The Boy in the Back: A True Story of Survival in Auschwitz and Mauthausen
Fern Lebo’s The Boy in the Back recounts the life of Jan Blumenstein, a Czechoslovakian Jew whose ordinary adolescence was destroyed by Nazi persecution. Written in the first person from extensive interviews with Blumenstein, the book begins with his childhood in Nové Zámky and follows the tightening restrictions on Jewish life, his family’s confinement in a ghetto, and his deportation to Auschwitz on June 5, 1944, his sixteenth birthday. From there, the narrative traces his imprisonment at Auschwitz and Świętochłowice, his transport to Mauthausen, the death march to Gunskirchen, and his eventual liberation. Lebo combines Blumenstein’s recollections with historical context, giving the memoir both the intimacy of personal testimony and a wider account of the system in which his experiences occurred.
At the center of the book is Blumenstein’s method of survival. He learns to become “the boy in the back,” remaining inconspicuous, avoiding unnecessary relationships, watching other prisoners closely, and making practical decisions about food, work, and physical safety. His survival is presented less as a series of dramatic acts than as an accumulation of judgments made under conditions in which the smallest error could be fatal. That emphasis gives the memoir much of its psychological interest. Blumenstein describes hunger, cruelty, forced labor, selections, beatings, transports, and death with an often restrained matter-of-factness that reflects the emotional detachment he developed as a means of enduring them. Yet he also makes an early commitment that gives purpose to his survival: “I will be a witness to the world of the unspeakable evils that occur here.” The promise turns survival into an obligation to remember, even though he would spend much of his later life avoiding discussion of the camps.
The book gains additional depth when it follows Blumenstein beyond liberation. His return home brings illness, loneliness, and the realization that the family and community of his childhood have largely disappeared. He eventually immigrates to Canada through the War Orphans Project, builds a new life in Toronto, studies medicine, establishes a family, and becomes a physician. These later sections matter because they allow the memoir to examine survival as a lifelong process. His career in medicine becomes especially meaningful in this context. The teenager who survived by making himself difficult to notice eventually becomes a family doctor whose work depends on attention, trust, and human connection. Looking back on that transformation, he observes, “No longer was I the invisible boy at the back of the soup line.” His professional and family life gives the narrative a second trajectory, one concerned with rebuilding identity after systematic efforts to erase it.
Lebo also places Blumenstein’s testimony in conversation with the present, particularly his concern about contemporary antisemitism, public indifference, Israel, and the aftermath of October 7. These reflections occupy a substantial part of the later book and reveal why Blumenstein, after decades of keeping his experiences private, finally agreed to speak. The resulting work is therefore both a record of what happened to one sixteen-year-old boy and an elderly survivor’s argument about the responsibility that accompanies memory. Blumenstein’s perspective can be forceful and intensely personal, especially when historical recollection gives way to commentary on current events, but that urgency is central to the book’s purpose. At ninety-six, he views testimony as a final form of responsibility, an attempt to connect the consequences of hatred and indifference he witnessed as a teenager with the world his descendants will inherit. The Boy in the Back ultimately preserves the distinctive voice of a survivor who built his life through watchfulness, resourcefulness, work, family, and service, then chose near the end of that life to make himself visible by telling the story he had once tried so hard to hide.
Pages: 198 | ASIN : B0FMFPC4BY
If You’re Laughing, You’re Listening
The Apprentice’s Bankruptcy is a political satire that uses a fictionalized caricature of Donald Trump to explore power, corruption, grievance, and the moral and democratic consequences of the Trump era. What draws you to write political satire?
I’m a novelist, academic writer, constitutional law scholar, and a civil rights (mainly First Amendment defense) attorney, so political satire just fits my skillset. Also, my favorite entertainment is short-form political satire like John Oliver, or what Matt Stone and Trey Parker have done in the last season of South Park, so I think it’s the best medium for calling attention to the ridiculous without calling normal people stupid or ignorant. If you’re laughing, you’re listening, and if you’re listening, you might be open to hearing the underlying message of the content.
As a lawyer, my job is to be persuasive, and yelling at people is never persuasive. Either way, we need a serious global reset, and that’s deadly serious. I want people to recognize that the loss of constitutional democracy is possibly the most catastrophic event in human history. I don’t think anyone wants a well-researched doomsday manifesto, so I tried to make the most serious of points in the funniest way possible.
How did you decide which real-world events and political figures to transform, exaggerate, or combine for the novel?
I’ve been watching Trumpism unfold for over a decade, and, to some extent, watching the progression of Trump the businessman since I was a little kid. There are hundreds of possible characters that could have been included, but I had to pick the ones that had the best angles to tell the story in the aggregate.
The book is almost like an anthology because it’s told from so many perspectives in individual chapters that focus on brand new characters, so the book would be a mess if it were just random Trump-like characters just spouting off. The book is structured like World War Z. There are admittedly too many characters, but their setups were actually pretty easy because they’re parodies/satires of well-known individuals, but the choice of who to use was dictated wholly by who would allow me to actually tell an Animal Farm-type story of the whole Trump period.
Your treatment of January 6 shifts the focus from one political leader to the broader forces that made the event possible. What did you want readers to consider about that moment?
The real January 6th event was a populous uprising based on disillusionment. The reimagined January 6th event is a populous uprising based on disillusionment. The pain normal Americans feel about their present circumstances are the same motivating factors, but both versions ultimately result in further tyranny.
Constitutional democracy is the guardrail that keeps either side from getting everything they want, but provides everyone sufficient opportunities and security to live their lives, seek their fortunes, participate in the political process, and enjoy their civil liberties. I.e., political extremism of any stripe leads us back to chaos and the subsequent loss of freedom and liberty.
What do you hope readers understand about the relationship between power, grievance, and the desire to “win” at any cost?
Publius is the pseudonym that Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison used when they wrote the Federalist Papers. Federalist No. 10 warns of factions, and Fedearals No. 51 warns of tyrannies of the majority. Absolute power, the inability to address grievances, and a win-at-any-cost mentality are incompatible with the free-market liberalism of Enlightenment philosophers, and the separation of powers and checks and balances that made American democracy what it is. There’s never been a nation with that secret sauce, and it’s what put the United States on top, and what has maintained its position since WW II.
Devolving into the authoritarian aspirations of a Trump strongman-type government ensures we will lose the future. I like being on top. I like America being the place that everyone else aspires to be. That can’t happen with the current trajectory. The current trajectory ensures we will be less innovative, less powerful, less influential, and less culturally relevant. For all it’s messiness, I love America, and I want us to remain on top. That can’t happen in an authoritarian echo chamber, and once the secret sauce is gone, we cease to be exceptional.
Author Links: GoodReads
Daniel Thorp bankrupts everything he touches — car dealerships, marriages, casinos, the truth. So when a failed salesman turned reality-TV strongman rises to become America’s self-declared “president for life,” the only real question is how long a nation can run on borrowed principle before the bill comes due.
Told as an apologue — a savage, uproarious moral fable — The Apprentice’s Bankruptcy reimagines a democracy’s slow-motion collapse through a cast of unforgettable grotesques: the conscience-free fixer who builds the throne, the pundits who mistake ratings for journalism, the loyalists who go along until there’s nothing left of them to lose. It is crude, it is fearless, and beneath the laughter it is deadly serious.
Fans of 1984, Network, and A Modest Proposal will recognize the lineage — political satire with prestige-TV bones and a scalpel where its heart should be. By turns filthy, hilarious, and genuinely frightening, it builds to an uprising, a reckoning, and a final match no tyrant has ever won: because you can’t beat Death at checkers.
Dedicated “to the American people,” Publius doesn’t want to comfort you. Publius wants to wake you up.
“I’m Publius, and now so are you.”
The Wizards And Their World
Queen of Starlight follows the elves of Edira and the wizards of Malicath who discover a darkness is attacking both their worlds, draining and corrupting their magic. Elves and wizards must overcome a difficult history to confront a common threat. What interested you about making reconciliation part of the central conflict?
I’ve never been one to write entire groups of characters as all bad or all good. In the first book, Daughter of Starlight, the wizards of Malicath are mostly seen as the enemy, so for the second book, I was eager to bring a more nuanced approach to both the wizards and their world.
Reconciliation is not easy; it is often messy and uncomfortable, especially when past grievances run deep. This concept was important for me to include in Queen of Starlight because its impacts can be explored on both the personal level and on the level of a broader community. It forces different characters, each in their own way, to confront their own biases, and to wrestle with the messiness that comes with breaking down layers of mistrust. All of this not only helps me expand character development, but also the need for an alliance between former enemies matches the book’s broader theme of finding and embracing balance.
Luma has to reckon with her mother’s dark magical legacy in this book. How did you develop that inheritance as a source of both threat and ultimately power while avoiding the trap of making it purely a burden?
When I first began thinking about how to approach the main themes of this book, it was important to me to focus on the idea of balance as a core concept: the idea that everyone has dualities within them, and that this fact is nothing to be ashamed of.
As Luma explores the history of her mother’s dark magic, she is forced to confront the legacy passed down to her. In doing so, she grows from someone who thought she had to hide or ignore parts of herself, to someone who sees the power inherent in embracing all aspects of her magic.
At the end of the first book in the series, Daughter of Starlight, Luma rejects the role and title of Queen. In this second book, Luma’s evolving understanding and acceptance of her mother’s dark magic legacy helps prepare her not only to defeat Hex but also to step into the role of Queen in a way that feels authentic to her.
What attracts you to young adult fantasy as a way of exploring subjects such as identity, grief, responsibility, love, and power?
Growing up, I was (and still am!) a voracious reader, and the books I read as a young adult not only shaped my worldview then but also continue to inspire me today!
Now, as an author myself, I love writing in the Young Adult genre because in your teens and twenties, sometimes the search for identity and for love, combined with the transformative power of grief and taking responsibility for yourself, can feel lonely and overwhelming. The Young Adult fantasy genre lets me use unique settings and magical systems where the books’ characters can wrestle with and confront these same feelings in a way that, I hope, helps my readers navigate their own journeys in the real world a little more easily.
Are there characters or corners of this universe that you would especially like to revisit in future books?
If I were to write a third installment of this series, I think it would be a prequel focusing on Luma’s mother. I believe there could be a fun story there, exploring Seren’s adventures on Edira more deeply as she navigates and grows into her own inherent magic as a dark witch.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
A year after defeating the evil wizard army, the elves of Edira prosper, yet Luma, the Daughter of Starlight, senses something is amiss. Shadows move where light should reign, and ominous whispers fill her mind, hinting that this hard-won peace may be more fragile than anyone realizes. Soon, attacks by a vicious darkness confirm her fears, and Edira is not the only world under threat. Malicath, home of the wizards, faces the same darkness, which drains and corrupts magic, including Luma’s own powerful starlight. Faced with a shared enemy, Luma and the elves form a tenuous alliance with the wizards. Together, they search for the Unseen Star, an ancient magical relic capable of restoring balance to both their worlds. But as the darkness grows stronger and time runs out, Luma realizes that all magic demands a price—and this one may be more than she can pay.
Return to the magical world of Edira in this sequel to the multi-award-winning YA fantasy, Daughter of Starlight.
Children Learn With Their Entire Bodies
Gigglet and Wigglet’s Alphabet Hop! transforms learning the alphabet into a colorful, movement-filled adventure that invites young readers to say, dance, laugh, and hop their way from A to Z. What inspired you to turn the alphabet into such an active, movement-based experience?
As we all know, children don’t just learn with their eyes, they learn with their entire bodies. Traditional alphabet books are wonderful, but I wanted to tap into the natural energy of young kids and bridge the gap between reading and physical play. Growing up, I never sat still long enough to read a single sentence, let alone an entire book! I was intensely energetic and active, and I would much rather have been playing outside than sitting still in a classroom.
By turning letters into active movements, we use gross motor skills to help anchor cognitive learning. When kids are hopping, giggling, wiggling, and dancing their way from A to Z, learning the alphabet stops feeling like a lesson and becomes pure fun. That joyful association is the best way to spark a lifelong love of reading.
How did you choose the words, settings, and activities that represent each letter of the alphabet?
Honestly, I just tapped into my inner big kid! When I was brainstorming, I asked myself: If I were diving into an alphabet adventure right now, what would I want to see, where would I go and where would my imagination take me? When I have readings at schools and events, I always ask the kids what they want to see as well. They have great imaginations and sometimes it’s up to us as adults to help them unlock and explore their creative mindset.
My extremely talented Illustrator and I wanted the settings and activities to jump off the page and to feel alive and playful. But beyond that, we paid a lot of attention to the pure joy of language, specifically, which words are just plain fun to say out loud, especially when you repeat them three times. For example, saying ‘yo-yo’ three times fast is so fun; we dare anyone to try it without giggling! That kind of playful rhythm is what makes the alphabet stick in a child’s mind well after they have closed the physical book.
What led you to include the “Alphabet Hop” dance and QR code as part of the reading experience?
Books don’t have to stay flat on the page anymore. I wanted to build a bridge between traditional reading and the digital world that kids love today, while keeping them physically active.
The QR code brings the ‘Alphabet Hop’ dance to life right on screen, giving little ones a guide to match the physical actions in the book. It transforms storytime into an interactive, whole-body experience where parents, guardians, teachers and kids can dance and laugh together. When reading feels like an event, it creates memories that make kids want to pick up a book again and again.
I didn’t have anything like this growing up, and I think I would have loved to learn the alphabet in such a fun, interactive way. I want kids to feel empowered and excited about coming up with their own dance moves to the bouncy rhythm. Ultimately, I hope it encourages children to collaborate, spark new friendships, and have fun creating something together.
Why was it important to include an English-Spanish vocabulary chart at the end of the book?
Language learning was a huge part of my upbringing, my parents and teachers always encouraged us to explore other languages. Plus, during my background as an opera singer, I had the incredible joy of learning and performing in multiple languages, and Spanish has always been an absolute favorite of mine.
There is such a profound sense of joy, pride, and connection when you can interact with others in their native tongue. Because I do a lot of readings in predominantly Spanish-speaking areas, I wanted to ensure those communities felt included and celebrated right on the page. Ultimately, providing this resource is about giving kids an approachable way to discover another language and supporting childhood literacy for families who might not otherwise have access to beginner bilingual tools.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
Meet Gigglet and Wigglet, two high-energy piggy siblings who believe that learning should never sit still. In this vibrant and interactive tale, join big sister Gigglet as she takes her enthusiastic baby brother, Wigglet, on a joyful journey to discover the true magic of the alphabet. But this isn’t your average, quiet storytime book―it is a full-body, high-energy experience designed to encourage children (and adults!) to giggle, wiggle, and hop their way from A to Z.
Turn Storytime Into a Dance Party! Why just read the alphabet when you can dance it? This “piggy perfect” adventure turns every letter of the alphabet into an absolute party.
*Interactive QR Code: Packed with modern fun, readers can scan the built-in QR code to unlock guided, kid-friendly dance moves that bring the story to life.
*Bouncy Rhythm & Rhyme: Prefer to set your own pace? Create your own groove to the book’s infectious, bouncy rhythm that naturally gets little feet hopping and bodies wiggling.
*Active Learning: Perfect for burning off extra energy, this book seamlessly blends early literacy with motor skills, making it a dream for beginning readers.Bonus Bilingual Learning Inside!
The fun doesn’t stop at the letter Z. Flip to the back of the book to find a special A to Z learning chart featuring both English and Spanish translations for every single letter. It’s the perfect tool for building vocabulary, introducing a second language, and reinforcing everything your little one learned during their dance-along adventure.
Whether you are a parent looking for a way to make reading more engaging, a teacher wanting to liven up circle time, or just a fan of irresistibly cute piglets, Gigglet and Wigglet are ready to jump off the page and into your heart.
Are you ready to shake up your reading routine? Grab your dancing shoes and join the piggy party today!
The Complexities of Human Emotion
In Vitro follows a couple longing for a baby as they navigate the quiet pressures of a prestigious fertility clinic, where medicine and emotion inevitably collide. Did a particular news story, personal experience, or ethical question inspire the novel?
After completing a residency in OB/Gyn, I did a one-year fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology where I worked in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic. I still have very vivid memories of the patients and staff members I met during this time. The clinic was filled with such optimism and hope, and on some days, such sorrow and loss. While IVF is certainly in the news these days, I had this story in my head for probably thirty years! I wanted to explore the complexities of human emotion, especially the desire to become a parent, set against the backdrop of a high-stakes fertility clinic whose success is based on deception. The current array of medical options available to couples seeking pregnancy is truly miraculous, and I wanted to make the process feel real to readers without overwhelming them with technical details.
Did writing this novel change your own perspective on reproductive medicine?
Not really. According to the CDC, about 2% of all births in the US are the result of some type of assisted reproductive technology, including IVF. There are many reasons for this such as declining fertility rates for both men and women and couples choosing to delay parenthood. Reading statistics in some report is pretty dry stuff, so bringing the story to life by following the lives of couples seeking treatment and the medical professionals caring for them struck me as a great way to help readers understand this increasingly common procedure. I haven’t been to a single author talk or book club where at least one person hasn’t come up to me afterwards and related a personal experience they or some family member had with IVF. Some stories have happy endings and some do not.
I also wished to explore some of the moral and ethical issues surrounding IVF. IVF is an extremely expensive treatment which is not covered by some health insurance companies, so one big question is who should have access. Many couples do not have the financial resources to afford this treatment if it is not a covered benefit. The existence of for-profit clinics raises concerns about commercialization that encourages high volumes and expensive add-on testing with unproven benefit. Many couples opt for pre-implantation testing to eliminate specific genetic conditions, and there is concern this practice might eventually lead to the creation of “designer” babies. And finally, most IVF cycles create a surplus of embryos, which then leads to ongoing questions about freezing (and storing) these embryos for future use, donating them for research, or discarding them. Certain religious and pro-life organizations are particularly concerned with the practice of performing research or discarding “excess” embryos on moral grounds.
The clinic itself almost feels like another character. How did you approach creating an environment where compassion and corruption could exist side by side?
What an intriguing insight! I hadn’t thought of it quite like that. I wanted readers to have enough information to form a picture in their own minds of what the McArthur Institute looks and feels like. The building itself is set on a university campus that is well known for its medical facilities, so there is a certain grandeur and gravitas to the external structure and lobby. Inside those doors, many characters, particularly the protagonist, Dr. Joyce Porter, exhibit warmth and kindness through their actions. Joyce savors the small gifts brought by grateful patients and keenly feels each unsuccessful cycle as a personal failure. The head nurse, Selena, is always ready with a box of Kleenex or a hug and cares for both patients and staff with hot coffee and chocolate chip cookies. A compassionate environment is created within the relationships between the medical professionals and their patients. I also tried to portray the “business” side of the clinic through the character of Dr. Owen Hicks, the Institute’s Director, and the university’s administration. When taken to an extreme, the focus on academic prestige and success allowed Dr. Hicks to begin a cycle of deception and corruption. Like many things in life, objects (in this case the clinic and the technologies it offers) have both a light and a dark side, or what you described as compassion and corruption, and they coexist side by side. Dr. Ajay Kumar is the character in the novel who wrestles most directly with this dichotomy, and in the end, he’s forced to make a choice.
Author Links: Facebook | Website | Goodreads
The calm and compassionate Dr. Joyce Porter is proud to work at McArthur Fertility Institute, where miracles happen every day. Couples determined to conceive flock to the clinic, drawn by its unmatched IVF success rate and glowing reputation.
But behind the clinic’s shining facade lies a disturbing secret. When another doctor mentions a peculiarity in the facility’s methods, Joyce investigates. What she discovers is worse than she could have imagined. Now, she must decide whether to confront the institute’s renowned director about his unscrupulous deeds or compromise her ethics by turning a blind eye. She knows staying silent could destroy people’s lives, but speaking out could destroy hers.
As the line between healing and harm blurs, Joyce must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her patients, her integrity, and the future she still hopes to build.
Spirituality 201: Wisdom Unleashed, Unmasking the Challenges of Life (Part 2)
Spirituality 201 is an ambitious spiritual guide built around one central conviction: human life makes more sense when we understand ourselves as spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting physical bodies. Wendell Eusebio-Edwards presents the book as a continuation of Spirituality 101, but this volume quickly establishes its own wide-ranging agenda. Across nine chapters, he moves from the human body and self-concept into belief systems, the nature of Earth, Darkness, the conscious and subconscious minds, consciousness, family, and death. What holds these subjects together is his insistence that our most important work happens inwardly. Experiences aren’t merely things that happen to us. In his framework, they’re opportunities to gain consciousness, recover spiritual awareness, and become more fully acquainted with who we are.
One of the book’s most accessible strengths is Eusebio-Edwards’s habit of turning abstract spiritual ideas into everyday images. Emotional wounds become unwanted tenants living “rent free.” The human body becomes a computer, with experiences stored like files. Parenting becomes the work of contractors laying a foundation, while consciousness becomes the only lasting form of wealth. These analogies give the book a conversational quality even when its subject matter becomes highly metaphysical. His recurring concept of “reframing” is especially important. Instead of remaining trapped inside painful conclusions about an experience, the reader is encouraged to ask what the experience can teach, what can be released, and how forgiveness might free the energy tied up in it. That idea carries through the discussions of self-esteem, childhood, relationships, family dysfunction, and personal responsibility, giving the book a practical thread beneath its larger cosmology.
The scope becomes considerably bigger as the book progresses. Eusebio-Edwards describes Earth as a spiritual academy, consciousness as the universe’s true currency, the subconscious mind as our connection to a far larger reality, and human existence as part of a long journey involving reincarnation, spiritual hierarchies, Light and Darkness. He writes with complete commitment to this worldview, including highly specific accounts of spirit aspects, dark entities, energetic seals, fallen angels, karmic consequences, soul retrieval, and events he says have taken place in the spirit realm. The book’s originality comes partly from how thoroughly these ideas are woven together. Eusebio-Edwards builds an entire explanatory system and applies it to education, health, sexuality, parenting, trauma, achievement, intuition, and human behavior. Readers who enter the book on its own terms will find a remarkably detailed vision of how the visible and invisible worlds are meant to interact.
The final chapter on death brings many of those ideas together and reveals the book’s deeper concern with how a person chooses to live now. Death, in Eusebio-Edwards’s account, is a transition, followed by reflection, accountability, continued learning, and eventually another opportunity for growth. By the closing pages, the book’s recurring subjects of consciousness, responsibility, intuition, forgiveness, purpose, and self-knowledge converge into a clear challenge: stop living by habit, inherited assumptions, or external validation and become an active participant in your own spiritual development. Eusebio-Edwards has written a book meant to provoke examination, and its voice remains urgent, personal, and unmistakably his from beginning to end. Spirituality 201 asks us to look beyond the life we can see and take responsibility for the consciousness we carry within it.
Pages: 204 | ASIN : B0GXWPMYKP
A Twisted Crucible: The Riddle of the Ruined Soul
A Twisted Crucible by Diana Louise Webb is a psychological crime thriller that mixes serial-killer fiction, road novel, dark comedy, and surreal horror into one deliberately feverish story. At its center is Julie Monroe Cromwell, a woman who’s stolen the identity of her dead best friend, Candice Wentworth, along with more than $1.5 million, and whose sense of reality is coming apart almost as quickly as her moral restraints. The book announces its personality immediately. Julie arrives at an airport under Candice’s name, carrying cash, jewelry, and guns while still under the influence of Ayahuasca, then turns a luggage mishap into another grotesque crime. From there, the story travels through funeral homes, motels, roadside attractions, cult hideouts, haunted spaces, and stretches of 1980s America that become increasingly warped by Julie’s imagination. It reads like a crime spree filtered through a funhouse mirror, with every stop giving Webb another opportunity to explore obsession, guilt, spectacle, and the strange logic Julie uses to keep herself moving.
Julie is the novel’s real engine, and her narration is fascinating because she’s funny, articulate, vain, cruel, frightened, and spectacularly unreliable, sometimes within the same paragraph. She doesn’t merely commit violence. She turns it into mythology about herself, treating murders as compositions and ordinary inconveniences as evidence that the universe has personally chosen her for some larger drama. That tendency becomes especially disturbing in her relationship with Jamie Owens, the daughter of the taxi driver Julie kills early in the story. Julie plays protector and companion while privately recognizing that she’s manipulating and isolating Jamie, even admitting to herself that she’s grooming her for something darker. Their cross-country relationship gives the book more emotional weight than the carnage alone could provide. Julie wants connection almost as desperately as she wants control, and the black stiletto she carries from Candice becomes a wonderfully macabre symbol of that contradiction: friendship, envy, identity, possession, and guilt all compressed into one object.
The closest comparison that came to mind was Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Both novels put readers inside the consciousness of a killer who interprets the world through status, objects, popular culture, appearance, and an unnervingly elaborate private mythology. Webb takes that basic kind of intimacy with a murderer and sends it in a much more hallucinatory direction. Julie converses with dead killers, encounters ghosts and apparent supernatural phenomena, rewrites memories while she’s remembering them, and fills the journey with references to music, movies, literature, food, fashion, crime, and 1980s Americana. Reality keeps changing texture around her. That makes A Twisted Crucible feel at times like a splatter film, a gothic ghost story, and an absurdist road movie playing simultaneously. The prose matches Julie’s mind: maximalist, excitable, sarcastic, image-heavy, and constantly looking for the next association. Even Jamie eventually recognizes Julie’s murders as a kind of “performance art,” which gets remarkably close to Julie’s own conception of herself.
I really liked the way all that flamboyant violence eventually circles back to something painfully personal. Julie spends much of the novel turning death into entertainment because spectacle lets her avoid looking directly at herself. By the final chapters, the disguises have collapsed. Jamie is dead after the catastrophic Winnebago crash, investigators have connected Julie to Candice and the other killings, and her father is forced to confront what his daughter has become. The return of Candice’s stiletto beside Julie’s hospital bed is especially effective because the object that helped Julie pretend to be someone else finally becomes the physical reminder of who she actually is. The closing confrontation between father and daughter gives the novel a surprisingly intimate finish after so much extravagant chaos. A Twisted Crucible is wild, grisly, mordantly funny, psychologically messy, and intensely committed to its narrator’s fractured point of view. Webb has built a story about a woman trying to steal another person’s identity only to discover that she can’t outrun the ruined self underneath it.
Pages: 236 | ASIN: B0H7T1QGZP
Windows
Skye Elliott’s Windows is an erotic novel built around a simple but surprisingly flexible idea: a lonely woman begins looking through her neighbors’ windows at night and discovers the private sexual lives hidden inside an otherwise ordinary community. The narrator’s voyeurism grows out of grief. Years earlier, she lost the man she considered the love of her life after a fifteen-year affair, and she describes watching other people as part of the way she begins reconnecting with feelings she has shut away. “Peeking just became a harmless hobby of sorts,” she says early on, but the book gradually makes that hobby much more personal. The novel is organized into thirty-eight short “Windows,” followed by six anthology pieces, so it reads almost like a collection of intimate encounters tied together by one observer and her changing relationship with sex, loneliness, and desire.
The voyeurism gives Windows its structure, but the narrator’s emotional life gives it its real center. She doesn’t simply watch couples because she finds sex exciting. She’s fascinated by intimacy, especially the trust, tenderness, companionship, and sense of belonging that she sees alongside the physical acts. Again and again, darkness becomes a place where people can admit desires they’re embarrassed to express in daylight. That idea is especially important for the narrator, who worries about her body, about disappointing a partner, and about exposing too much of herself emotionally. At one point she admits that she feels safer in darkness because there she can become whatever fantasy her lover wants, while daylight makes her feel exposed. Those recurring images of windows, darkness, open curtains, and hidden rooms give the book a surprisingly consistent emotional vocabulary.
The book moves through heterosexual and same-sex encounters, multiple partners, masturbation, role-playing, bondage, dominance and submission, spanking, flogging, toys, and other forms of sexual experimentation. What connects most of those scenes is the narrator’s fascination with people giving themselves permission to want things. She frequently concentrates on trust and the exchange of control, especially as she becomes increasingly curious about BDSM and begins imagining herself as a submissive. Eventually, that curiosity stops being something she only observes. A man whose bedroom she has watched discovers her outside his window, invites her inside, establishes a safe word, and introduces her to the experience she has spent so much of the book wondering about. That development gives the later chapters a sense of movement because the watcher finally becomes a participant.
Elliott’s style is repetitive, but that repetition also reveals what occupies the narrator’s mind. Certain sensations, phrases, gestures, and images return constantly: whispered voices, open windows, moonlight, hard breathing, bodies glistening with perspiration, people falling asleep in each other’s arms. Sex often leads back to cuddling, sleep, reassurance, or conversation, which makes the narrator’s deeper longing increasingly clear. One of the book’s strongest sections is actually among its least sexually focused. In Window 38, she watches a long-term couple who can’t live together comfort each other after the woman’s mother dies. The narrator leaves with “a profound sense of loss” and reflects on her own empty bed. Moments like that deepen the book because they show that what she envies most isn’t simply sexual freedom. It’s the experience of having someone who feels like home.
Windows feels like an erotic diary about a woman slowly returning to a part of herself she thought she had buried. The narrator begins as someone who believes observation is enough, but watching other people gradually forces her to examine her own loneliness, fantasies, fear of vulnerability, and desire to be wanted. After finally stepping inside one of the rooms she has been watching from outside, she says, “I was feeling beautiful and desired.” That sentence captures the book better than any of its more elaborate sexual descriptions. Windows is explicit, curious, repetitive, confessional, and deeply interested in the connection between sexuality and emotional security. Beneath all the bedrooms and open curtains, it’s a story about someone trying to move from watching life happen to other people toward allowing herself to participate in it again.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0GMY8T5CY
