets how to open the bathroom door. She forgets her apartment. She forgets living in Queens. She forgets Kyle. She forgets enormous sections of a life that once consumed her. One of the most powerful scenes occurs when Taibl asks Toni directly what dementia feels like. Toni says it is scary. It's this really human, vulnerable, and honest moment from a person who was terrorizing others. When Taibl asks what frightens her most, Toni explains that she is no longer the same person she used to be. That is one of the emotional cores of the entire memoir because it reminds us that dementia is not merely confusing for the people around the patient. There are moments when the person inside understands enough to know that something is disappearing. We also greatly appreciated the transformation in Taibl herself. At first, caregiving is an obligation complicated by years of resentment. Taibl wants Toni safe, but she hasn't forgotten what Toni did to Mary. Eventually, curiosity changes things. The journals change things. Time changes things. Knowledge changes things. Taibl starts researching dementia obsessively. She learns how to redirect conversations, avoid unnecessary corrections, meet Toni within her reality, simplify questions, provide reassurance, and occasionally use harmless deception when telling the literal truth would only cause panic. She also occasionally breaks her own rules. One particularly important example occurs when she writes Toni a long letter explaining that Mary and Victor never stole her belongings or poisoned her food. Taibl knows that arguing with someone experiencing dementia-related delusions is generally discouraged, but she also needs Toni to understand how badly she hurt the family. The scene works because it is emotionally messy. There is no magical revelation in which Toni suddenly announces that everything she believed for twenty years was false. Instead, she asks Taibl something far more revealing: How can you be so nice to me knowing what you know? That question says an enormous amount. Taibl eventually realizes that forgiveness does not require pretending the harm never happened. It means understanding the harm within a larger picture. And that distinction is one of the reasons we think this memoir succeeds so well. Toni is not absolved because she develops Alzheimer's. Mary's suffering still mattered. Melissa's suffering still mattered. Kyle was still hurt. Toni's behavior still had consequences. Taibl herself even uncovers disturbing evidence from Toni's teaching career, including an incident in which Toni struck a student's hand and apparently retired while disciplinary action was underway. The discovery horrifies Taibl, who is also an educator. These details prevent the memoir from becoming sentimental. Understanding someone is not the same as declaring everything they did acceptable. That is an important difference. Yet perhaps the most surprising thing Alzheimer's gives Toni is something she struggled to obtain throughout much of her life: friendship without conditions. Enter Jane. Jane becomes Toni's best friend in memory care, and their relationship might be our favorite storyline in the second half of the book. The women become inseparable. They participate in activities together, sit together, eat together, and navigate the increasingly confusing world of memory care side by side. For perhaps the first time in the memoir, Toni has a relationship that is not built around money, romantic fantasy, suspicion, resentment, family obligation, or some complicated emotional negotiation. Jane simply likes Toni. Toni simply likes Jane. That's it. When Jane has to go to the hospital, Toni becomes disoriented and devastated. Then Jane's daughter sends Taibl a message explaining that her mother wants to return because she misses Toni. That seemingly ordinary statement hits Taibl extraordinarily hard. Someone misses Toni. Someone loves having Toni around. For a woman who spent much of her life believing she was unwanted, that is enormous. It is difficult not to appreciate the bittersweet irony. Toni spends decades desperately searching for unconditional acceptance, and she finally finds it inside a locked memory care unit while losing the memories that once convinced her she could never have it. The memoir's final movement toward forgiveness is extremely satisfying because Taibl's transformation is only part of the story. The deeper goal is Mary. Taibl wants to give her mother back her sister. Gradually, she brings Toni around the family again. Mary becomes more comfortable. The sisters reminisce. They sing. They attend church. Eventually, Mary becomes comfortable enough to take Toni somewhere alone, something that would have been almost unimaginable years earlier. Then comes the scene the entire book has been quietly building toward. During lunch, Toni asks whether she used to be mean. Mary tells her yes, gently explaining that she had been ill. Toni apologizes. Mary forgives her. There is no gigantic theatrical speech. No dramatic soundtrack starts playing in the diner. Nobody delivers a ten-page philosophical monologue on the nature of forgiveness. Two elderly sisters simply acknowledge what happened. Then, when they leave, Toni holds Tanya's hand and reaches for Mary's as well. That image is beautiful. After decades of anger, paranoia, accusations, estrangement, and tears, the women walk together as family again. That is the payoff. There is a wonderful structural irony running through The Words She Left Behind. Alzheimer's is destroying Toni's ability to tell her own story in the present, yet the enormous archive of words she created throughout her life allows Tanya to reconstruct that story after Toni can no longer explain it herself. The more Toni forgets, the more Tanya learns about her. That is the memoir's greatest idea. The title becomes increasingly powerful because Toni truly did leave words everywhere. Journals. Letters. Lists. Notes. Posters. Recorded conversations. Financial documents. Private reflections. Angry messages. Romantic correspondence. Therapy notes. Fragments of thought. Toni spent much of her life trying desperately to document reality. Ironically, those documents ultimately allow her family to understand the reality she could no longer remember. We do have some criticisms. The memoir can be repetitive. There are numerous discoveries involving documents Toni thought had been stolen, additional accusations against Mary and Victor, another hidden collection of paperwork, another example of paranoia, another forgotten item, and another clue to the decline. Repetition certainly demonstrates just how pervasive Toni's condition became, but trimming some of these examples could make the strongest discoveries hit even harder. Taibl also occasionally explains the significance of a scene after the scene has already communicated that significance perfectly well. There are moments when we wanted the book to trust its own emotional material a little more. When Toni forgets how to put on pants or says dementia is scary, the reader already understands how devastating that is. The Kyle storyline is fascinating enough that it almost becomes a memoir within the memoir. We enjoyed it, but some readers may feel that the prolonged examination of letters, gifts, arguments, money, and romantic negotiations temporarily pulls focus away from the primary caregiving narrative. We would also be cautious about treating every psychological or medical interpretation in the memoir as definitive. Taibl sometimes connects behaviors, personality traits, family experiences, possible autism, depression, dementia, trauma, and other factors while attempting to reconstruct what happened to Toni. These interpretations are meaningful because they show a niece desperately trying to understand her aunt, but some connections are naturally more speculative than others. None of those concerns significantly diminished our experience. What impressed us most is how successfully The Words She Left Behind changes the reader's relationship with Toni alongside Taibl's. At first, we understand why Tanya hates her. Then we become curious. Then frustrated. Then horrified. Then amused. Then saddened. Then increasingly sympathetic. Eventually, without necessarily approving of everything Toni ever did, we begin hoping she finds peace. That is difficult to accomplish. By the end, Taibl realizes that she is going to miss the aunt she once wished would disappear from her family's life. That transformation feels earned because we have traveled through the evidence with her. The Words She Left Behind is not merely about Alzheimer's disease. It is about what remains when memory disappears. It is about the stories families tell about one another, the stories people tell themselves, the emotional damage caused by misunderstanding, and the possibility that compassion can arrive even after decades of resentment. There is an extraordinary sadness in watching Toni disappear. There is also something unexpectedly beautiful about watching her finally become known. Alzheimer's takes away Toni's memories. The words she left behind give Toni back to her family. That makes this an exceptional memoir, an absorbing family mystery, an illuminating caregiver narrative, and, most of all, a powerful story about forgiveness arriving when everyone involved had every reason to believe it was already too late. One element we haven't praised enough is actually among the best parts of the entire book: the brief quotations from Toni that introduce the chapters. These little fragments are haunting, tragic, and often incredibly thought-provoking. Because many come directly from Toni's journals across different decades, they allow us to watch her loneliness, insecurity, paranoia, and eventual cognitive decline unfold in her own words. Sometimes a single sentence tells us more about what was happening inside her than several pages of explanation could. Consider a few of them: "I am despairing in my life a lot tonight. I'm starting to feel scared and lonely." Or the devastatingly simple: "There is a girl inside of me who wants to be included." Years later, as her condition becomes increasingly apparent: "I'm having memory issues. I had a memory lapse driving to Linda's house. Something is happening to me." Then there is the frightening: "Someone is in the bedroom with me. I hear footsteps next to me, but I can't see anything." And eventually, when the disease has progressed much further: "There is nothing. My mind is blank, it's empty. This happens often." That last one is particularly difficult to shake. Taken individually, these quotations are powerful. Taken together, they almost form a miniature memoir within the memoir. We can trace a woman who spent decades feeling lonely and disconnected, then increasingly suspicious and frightened, and finally aware that her own mind was disappearing. There is something especially affecting about the fact that these aren't Taibl telling us what Toni must have felt. This is Toni telling us herself. The quotations also reinforce the brilliance of the title. These really are the words she left behind. Alzheimer's eventually takes away Toni's ability to explain herself, remember her past, or even understand parts of her present. Yet these sentences remain behind like little messages from earlier versions of Toni, allowing both Taibl and the reader to hear a voice that the disease is slowly silencing. We would go so far as to say that some of the most memorable lines in The Words She Left Behind aren't traditionally written passages of memoir at all. They're these brief, sometimes decades-old fragments from Toni herself. They can be uncomfortable. They can be heartbreaking. And occasionally, they are downright haunting. But they make Toni feel extraordinarily real. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 89/100 (8.9 out of 10)
What happens when a writer who has spent years turning trauma, religion, music, loneliness, politics, obsession, romance, and self-loathing into memoir decides to remove the narrative structure and simply let his mind loose on the page? You get When the Light Is Mine. This is the third book by Chaz Holesworth we have read, although it is his first poetry collection. After previously reviewing both volumes of Life and How to Live It, we came into this book with an unusual amount of context about the person behind the poetry. We already knew about the poverty, dysfunctional family, heroin-addicted father, fundamentalist upbringing, religious trauma, obsessive relationship with music, romantic heartbreaks, intrusive thoughts, self-loathing, and long-running search for some combination of meaning, love, freedom, and peace. That context turns out to be incredibly useful because When the Light Is Mine feels less like Chaz introducing readers to these subjects and more like opening the door to his brain and letting us wander around without a tour guide. Chaz describes the collection as poetry written during some of his “darkest, most mentally draining moments.” He says that song lyrics are among his greatest inspirations and identifies poverty, family dysfunction, Christian fundamentalism, society, government, love, OCD, and self-loathing as recurring themes. He also describes his approach as something resembling lyrical stream-of-consciousness writing. Yep. That is exactly what this is. There is remarkably little separation between Chaz Holesworth the memoirist and Chaz Holesworth the poet. The same obsessions that dominated Life and How to Live It return here: God, Christianity, R.E.M. and other music, poverty, rich people, capitalism, politicians, attractive women, lost loves, sex, mental illness, self-worth, intrusive thoughts, death, nostalgia, and the constant desire to escape whatever is happening inside his own head. The major difference is that the memoirs gave those thoughts somewhere to go. There was Philadelphia. There were schools, concerts, jobs, relatives, girlfriends, buses, apartments, churches, friends, breakdowns, and specific years of Chaz's life. Even when his thinking became obsessive, the story eventually moved somewhere else. Poetry removes those guardrails, and the result can be fascinating, funny, insightful, frustrating, disturbing, clever, exhausting, strangely beautiful, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible, occasionally within the same poem. That makes When the Light Is Mine a difficult book to score. At his best, Chaz has a genuine gift for strange, memorable language. He is particularly effective when he compresses complicated parts of his biography into an image rather than explaining them. Perhaps our favorite example comes when he describes himself as the child of “the powder’s son and the Bible Belt’s offspring.” If you have read his memoirs, that line says an enormous amount with very few words. His father struggled with heroin addiction. His mother became consumed by Christian fundamentalism. Chaz grew up caught between those two forces. The memoir requires pages and chapters to explain that dynamic, while the poem condenses it into a single image. That is where poetry works particularly well for Chaz. There are other strong images throughout the collection. He describes humanity fighting over “a plastic spork” while others choke on silver spoons. He wishes memories worked like the digestive system, allowing us to keep whatever nourishes us while getting rid of the waste that continues circling through our heads. Elsewhere, he imagines love being “stapled to his lungs,” suggesting that affection has become as essential to him as breathing. These are weird images, and we mean that as a compliment. Chaz is rarely boring when he finds the right metaphor. He is also still funny in that uniquely Chaz-ish way we enjoyed in Begin the Begin. One romantic disappointment escalates into the possibility that he will become a hermit in North Dakota, raise goats and possums named Penelope, Icicle, and George, and spend his time singing songs about faith and love. Elsewhere, he imagines kissing someone under the lights of a JCPenney in Paris and quickly assures the object of his affection that he only thinks about her “99% of the time” because he does not want to come on too strongly. That self-awareness is important because this collection could otherwise become unbearably solemn. Chaz knows that he is obsessive. He knows that he rambles. He knows that his thoughts repeat themselves. He occasionally makes fun of himself for doing exactly what the reader has noticed him doing. In fact, one line may accidentally summarize the entire collection: “Nothing left to say, so I will say it again with new words.” This brings us to the book's biggest problem, which is that there is a tremendous amount of repetition. Chaz returns to the same subjects again and again: Christianity, God, self-hatred, sex, music, rich people, poverty, government, attractive women, romantic rejection, intrusive thoughts, feeling ugly, wanting love, hating society, feeling guilty, wanting to escape, wondering whether life has meaning, and songs making everything temporarily better. Then we do it again, and sometimes again after that. This repetition is not necessarily accidental. We know from Life and How to Live It that Chaz has spent much of his life dealing with obsessive thought patterns. Repetition is therefore thematically appropriate. His mind really does seem to circle around certain subjects, desperately looking for an answer that never completely arrives. In poetry, repetition can even reproduce that experience for the reader. The problem is that something being psychologically authentic does not automatically make it artistically effective. Some poems develop an idea. Others simply accumulate thoughts around it. A political complaint becomes a religious joke, which becomes a sexual image, which becomes a musical reference, which becomes self-loathing, which becomes another political complaint. There are passages where individual lines are interesting but their relationship to the lines around them becomes difficult to determine. At those moments, stream-of-consciousness begins feeling less like an artistic technique and more like reading an unfiltered thought dump. Interestingly, Chaz himself repeatedly acknowledges this tendency. He calls himself a “broken record,” says he speaks in echoes, describes thinking in circles, and even explicitly says that he strings words together repetitively. Self-awareness helps, but editing would help more. We think this collection could have been significantly stronger if some poems had been shortened, combined, or removed. There is probably an outstanding 60- or 70-page poetry collection hiding inside these 102 pages. Greater selectivity would have allowed the strongest lines to breathe instead of making them compete with dozens of variations on the same thoughts. Music presents a similar issue. Anyone familiar with Chaz knows how enormously important music is to him. In the memoirs, music was practically another character. Here, that influence becomes even more explicit. Chaz openly states that song lyrics are his greatest writing inspiration. Titles such as Everything in its Right Place, Out of Time, Forever has Nothing on Michael Stipe, Losing My Religion, Bored in the USA, and Love is Blindness make the musical DNA of the collection impossible to miss. Sometimes that creates an enjoyable intertextual quality, particularly for readers who recognize the references. Other times, we wished Chaz would move farther away from his musical heroes and trust his own voice. He actually has one. The strange thing is that his most memorable phrases often sound like Chaz Holesworth, not like someone trying to write something that could be sung by one of Chaz Holesworth's favorite bands. We therefore think his poetry would become stronger if future collections relied less heavily on existing songs, titles, musical imagery, and lyrical mannerisms. Religion creates an even larger challenge. There may never have been a time when our own religious and ideological views were so sharply opposed to those expressed by an author we were reviewing. Some of Chaz Holesworth’s statements about God, Christianity, organized religion, politics, and society are not merely different from what many of us at OCA believe; in some cases, they are almost diametrically opposed to our own convictions. At times, we disagreed with him quite strongly. However, we cannot in good conscience disqualify, dismiss, or disregard the work of an author simply because we disagree with him, even vehemently. That would not be fair. We live in America, a country where freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of religious or non-religious belief are deeply valued. Chaz has every right to believe what he believes and express those beliefs through his writing, just as we have every right to agree with some of those ideas and strongly disagree with others. To say, in effect, “We don't like this author's opinions about God and Christianity, so we're going to score his book poorly,” would not be a fair or responsible way to judge literature. Frankly, it wouldn't be very kosher. What we can evaluate are the literary qualities of When the Light Is Mine: its writing, imagery, originality, emotional impact, structure, voice, consistency, and effectiveness as poetry. That distinction matters because some of the religious material is deliberately provocative. I've Got a Bad Feeling About This One, Hell is on Fire, and Heaven is Too Wet to Camp at, Entropy, and other poems contain extremely irreverent, sexually explicit, and sometimes intentionally offensive commentary about Christianity and God. Readers should know this going in, particularly those who hold traditional Christian beliefs. There is a difference, though, between saying something offensive and saying something effectively. Sometimes Chaz's irreverence functions as satire. It exposes contradictions he sees between religious teachings and religious institutions, wealth and Christianity, sexuality and purity culture, or the behavior of believers and the teachings attributed to Jesus. Knowing what happened to him in childhood gives this anger considerably more context. Other times, the jokes seem designed mostly to shock. Those moments are less successful for us, not because they offend our religious beliefs, but because provocation alone is relatively easy. The more powerful poems are the ones that reveal what happened inside Chaz as a result of those experiences. Anger is understandable. The transformation of anger into art is more difficult. We felt similarly about the political poetry. Chaz writes about racism, wealth inequality, corporate influence, environmental destruction, war, poverty, government, and the concentration of power. Oligarchy Orcs on the March is one of the more focused examples. It establishes its argument quickly and sustains it with recurring images of wealth, greed, political power, pollution, and ordinary people being drained while elites accumulate more. Other political pieces feel more like collections of grievances than completed poems. Again, whether we agree with the political position is beside the point. The question is whether the poem transforms an opinion into something memorable. The final portion of the collection becomes increasingly concerned with love, attraction, lost relationships, and romantic obsession. We actually found some of this material more emotionally engaging than the political and religious sections because Chaz becomes vulnerable rather than argumentative. All the Love in My Heart is particularly interesting. It tells the story of a boy and girl who love each other, become separated, seek comfort elsewhere, reconnect, separate again, and continue carrying one another through memory. After reading Chaz's memoirs, it is difficult not to think about the relationships we encountered there. Likewise, the final poem, About the Time I Had to Get My Own Wings, returns to nostalgia, regret, enduring affection, second chances, and the inability to completely leave the past behind. The speaker says that if living in the past were the only way to retain someone he loved, he would turn back every clock in the world. The book ultimately ends not with politics, religion, or anger, but with the possibility of remaking oneself and pushing negativity away. That feels appropriate because, for all the darkness in this book, Chaz does not actually seem to want darkness. He wants light. He wants music. He wants love. He wants someone to understand him. He wants poor people to suffer less. He wants people to stop hurting one another. He wants freedom from guilt, intrusive thoughts, and institutions he believes damaged him. Perhaps most importantly, he wants to look in a mirror without hating the person staring back. That is where the title, When the Light Is Mine, begins to make sense. This is not a collection written by someone who has found peace. It is written by someone perpetually reaching toward it. Ultimately, When the Light Is Mine is probably our least favorite of the three Chaz Holesworth books we have read so far, but it may also be the one that places us closest to the unfiltered machinery of his mind. Begin the Begin gave us Chaz the child and teenager. Near Wild Heaven gave us Chaz stumbling through the aftermath. When the Light Is Mine gives us the noise that remained. Sometimes that noise becomes poetry, and sometimes it remains noise. When the right image, joke, memory, rhythm, or confession emerges from the chaos, however, Chaz proves that there is a legitimate poet somewhere inside all those looping thoughts. His next challenge is not finding more things to say. He has plenty to say. It is deciding which things deserve to remain on the page. For readers who enjoy unconventional, confessional, stream-of-consciousness poetry dealing with religion, trauma, politics, sexuality, mental health, music, romantic obsession, and existential frustration, When the Light Is Mine offers a voice that is undeniably its author's own. It is messy, provocative, repetitive, vulnerable, funny, uncomfortable, and intensely personal. In other words, it is very, very Chaz. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 93/100 (9.3 out of 10)
Run, Mud Pie! Run, Lova-Bull! They're going to turn you into RIBEYE! Well, that's certainly one way to start a children's adventure! "The Great Animal Escape: Theme Song" is an energetic, catchy, wonderfully goofy musical adaptation inspired by Linda Harkey's children's book The Great Animal Escape. With music and lyrics by Zachary Simpson, an invigorating performance by Erin Rementer, production by Studio Story Monsters, and Linda F. Radke serving as executive producer, the song takes the wonderfully strange premise of Harkey's story and condenses it into a lively little musical adventure. We've encountered this creative team many times before, and they've set quite a high standard for themselves. We've previously praised songs such as "Hey Mommy," "The Magical Garden," "Who Are These Bugs?," and the ridiculously catchy "Story Monsters Theme." One of the things we've increasingly come to appreciate about these productions is that they don't merely create generic children's songs and attach a book title to them afterward. At their best, the music captures something specific about the story, characters, mood, and intended audience of the source material. Thankfully, "The Great Animal Escape" continues that tradition. We have also reviewed Linda Harkey's The Great Animal Escape more than once, including its audiobook adaptation, and it remains one of the most entertaining stories we've encountered from Harkey and illustrator Jeff Yesh. What makes the book work isn't simply that a group of animals escapes from danger. It is the wonderfully bizarre combination of adventure, danger, friendship, silliness, unpredictability, and enormously charismatic animal characters. There are legitimate threats in the story. Mud Pie and Lova-Bull realize that the mysterious "Cowlick Cooking School" might not have the culinary career prospects they initially imagined. There are speeding vehicles, terrible weather, an encounter with a mountain lion, and plenty of other obstacles standing between the animals and safety. Yet the book never becomes grim or frightening for long because its characters are so goofy, lovable, and full of personality. That's one of the first things we think Zachary Simpson gets right with the song. The lyrics don't attempt to transform The Great Animal Escape into some overly serious anthem about heroism and survival. Instead, Simpson recognizes the wonderfully ridiculous nature of the predicament and embraces it. The animals genuinely need to escape, but the song can still make jokes about ribeye, hamburgers, and chewing cud while they're doing it. We particularly enjoyed: "Gotta run, it's time to fly Or they'll be turned into ribeye" That's pretty funny. There's something wonderfully dark about that joke if you stop and contemplate what is actually being suggested, but it is presented with such exaggerated silliness that it fits comfortably within the tone of children's entertainment. That's also exactly the kind of humor that made the original book memorable. The threat is technically serious, but Harkey and company never allow us to forget that we're following a bunch of talking farm animals getting themselves into increasingly ridiculous situations. The later line "Being hamburgers was yesterday" continues that humor and might be even funnier. Again, these are extremely simple lyrics. Nobody is going to mistake this for Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, but it would also be absurd to expect that from a children's theme song about runaway cattle. The simplicity is largely intentional and appropriate for the target audience. In fact, we think Simpson demonstrates a good understanding of what not to do here. He could have filled the song with generic lyrics about bravery, friendship, believing in yourself, and never giving up. Those themes are certainly present in the story, but we've heard variations of those sentiments in approximately six billion children's songs. Instead, Simpson gives us Mud Pie, Lova-Bull, Gracie the burro, Bernie the raven chick, a mountain lion, a truck, ribeye, hamburgers, chewing cud, and an animal escape. That specificity matters. Even without seeing the title, you probably wouldn't confuse this song with something from an unrelated children's property. It clearly belongs to The Great Animal Escape, and the lyrics preserve much of the weird, fun, and funky personality that makes Linda Harkey's book distinctive. The song also does a surprisingly efficient job of summarizing the basic premise without giving away the entire adventure. We begin with Mud Pie and Lova-Bull being transported from the farm and discovering that something is very wrong. They decide to escape. Gracie and Bernie become involved. The group knows about somewhere safer, but danger stands between them and their destination. Then the song teasingly mentions some of the obstacles without explaining exactly how everything plays out: "Without your friends you don't have much luck From a mountain lion or a truck" That's another effective little couplet because it does several things at once. It references two memorable dangers from the story, creates a natural rhyme, adds some humor through the bizarre juxtaposition of a mountain lion and a truck, and reinforces one of the book's central ideas: these animals survive because they help one another. That's important because friendship in The Great Animal Escape isn't merely a nice lesson stapled onto the ending. The relationships between these characters are a major part of what makes the story enjoyable in the first place. And we're especially happy that the song actually names the characters. One of our favorite aspects of the book is its cast. Lova-Bull and Mud Pie aren't simply "two cows." Bernie isn't simply "a bird." Gracie isn't merely a convenient mode of transportation. These characters have recognizable personalities and roles within the group, and they are enormously lovable. Gracie in particular has always stood out to us. She's capable, dependable, adventurous, and willing to help this ridiculous collection of animals even though she doesn't have nearly as much personal stake in their escape as some of the others do. Lova-Bull has courage to spare, even when that courage occasionally outruns his common sense. Mud Pie contributes her own personality and affection to the group, while Bernie brings youthful curiosity and innocence to the chaos unfolding around him. The lyric: "Gracie the burro, Bernie the raven chick Wanted to join them, so they decided quick" isn't exactly Shakespeare, but we appreciate the decision to include their names tremendously. These aren't anonymous animals running through a generic adventure. They're Gracie, Bernie, Lova-Bull, and Mud Pie, and part of the purpose of a theme song should be making children want to spend more time with those characters. This song succeeds at that. Of course, lyrics alone are only part of the equation, and this is where Erin Rementer once again becomes incredibly valuable. We've praised Rementer's work many times before, and there is a reason for that. She's not simply someone with a technically pleasant singing voice. She has an unusual ability to inject children's music with personality, enthusiasm, theatricality, warmth, and a kind of animated energy that makes these songs feel larger than their relatively short runtimes. Her performance here is invigorating, exciting, and tremendously energetic. That's exactly what this song needs. A song called "The Great Animal Escape" shouldn't sound cautious. These characters are fleeing, scheming, encountering danger, making ridiculous decisions, and charging toward another adventure. Rementer's vocal performance gives the track the propulsion it needs and makes the repeated chorus feel like an enthusiastic rallying cry rather than a phrase that happens to be repeated several times. And we cannot overstate how valuable that is because, on paper, the chorus is incredibly simple: "It's The Great Animal Escape." That's essentially it. Repeat that phrase enough times without a compelling melody or vocalist and you could very quickly have something monotonous. Yet one of Rementer's great strengths is her ability to take relatively straightforward children's lyrics and make them feel exciting through sheer performance energy. This is something we've noticed in previous Studio Story Monster productions. Rementer can make her voice sweet, tiny, whimsical, mischievous, tentative, fierce, warm, or exuberant depending on what the material requires. Her vocal personality has become such a recognizable part of several of these projects that we have half-jokingly referred to her as something resembling the "voice of Story Monster." She earns that reputation again here. There is a buoyancy to the performance that elevates the material beyond what you might expect from simply reading the lyrics on a page. The song feels like it's moving, which is particularly important for an escape story. We don't merely hear someone explaining what the animals did. There is a sense of urgency and excitement pushing everything forward. It also helps enormously with the song's catchiness. We've previously identified "Hey Mommy" and the "Story Monsters Theme" as especially dangerous earworms, and "The Great Animal Escape" belongs much closer to that side of the Studio Story Monster catalog. The repeated title phrase is simple enough that children can learn it almost immediately, while the energetic performance makes it easy to imagine kids shouting or singing along after only one or two listens. Sometimes simplicity is exactly what makes a chorus work. There is a reason some of the most enduring children's songs in history aren't built around complicated melodic structures or lyrically dense verses. Young listeners benefit from repetition, predictability, rhythm, and a central phrase they can recognize and anticipate. Adults sometimes mistake simplicity for laziness, but the two aren't synonymous. Effective simplicity requires knowing what to leave out. "The Great Animal Escape" tells us enough to establish the premise, introduce the main characters, tease the danger, and communicate the spirit of the story without attempting to summarize every scene in Linda Harkey's book. That's especially important because the song is ultimately intended to complement the book, not replace it. We also appreciate that the lyrics repeatedly return to the actual escape rather than getting distracted by too much exposition. Every time the song comes back to its central title, we're reminded of the immediate goal. Mud Pie and Lova-Bull have discovered what's happening, and they need to get out of there. Fast. That structure gives the song a clear sense of direction even if the individual lines remain straightforward. The song also relies heavily on repeating "It's The Great Animal Escape", particularly toward the end. Whether that's excessive will probably vary depending on the listener. Adults approaching the song purely as a standalone musical composition may wish for somewhat more lyrical variation, while children are likely to appreciate having an easy chorus they can quickly memorize and join. For us, Rementer's performance and the catchiness of the musical arrangement largely justify the repetition. If that central phrase weren't fun to hear, we'd have a bigger problem. Fortunately, it is. And we think that's one of the biggest differences between merely reading these lyrics and actually experiencing the song. On the page, the writing is intentionally simple. With Rementer bringing it to life and Simpson's music propelling everything forward, the whole piece becomes much more animated. That's what a good musical adaptation should accomplish. Music should add something. Otherwise, you could simply read the book aloud. Here, the song adds urgency, movement, excitement, and a sense of collective adventure. It takes Harkey's colorful animal characters and gives them something resembling their own miniature anthem. There is also a particularly effective tonal balance here. As we've mentioned in our reviews of the book, The Great Animal Escape gets surprisingly close to some dark territory when you describe its events literally. These animals believe they're in danger of becoming food. They encounter potentially deadly wildlife. They deal with vehicles, weather, and other genuine hazards. Yet the book remains wonderfully lighthearted. The song gets that. Lyrics about being turned into ribeye or becoming hamburgers could have been horrifying in a completely different musical context. Here, they're funny because everything surrounding them is so exaggerated, energetic, and playful. We're not invited to contemplate livestock mortality. We're invited to yell, "RUN!" That seems like exactly the right creative instinct. We also love how strongly the song emphasizes the book's lovable and charismatic characters rather than treating them merely as pieces of the plot. Linda Harkey's greatest strength in this particular story may be the strange little group she assembles. These creatures don't necessarily have much in common, and some of them probably wouldn't have chosen one another under ordinary circumstances, but adversity brings them together. That's where the line about not having much luck without your friends becomes more meaningful than its simplicity initially suggests. The book's friendship theme works because these characters actively depend upon one another. Gracie's competence matters. Lova-Bull's courage matters. Mud Pie matters. Bernie's curiosity and presence matter. Their personalities occasionally create problems, but they're also exactly what make the group worth following. A lesser theme song might have focused exclusively on movement and escape. Simpson makes the smarter choice of reminding us that this is a group adventure. That makes the song especially effective as a promotional companion to the book. If a child hears this song without having read The Great Animal Escape, they're introduced not only to the premise but also to names such as Gracie, Bernie, Mud Pie, and Lova-Bull. Hopefully, the natural next question becomes: Who are these animals, and what happens to them? That's exactly what an adaptation like this should accomplish. It shouldn't tell you everything. It should make you want to know more. We've listened to and reviewed enough Studio Story Monster music by now that comparisons are inevitable. "Who Are These Bugs?" impressed us with the way it used changing musical moods to support Cate's emotional journey. "The Magical Garden" was especially rich because of its worldbuilding, multiple characters, vocal interplay, acoustic instrumentation, and eventual harmonization. "Hey Mommy" possessed tremendous sweetness and one of those melodies that seemed almost engineered to stick in the brain. The "Story Monsters Theme" remains one of the studio's most ridiculously infectious pieces. "The Great Animal Escape" doesn't necessarily surpass all of those songs in every individual category, but it combines several of their best qualities. It has the story specificity we appreciated in "Who Are These Bugs?," the ensemble emphasis of "The Magical Garden," the infectious energy and vocal charm of "Hey Mommy," and the kind of immediate sing-along accessibility that made the "Story Monsters Theme" so successful. Perhaps most importantly, it actually sounds like it belongs to this particular book. That's something we don't take for granted. Theme songs attached to books can sometimes feel like glorified advertising jingles. They'll repeat a title, mention a protagonist, toss in a few inspirational phrases, and call it an adaptation. "The Great Animal Escape" is more thoughtful than that. Simpson incorporates specific characters, specific dangers, specific jokes, and the wonderfully absurd central premise while Rementer's performance supplies the musical excitement necessary to bring those ideas to life. Is it lyrically sophisticated? Not particularly. But does any of that stop the song from being ridiculously fun? Not really. For the audience it's actually trying to reach, the simple language, repetition, recognizable characters, energetic melody, and exhilarating vocal performance are largely strengths. This is the kind of song children can understand immediately and potentially start singing before they've even heard it all the way through. And perhaps that's the most important compliment. "The Great Animal Escape: Theme Song" doesn't merely describe Linda Harkey's book. It captures its personality. It's adventurous without becoming overly serious, silly without becoming meaningless, simple without becoming empty, and energetic without losing sight of the characters at the center of everything. Zachary Simpson once again demonstrates why he has become such a reliable musical storyteller for Studio Story Monsters, while Erin Rementer reminds us why her voice has elevated so many of these productions. Linda F. Radke and Studio Story Monsters continue finding creative ways to extend children's stories beyond the printed page, and Linda Harkey's wonderfully oddball animal ensemble proves particularly well suited for the transition. We already loved Gracie, Bernie, Lova-Bull, and Mud Pie on the page. Now they have a theme song. And it's a pretty darn good one. "The Great Animal Escape: Theme Song" is another excellent addition to Studio Story Monster's increasingly impressive collection of children's music. Its lyrics may be simple, but its personality is anything but. The song is lively, memorable, funny, character-driven, and propelled by an invigorating Erin Rementer performance that gives the whole adventure an extra shot of adrenaline. Most importantly, after listening to it, we don't just want these animals to escape. We want to escape with them. Check it out here!  Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)
Have you ever had one of those days when you look in the mirror, wonder where the person you remember went, get irritated by people half your age, desperately want everyone at work to leave you alone, forget what you were doing, make some ridiculous mistake you would rather nobody know about, and finally decide that the universe itself may be conspiring against you? Peg McMann has had more than one of those days. In fact, she seems to be having an entire year of them. Peg, Unhinged by Teri M. Brown is a funny, heartfelt, surprisingly substantial novel about menopause, divorce, aging, friendship, work, family, alcohol, domestic abuse, new beginnings, and the terrifying realization that the life you spent decades building may no longer be the life you actually want. There is a lot happening here, including a collapsing marriage, professional humiliation, a new business, a DUI, community service, a women's shelter, damaged friendships, potential romance, financial problems, and enough personal catastrophes to fill several novels. Yet if we are being completely truthful, almost all of that becomes secondary because Peg absolutely steals this book. We could probably spend this entire review talking about nothing but Peg McMann and still have plenty to say. She is insecure, sarcastic, competitive, caring, jealous, hardworking, impulsive, intelligent, occasionally selfish, frequently generous, painfully self-conscious, and sometimes so spectacularly bad at making decisions that we wanted to reach into the book and confiscate her car keys, wine glass, telephone, and perhaps several other objects for her own protection. Somehow, we also liked her almost immediately. There is something enormously relatable about a protagonist who isn't trying to convince us that she has everything figured out. Peg knows she is becoming a mess. At times, she practically narrates the mess while it is happening. She has different internal versions of herself, including Professional Peg, Crazy Peg, Healthy Peg, Emotional Chaotic Mess Peg, and various others who seem to take turns fighting over the steering wheel. Sometimes the sensible version wins. Other times, she apparently gets stuffed into the trunk while Crazy Peg takes the car for a joyride. If Hollywood ever adapts Peg, Unhinged, we kept imagining the sort of character Melissa McCarthy might play. We do not mean that Peg literally resembles McCarthy, nor that Brown appears to be copying one of her movie characters. It is more the overall energy we kept getting from her: a fundamentally likable and capable woman whose confidence and insecurities somehow exist simultaneously, who can deliver a sarcastic observation one minute and stumble into an absurd physical catastrophe the next, and who remains sympathetic even while behaving so badly that everyone around her is wondering what on earth has gotten into her. Peg possesses that wonderful comedic quality where you can see disaster approaching from half a mile away, know she should absolutely turn around, and nevertheless keep following because you have to see how spectacularly everything is about to go wrong. The novel wastes almost no time establishing this personality. Peg is approaching fifty and experiencing menopause, and she is not taking the transition gracefully. Her body has changed. Her hair is graying. Her waistline is expanding. Her memory is unreliable. Her emotions are volatile. Her husband of twenty-seven years, Stephan, has left her. Her children are growing up and pulling away. The reflection looking back at her no longer resembles the woman she carries around in her head, and practically every change seems to give her one more reason to wonder what happened to the person she used to be. So Peg does something she hasn't done in decades: she starts talking to God again. The recurring "Hey God" passages are among our favorite elements of the novel. Peg apparently had plenty to say to God during puberty, and menopause is traumatic enough to reopen the correspondence. Her complaints include hormones, aging, body changes, relationships, memory problems, emotions, and the baffling design of the female body. She is respectful enough to acknowledge God as God, but not so respectful that she isn't willing to question some of His design decisions. These conversations could easily have become gimmicky. Instead, they gradually become something much more meaningful. Early in the novel, Peg mostly wants answers about what is happening to her. Later, she starts asking uncomfortable questions about what is happening because of her. The one-sided conversations become almost like checkpoints along her emotional journey, showing us how her outlook gradually changes even when Peg herself may not recognize that change yet. Brown is especially good at making Peg's insecurities funny without making Peg herself the joke. Take her reaction to Stephan's apparent interest in younger women. She bitterly observes that they are roughly half his age and half her weight, before adding that she would wager they have about half her IQ too. We laughed at that line, but it also exposes something genuinely vulnerable about Peg. She is reassuring herself. She cannot compete with these women physically, at least not according to her increasingly unforgiving view of herself, so she retreats to one of the areas where she still feels superior. Fine. They're younger. They're thinner. But I'm smarter. That mixture of humor, jealousy, wounded pride, and insecurity feels extremely human. We also related to Peg's desire to get to work before everyone else simply so she can enjoy a little peace and silence. Sometimes the greatest workplace benefit isn't the salary, insurance, retirement plan, or free coffee. Sometimes it is arriving before your coworkers and enjoying a few glorious minutes during which nobody is talking to you. Peg needs those moments because work has become one of the last places where she still knows exactly who she is. She is a highly successful real-estate agent, and for years she has been the dependable one in her marriage. Peg worked. Peg earned. Peg handled responsibilities. Stephan bounced between jobs, unfinished ambitions, hobbies, and get-rich-quick schemes. Peg increasingly came to see herself as the adult responsible for holding everything together while Stephan got to be the fun husband and fun parent. Naturally, this created resentment. Add menopause, marital unhappiness, two children growing into adulthood, professional competition, fear of aging, and a husband who finally walks away, and Normal Peg gradually gives way to someone she refers to as Crazy Peg. The situation at work eventually detonates. Peg believes younger agent Kayla has stolen a valuable real-estate opportunity from her. When Kayla wins Agent of the Year, Peg completely loses control. She screams, accuses Kayla of stealing the sale and flirting with both the boss and Peg's husband, grabs the award, grabs Kayla's hair, and ends up being restrained by her coworkers before getting fired. It is an absolute disaster, and unfortunately for Peg, it is also a public one. The altercation becomes local news, complete with a humiliating article describing the supposedly "unhinged" veteran agent whose husband left her and whose personal troubles have apparently spilled into the workplace. One of the things we appreciate about Brown's handling of this situation is that the novel eventually confirms Peg was not imagining everything. Kayla really did take advantage of information from Peg's desk and swoop in on her opportunity. Peg had legitimate reasons to be furious. She still had absolutely no right to yank the woman's hair. That distinction matters because book doesn't excuse every terrible decision Peg makes simply because she is the protagonist. Peg can be wronged and still respond wrongly. Stephan can have serious shortcomings while Peg also bears responsibility for some of the deterioration in their marriage. Her friends can behave badly while Peg also fails them. Monique can misjudge Peg while Peg also carries prejudices and assumptions of her own. That moral messiness makes the novel considerably more believable. After being fired, Peg decides to create her own real-estate company, Living the Dream Real Estate. This produces another of our favorite little moments when she negotiates office space and describes the haggling as requiring something akin to her left leg and first-born grandchild. It's just a throwaway exaggeration, but lines like this are a major part of why Peg's narration remains entertaining for hundreds of pages. Then there are the larger comedic disasters. At one point, Peg accidentally puts ear drops in her eyes and contacts Poison Control by essentially announcing that she is an idiot and may have blinded herself. She survives, of course, but now has to continue functioning while looking as though something has gone catastrophically wrong with her eyeballs. At another point, she decides she can move a mattress by herself. She cannot. The mattress flops around, repeatedly refuses to cooperate, eventually pins Peg against the stair railing, and forces this fiercely independent woman to yell for her neighbors. Brown's perfectly timed observation that Peg considers herself independent and capable while the mattress would apparently disagree had us laughing. It is physical comedy on the page, but once again, there is character development hiding inside the joke. Peg hates needing anyone. She wants to solve everything herself. She has spent decades believing she has to solve everything herself. The mattress becomes one small, ridiculous reminder that sometimes you need somebody on the other end. The dating material generates plenty of comedy as well. Peg joins the online dating world partly because she genuinely wants companionship and partly because she wants Stephan to see that other men find her desirable. The results are exactly as graceful as you might expect. She analyzes profiles, panics over messages, wonders what to wear, encounters men who range from promising to dreadful, and frequently behaves like a teenager despite being old enough to know better. One tiny exchange later in the book particularly amused us. Peg tells Beth that she has a problem involving a man. Two men, actually. Beth immediately reacts with an intrigued "Ohhh!" and Peg has to clarify, laughing, that she does not mean it like that. These little misunderstandings, comments, and reactions give the book much of its charm because Brown does not need some elaborate comedic setup every time she wants to make us smile. Eventually, one man becomes particularly important: Trevor. Trevor begins as a real-estate client and becomes Peg's neighbor when he rents the other half of her duplex. Peg is attracted to him almost immediately, although she spends quite a bit of time insisting to herself that dinners, walks, conversations, hand squeezes, and an increasing fascination with what she is wearing are all strictly professional or neighborly. Sure, Peg. Whatever you say. Trevor works because Brown does not simply turn him into the handsome consolation prize Peg receives for surviving divorce. He has his own history and boundaries. Much later, we discover that Trevor grew up around domestic violence and was himself abused by his father. He later married a woman who became physically abusive after their honeymoon. His caution around Peg therefore comes from somewhere far deeper than uncertainty about dating a newly divorced woman. This revelation also connects Trevor to what becomes the most substantial storyline in the novel: Peg's community service at Seabreeze House, a shelter serving women and children who have escaped abusive situations. Peg ends up there because her drinking increasingly becomes a problem. At first, alcohol is simply part of her social life. Gradually, however, wine becomes something she reaches for whenever she is angry, lonely, embarrassed, frightened, or overwhelmed. After receiving particularly upsetting information involving Stephan and their divorce, Peg drinks heavily, runs out of wine, gets into her car to buy more, and is pulled over on the way home. This is one of the points where Peg stops being merely an entertaining disaster and becomes a legitimately dangerous one. Brown does not treat the incident as just another wacky misadventure. Peg loses her license, faces legal consequences, and is eventually required to complete community service. She has to acknowledge that her coping mechanism has become destructive and that being miserable does not erase responsibility for what she did. That community service takes her to Seabreeze House, and this is where the novel grows significantly in depth. Peg arrives carrying assumptions about what abused women are supposed to look like. She expects sadness, silence, frightened children, and broken people. Instead, she walks into something resembling a bustling home, with women cooking, laughing, parenting, studying, and rebuilding their lives. She quickly learns that abuse does not belong to one social class, income bracket, personality type, or particular kind of woman. Peg eventually becomes a mentor to Monique, a resident with a young daughter named Kiara. And once again, Peg messes it up, which we actually appreciated enormously. Brown could easily have written Peg as the prosperous professional woman who walks into a shelter and transforms someone's life with her wisdom and generosity. Instead, Peg has almost as much to learn from Monique as Monique could possibly learn from her. Perhaps more. Peg has to confront her assumptions about poverty, abuse, class, education, employment, dignity, motherhood, and what it actually means to help someone. Their relationship is awkward and contentious. Monique frequently does not trust her. Peg tries too hard. Peg occasionally makes things about herself. She misunderstands boundaries. She genuinely cares, but genuine care does not automatically produce perfect behavior. Their relationship nearly collapses after Peg invites Monique and Kiara into her home. Peg's longtime friends Kelly and Laura make insulting, classist comments suggesting that Monique does not belong in their beachfront world because she is a young mother living in a shelter. Peg eventually throws them out, but she does not defend Monique quickly enough. Monique recognizes this immediately and effectively tells Peg that their relationship is over. That scene is important because Peg cannot simply point to her good intentions and declare herself innocent. She failed her friend, and the novel makes her sit with that failure. Eventually, Peg apologizes, becomes more honest about her own circumstances, and does something much healthier than trying to "save" Monique. Because Peg temporarily cannot drive, she offers Monique paid work helping her get to real-estate appointments. Suddenly their relationship becomes reciprocal. Peg has something Monique needs, but Monique also has something Peg needs. That difference is enormous. Their relationship begins to feel more equal, and by the end of the novel, Monique agrees to try working as Peg's assistant, with the understanding that she can pursue education or another career if the arrangement does not suit her. Peg's professional journey similarly comes full circle. George eventually realizes Kayla really did steal Peg's opportunity. Kayla is fired, and George desperately tries to convince Peg to return because the office is struggling without her. Earlier Peg would have considered this the ultimate victory. She was right. Kayla was wrong. George needs her. Everyone finally knows it. But something surprising happens: Peg no longer wants the exact life she fought so desperately to reclaim. She realizes that being Agent of the Year is not worth sacrificing her friendships, family, mental health, and the rest of her life. She negotiates a better commission arrangement, a four-day workweek, clearer workplace policies, and an assistant who will also be given enough flexibility to maintain a healthier balance. This may be the most important change Peg makes. The woman we meet at the beginning believes she needs to get everything back: her husband, her job, her status, her body, her confidence, and her old life. The woman we leave at the end realizes she doesn't need to become the old Peg again. She needs something better suited to who she is now. That distinction is why the ending works so well. There is no magical reversal of menopause. Peg does not suddenly become twenty-five again. She does not drop thirty pounds, awaken with flawless skin, restore her marriage, win another professional trophy, and walk into the sunset looking like the woman she was decades earlier. She is still round. She still loses things. Her moods still fluctuate. Her body is still changing. Yet everything that actually matters feels different. Peg is drinking less and finding healthier ways to cope when life becomes overwhelming. She no longer mourns a marriage that, in retrospect, had not really functioned as a marriage for a very long time. She has new friends, old friends who are willing to try again, a healthier version of her old career, a meaningful connection to Seabreeze House, and the possibility of something more with Trevor. Our main criticism is that the novel could probably be tighter. It loses a lot of momentum. At roughly 365 pages of story, certain portions become repetitive. Peg becomes upset, drinks or wants to drink, lies to conceal an embarrassing situation, gets herself into another predicament, berates herself, and starts trying to recover. Because these patterns reflect her emotional state, the repetition makes thematic sense, but several episodes could be shortened without weakening her transformation. Some of the humor is deliberately broad as well. Certain dating encounters, generational jokes, bodily mishaps, and early conflicts with Kayla occasionally feel closer to television sitcom comedy than the more nuanced material found elsewhere in the book. A few secondary characters can also seem temporarily designed around whatever lesson Peg needs to confront at that particular stage of the story. But here is the problem with criticizing the book for spending so much time with Peg: we really like spending time with Peg. She overwhelms virtually everything else in the novel, including, in some ways, the plot itself. We remember the DUI, Seabreeze House, Monique, Trevor, Stephan, Kayla, George, the divorce, the new business, and the various crises, but what we remember most vividly is Peg reacting to all of them: Peg trapped behind a mattress, Peg interrogating God about menopause, Peg insulting twenty-something women in her own head because she feels threatened by them, Peg secretly wanting everyone at work to leave her alone, Peg staring at herself in the mirror and wondering what happened, Peg accidentally putting ear medication into her eyes, Peg negotiating away her hypothetical leg and grandchild, Peg trying to convince herself that dinner with Trevor absolutely, positively, definitely isn't a date while worrying about her hair, clothes, house, and even whether she should make the bed. We remember Peg saying something about two men and immediately realizing how scandalous it sounds. We remember Peg screwing up, recovering, screwing up again, apologizing, laughing, crying, yelling, learning, and continuing forward. That is what makes this book work. Teri M. Brown has created the sort of protagonist who feels less like someone we merely read about and more like somebody we have met. For some readers, she may resemble a mother, sister, coworker, friend, spouse, neighbor, or aunt. For others, the uncomfortable realization may be that Peg resembles them. Maybe not the hair-pulling part, and hopefully not the DUI, but the insecurity? The stubbornness? The longing for quiet? The irritation with younger people? The fear of becoming irrelevant? The tendency to compare ourselves to others? The desire to be considered attractive while simultaneously wanting to be left alone? The refusal to ask for help until a metaphorical or literal mattress has pinned us against the railing? Yeah. We know that person. Sometimes we are that person. Peg, Unhinged is funny because Peg's life is chaotic, but it is moving because beneath all that chaos is an enormously familiar fear: what happens when the person you have always been no longer fits the life you are living? Brown's answer is ultimately hopeful. You do not have to become your old self again. You can become someone new, and that new person does not have to be perfect to deserve happiness, friendship, love, purpose, or another chance. If she is still sarcastic, occasionally unhinged, a little rounder than she would prefer, prone to losing her phone, and capable of turning an ordinary afternoon into a full-scale catastrophe, that does not make her a failure. It might simply make her Peg. By the way, can we just say that we almost completely forgot that this is the same author who wrote Enemy Like Me, a previous OCA-winning book? It's so interesting to note how the seriousness and dire nature of that previous book contrasts with the lighthearted, comedic tone of this book. It shows that Teri Brown has great range as an author! Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 87/100 (8.7 out of 10)
How do you conclude a fantasy series about a hero who can already perform nearly every kind of magic, defeat almost every opponent, ride the fastest dragon in the world, impress kings and queens, inspire entire nations, cook food everyone loves, collect noble titles, and attract practically every available woman across eight different races? Apparently, you send him into outer space as the chosen vessel of cosmic spirits. Honestly, where else could Keith Cottam possibly go? All the Elements is the third and final installment in Keynin Carl Battle’s lighthearted fantasy series, following Elements of Change and Elements of Growth. After reading this final installment multiple times (largely due to its short length), we can confidently say that it is exactly the kind of finale this series was always destined to deliver. Like the rest of the series, it is overstuffed, rough around the edges, wildly derivative, frequently ridiculous, and almost completely uninterested in restraint. It is also colorful, sincere, good-natured, imaginative, and surprisingly heartfelt. The story begins six months after Keith became a viscount. Despite his new title and his growing reputation throughout the magical world, his daily life has not changed much. He remains student council president, attends classes with his friends, cares for his adopted sister Olivia, and lives alongside Violet, Ash, and his rare white dragon, Sora. Of course, “daily life” means something slightly different when you are Keith Cottam. Princess Gemstarzah summons him to plan her birthday party, hoping he can give the event some “human flair.” Her lady-in-waiting, Bailey, wants a traditional gathering with roses, smoked salmon, oysters Rockefeller, and dignified entertainment. Keith naturally replaces much of it with pigs in a blanket, deviled eggs, colorful flowers, and songs from his MP3 player. Bailey is horrified. Gemstarzah declares it the best birthday she has ever had. That sequence establishes the tone of the book perfectly. Keith enters an established institution, ignores convention, introduces food or music from Earth, and causes everyone except one designated skeptic to love him even more than they already did. Oh, and speaking of Keith's MP3 player... it continues to function somewhat like Star-Lord's casette player from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. We think it's supposed to set the tone and add flare to some of these scenes, but it does come across as a bit derivative and cheesy. It shouldn't be like, "Keith played [insert song the author probably likes here]" and that's the scene, but that's what we end up getting a lot of the time. We sweat that a ton of these moments are inspired by the movie Wreck It Ralph, which is admittedly one of our favorite films ever. Maybe that's why we picked up on the similarities. For example, Keith plays "Shut Up and Drive" by Rihanna just as Sora speeds up to win the final race, almost a beat-by-beat recreation of what happens with Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck It Ralph. Even the race itself evokes memories of the Sugar Rush race sequence from the movie. During the fifteen-year reunion, the band performs “When Can I See You Again” by Owl City while everyone dances and Keith watches them from space. That song, like "Shut Up and Drive," is featured prominently in the credits of Wreck-It Ralph, so the resemblance is not merely a vague matter of tone. Like a lot of this book, it often feels like the author saying "I like this, so here..." and finding some way to shove it into the book. Anyway, the larger conflict begins to stir when several rulers gather to discuss the elemental diamonds and the possible return of the Dark Undead. On the way home, the vampire royal family is ambushed. Their black dragon, Onyx, sacrifices himself to protect them and dies beside Sora. This should signal that the series is moving decisively toward its final battle. Instead, All the Elements spends much of its first half on marriage proposals, card games, a dragon birth, a production of Cinderella, a four-day dragon race, and Keith catching a cold. It's so... random. Several noble families attempt to arrange marriages between Keith and their daughters. Meanwhile, Catherine, Lulu, Shayla, Ellie, Gemstarzah, Queen Hecate, and Damana gather at Keith’s house and play Yu-Gi-Oh! for the opportunity to spend a day with him. Olivia wins, giving Keith and his adopted sister a sweet day together in the demon kingdom. We also learn more about Ash, Keith’s shadow-wolf familiar. Ash once belonged to a cruel pack that was eventually slaughtered by a chimera. Ash survived by fleeing, but carried enormous shame over abandoning his family. After being summoned as Keith’s familiar, he came to see Keith, Olivia, Violet, and the others as his new pack. It is a simple but effective explanation for his loyalty. Sora later lays an egg fathered by Onyx. It hatches into a white dragon with black spots whom Keith names Pongo. The birth gives Onyx’s death some emotional continuation while expanding Keith’s already crowded but lovable household. Then comes the Unity Festival, where Keith stages a production of Cinderella. Catherine plays Cinderella, Ellie becomes the fairy godmother, Shayla portrays the stepmother, Lulu and Noah play the stepsisters, and several other friends join the production. By the way, the Cinderella sequence did not need to be as long as it was. We all know the story of Cinderella. You don't need to completely recreate it scene by scene, albeit with some awkwardness and funny moments from the self-aware actors. When the actor playing the prince is accidentally knocked unconscious, Keith steps into the role. Naturally. And that's nice and all in that Keith gets to fulfill every boyhood fantasy he can think of, which seems to be the point of the series, but... it also feels like the book meandering. Anyway, Catherine is delighted to dance with him, the performance is a success, and Keith once again becomes the center of an event that was technically supposed to feature everyone else. The dragon race follows a similar pattern. Keith and Sora compete against hundreds of riders across forests, mountains, water, and rough terrain. When a giant octopus attacks several competitors, Keith saves them. After Sora suffers a leg injury, the other riders allow the pair to advance as thanks for Keith’s heroism. Sora then wins the final race while Keith plays “Shut Up and Drive” by Rihanna. This is absurd. It is also completely on-brand. The main conflict finally accelerates when Keith receives a letter from a secret admirer asking him to meet at a gazebo. Instead of finding Catherine, Lulu, Gemstarzah, Hecate, Shayla, Ellie, Damana, or another member of his increasingly enormous fan club, Keith walks into an ambush. Lord Valac has returned. Valac reveals that he was originally Valadus Carlos, the first human summoned into this magical world. Valadus had been torn away from his family and his beloved Agnes moments before their wedding. His summoners promised to return him home, but secretly intended to murder him as part of a necromantic experiment. Valadus escaped, found the diamond of darkness, and begged it for power. The diamond destroyed his human body, leaving him as the skeletal Lord Valac. After learning that he could never return home, he embraced hatred, raised an undead army, and began seeking revenge against the entire world. This is easily one of the strongest ideas in the trilogy. Valac and Keith were both brought into this world against their will. Neither chose to leave his family behind. Both were expected to use their powers for the benefit of strangers. The difference is how they responded. Valac allowed betrayal and grief to consume him. Keith found friendship, purpose, and a new family. Keith even acknowledges that what happened to Valac was horrible. However, suffering does not give Valac the right to slaughter innocent people. Keith refuses to join him, so Valac traps him inside an eternal dream. Keith awakens in his old apartment on Earth. He goes to work, bakes desserts, visits his parents, and spends time with relatives he thought he had lost forever. Everything appears familiar and comforting, but something feels wrong. Back in the real world, Keith lies unconscious while his friends gather around him. Catherine, Lulu, Noah, Zosk, Shayla, Ellie, Damana, Violet, and Olivia remember how he changed their lives. Their voices eventually reach Keith inside the dream. Keith realizes that his life on Earth is not real. His biological family encourages him to return to the people who now depend on him, and he wakes beside Olivia and his friends. This section is among the book’s most emotionally successful material. Keith is not merely choosing one world over another. He is accepting that “home” is no longer defined only by where he was born. Home is also the place where he formed relationships, accepted responsibilities, and built a family of his own. Meanwhile, Lord Valac forms an alliance with King Ymer of the troll kingdom. His generals steal the elemental diamonds, while Valac begins sacrificing prisoners to create a magical staff containing one hundred souls. He surrounds the troll kingdom with a dome of negative energy, preventing the allied armies from entering. Keith’s solution is inspired by Ghostbusters II. Yes, really. Keith and his friends animate enormous statues of legendary heroes and march them toward the dome while playing “Higher and Higher.” The sight of these heroic figures raises everyone’s spirits, generates positive energy, and weakens Valac’s barrier. It is shamelessly derivative. The book explicitly acknowledges the reference, though, and the resulting sequence is goofy enough to be entertaining. Before entering battle, Shayla kisses Keith because she does not want to die with any regrets. Ellie follows. Then Gemstarzah, Hecate, Damana, Lulu, and Catherine all take turns kissing him. Apparently, the possible end of the world must briefly pause so Keith can complete the fantasy equivalent of a dating-game achievement list. The final battle allows Keith’s supporting cast to contribute more meaningfully than usual. His friends separate to face Valac’s generals, while Keith and Prince Jord enter the castle, rescue prisoners, and confront Valac. Keith secretly replaces the elemental diamonds inside Valac’s staff with replicas made of ice. When Valac declares that he is “all the darkness,” Keith activates the real diamonds and responds that he is “all the elements.” It is corny. It is obvious. It is also exactly the title drop this trilogy demanded. The elemental magic restores Valac’s human body and severs his connection to the world’s magic. His undead forces collapse, his generals lose much of their power, and the surviving villains are captured. Victory appears to have killed Keith. However, the elemental diamonds transform into glowing orbs and enter his body. The cosmic spirits within them declare Keith their ideal vessel. His physical form begins dissolving into multicolored light, and he says goodbye to his friends before flying into space to carry elemental magic to other planets. Keith does not simply save the world. He becomes a cosmic magical entity. Of course he does. The novel concludes with a fifteen-year time jump. Noah has married Anthony and become a royal guard. Zosk leads the lizard folk. Damana runs a blacksmith shop. Shayla is queen of the fairies. Ellie is a famous artist. Lulu manages her family’s business. Violet has transformed Keith’s house into an inn staffed by people she helped free from slavery. Most touching of all, Olivia runs an orphanage called Cottam’s Home. She uses the love and security Keith gave her to provide other children with the family she once needed. Catherine becomes a headmistress and organizes reunions for the old group. As Keith’s friends gather, dance, remember him, and celebrate the lives they have built, Keith watches from space and remains prepared to return should their world need him again. The greatest strength of All the Elements is its emotional sincerity. Battle clearly loves these characters and wants them to be happy. This is a world where kindness is remembered, friendship changes lives, lost people find families, and heroic actions inspire others to become better versions of themselves. Even when the writing is clumsy (like when we're told someone grilled on a grill), that warmth remains apparent. Olivia continues to be the emotional heart of the series. Her relationship with Keith gives the books a sweetness that the romantic material often lacks. Her fear of losing him during the eternal dream, their final goodbye, and her future work with orphaned children form one of the trilogy’s most satisfying arcs. Lord Valac’s backstory also gives the final conflict more substance. For the first time, Valac becomes something more than a theatrical Saturday-morning-cartoon villain. He is a distorted reflection of Keith, showing what Keith might have become had loneliness and resentment defeated his capacity for love. Unfortunately, the book does not give this material enough room to breathe. The entire novel is only around fifty pages long, yet it attempts to include a royal birthday, political intrigue, a dragon’s death, marriage proposals, an Ash origin story, a dragon birth, a lengthy retelling of Cinderella, a massive dragon race, Keith’s illness, Valac’s origin, an alternate life on Earth, multiple romantic confessions, an invasion, a final battle, a cosmic transformation, and a fifteen-year epilogue. That is enough material for several full-length novels. As a result, the pacing feels badly unbalanced. Much of the first half plays like a collection of bonus episodes, while the war and cosmic conclusion rush past in the final chapters. The Cinderella performance alone occupies valuable space that could have been used to develop Valac, explain the elemental spirits, deepen the war, or explore Keith’s emotional conflict. The tonal shifts are equally jarring. Onyx dies protecting the vampire royal family. Soon afterward, women are playing card games for dates with Keith. Valac murders prisoners and constructs a staff from their souls. Shortly before confronting him, nearly every important female character lines up to kiss Keith. The book moves between death, romance, slavery, comedy, pop music, genocide, dragon babies, family drama, and cartoon violence so quickly that important moments rarely receive the emotional weight they deserve. Keith’s Gary Stu problem also reaches its final form. In the previous books, he was a magical prodigy, student council president, dragon rider, nobleman, chef, cultural ambassador, surrogate brother, military leader, and universal romantic interest. In this book, he becomes the fastest dragon rider, the desired husband of noble families, the romantic obsession of nearly every prominent woman, the savior of the world, and the chosen vessel of cosmic spirits. Keith is no longer merely the center of this world. He is apparently the center of the universe. The mass-kissing scene is funny, but it also highlights how often the female characters are defined by their attraction to him. Shayla, Ellie, Gemstarzah, Hecate, Damana, Lulu, and Catherine are all potentially interesting characters with personal histories, responsibilities, and ambitions. At the most important moment of the trilogy, however, they become members of a line waiting to kiss the hero. The romantic storyline also lacks a real resolution. Three books repeatedly tease the possibility of Keith choosing Catherine, Lulu, Shayla, Ellie, Gemstarzah, Hecate, Damana, or someone else. All the Elements devotes an entire subplot to marriage proposals and romantic competition, only for Keith to choose nobody and leave the planet. That feels less like a conclusion and more like an escape hatch. The writing itself remains unpolished. Dialogue is often stiff, transitions are abrupt, action can resemble turn-based video-game combat, and grammatical problems appear throughout the manuscript. The imagination is much larger than the execution, and the book would benefit tremendously from comprehensive editing. Keith’s transformation into the vessel of the cosmic spirits is also conceptually confusing. It is meant to be a glorious ascension, but his body dissolves and many voices begin speaking through him. It is not entirely clear how much of Keith remains separate from the entities now inhabiting him. There is also a strange emotional contradiction. Keith escapes his dream of Earth because he realizes he belongs with Olivia and his new family. Almost immediately afterward, he leaves that family to travel across the galaxy. The farewell is touching, but the story does not fully address why Keith must abandon the very people he just chose. Despite these flaws, All the Elements provides more emotional closure than Elements of Growth. The villain is defeated. Keith’s friends receive futures. Olivia carries his compassion forward. The series’ central themes of friendship, belonging, and found family receive meaningful payoff. This is not a polished fantasy epic. It is not subtle, restrained, or structurally disciplined. It borrows openly from Disney, Ghostbusters, Yu-Gi-Oh!, popular music, video games, anime, superhero stories, and practically every fantasy adventure Battle has probably ever enjoyed. Yet it has personality. All the Elements feels less like a carefully engineered finale and more like an enormous farewell party where every friend, princess, dragon, kingdom, song, magical power, romantic admirer, and sentimental callback has been invited. It is messy. It is ridiculous. It is unmistakably sincere. And somehow, through sheer enthusiasm and heart, it remains charming. All the Elements is a flawed but affectionate conclusion that gives Keith Cottam the largest, loudest, brightest, and most outrageously Keith Cottam ending imaginable. Check it out on Amazon! |
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