Book Review: Truth and Other Lies

Truth and Other Lies. Maggie Smith, Ten 16 Press, an imprint of Orange Hat Publishing, March 8 2022, Paperback and E-Book, 356 pages.

Review by Lisa Sherman.

Maggie Smith intertwines ambition, friendship, and family with the power of secrets and social media in her new novel Truth and Other Lies.

Truth and Other Lies tells the story of New York Journalist Megan Barnes. She loses her job, gets dumped by her boyfriend, and returns to her childhood home of Chicago where her overbearing mother is running for Congress. Not only does Megan disagree politically with her mother, she also finds that, as the child of a candidate, no news agency will hire her.

To let off steam, Megan attends a rally on a college campus where she protects Jocelyn Jones, a successful journalist Megan admires, from a physical confrontation. Grateful for Megan’s assistance, Jocelyn offers Megan the chance to work for her in PR to help promote Jocelyn’s upcoming book. Even though the job is not in journalism, Megan accepts the position because it promises to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will open doors for Megan in the future. When a tweet threatens Jocelyn’s career, Megan is tasked with finding out who is behind it. However, in the process she discovers things are not always what they seem, both with respect to Jocelyn or her own mother, and that secrets don’t remain secrets forever.

I very much enjoyed reading Truth and Other Lies by Maggie Smith. I was instantly pulled into the novel by the relatability of the main character, Megan, and her journey. Smith gradually peels back the layers of the story, revealing one secret after another, which kept me turning the pages as I tried to piece together the clues along with Megan.

In addition, I appreciated the depth of Smith’s characters. Smith’s characters have complicated histories that overlap and interweave as they navigate the complex worlds of politics, journalism, and social media. Smith does a masterful job exploring the interplay between these issues with wit and compassion all through the lens of a strong female protagonist. Smith’s descriptions of newsrooms, political rallies, and PR campaigns pop off the page and ring true.

Similarly, Smith does a wonderful job exploring the relationships between the female characters. Smith makes each of Megan’s relationships—with her best friend, her mother, and Jocelyn—unique and nuanced, showing readers what Megan learns from each.

I also really enjoyed Smith’s references to the city of Chicago and the outlying suburbs. Smith’s descriptions are spot on, and I felt as if I were exploring the various locations by Megan’s side.

Overall, I think Truth and Other Lies by Maggie Smith is an excellent book, and I am grateful I had the opportunity to read it. It is a quick read that is as entertaining as it is thoughtful. Fans of women’s fiction and anyone who is looking for a fun story with heart will enjoy this novel.  

Book Review: Turning Points

Turning Points. Renee James (for Off-Campus Writers' Workshop), Windy City Publishers, June 13 2021, Paperback and E-Book, 344 pages.

Review by Marssie Mencotti.

This anthology was created to celebrate Off Campus Writers' Workshop's 75th anniversary. OCWW members, working together for more than a year, created Turning Points, a collection of fiction and creative non-fiction. The anthology features a forward by Fred Shafer and a preface by Scott Turow, along with 43 pieces that cover a wide spectrum of genres. They were composed by authors who range from first-time short story writers to extensively published writers of short and long fiction as well as non-fiction. This is an impressive collection of carefully curated work. Each piece is put forward with a depth of care and thoughtfulness that continues to impress long after the first reading.

This anthology is like opening several boxes of Forrest Gump’s chocolates. Each selection is its own experience of delights and fears, childlike perspectives, friendship, ostracism, diverse life choices, days well or not well-lived, science fiction, future fiction, personal memoir, and more. There are stories here that fuel hours of conversation or snap tightly into non-conversation when we recognize ourselves too closely in the characters. I am resisting the temptation to single out certain pieces that impressed me, but I know these confused and troubled people who have wanted babies and ignored babies, who survived cancer and did not survive cancer, or who have had strange, truncated love for their parents and persevered through shocking trauma since childhood. I have shared some part of my life with most of them, and here they are captured in concise, richly descriptive, exquisitely edited prose.

This is an excellent anthology. It is well written and edited, and it is thoughtfully assembled here for our exceptional reading and thinking experience. I will hereby contradict myself and mention one or two entries from each of the six sections of the anthology. I found them all quite wonderful, but a few will stay with me for a long time.

This is the book you buy to share with a good friend, a book club, a family member who is thoughtful and loves to look at the world alongside excellent writers, or editors and friends who share their vision to entertain and engage you as a reader. These selections will be well remembered and discussed in-depth for a long time. So if you’re looking for evidence of your Turning Points, you may well find them here.

Book Review: A Necessary Explosion: Collected Poems

A Necessary Explosion: Collected Poems. Dan Burns, Chicago Arts Press, June 25 2021, Paperback, Hardcover, and E-Book, 161 pages.

Review by T. L. Needham.

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” —Robert Frost

Robert Frost is the poet who launched my love of poetry. He is my gage for judging other poets. His complete works was the first poetry book I acquired and began the collection on my bookcase. I read Frost’s poems The Road Not Taken and Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening so many times I memorized them.

Dan Burns has now earned a place in my bookcase of great poets and great poetry. He is not a rookie. He has six other books to his credit, including the novels A Fine Line, Recalled to Life, and the short story collections, Grace: Stories and a Novella and No Turning Back: Stories. In addition, Burns is an award-winning writer of stories for the screen and stage. A Necessary Explosion: Collected Poems, his first poetry collection, was fifteen years in the making.

Burns opens his collection of poems with a quote from Ray Bradbury. He is a titan of American authors and screenwriters and is among the most celebrated 20th-century American writers: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”

Midway into Burns’ collection, he gives us his poem A Necessary Explosion which yields a collection of the pressures, impressions, ideas, conflicts, and criticisms that influence the author in his daily creative frenzy. His is a poetic voice seeking release in the explosion of conflicting influences, presenting a brilliant insight into the creative process involved in giving birth to a poem.

Another poem, A Call from Home, opens with a booming phone call from a distant, unknown yet familiar voice that beckons the poet to the Emerald Isle. There he discovers and reveals his genetic lineage to the Irish people as each new face seems to be family. As a reader, I was not surprised to learn that Dan Burns is of Irish heritage, linked to a pedigree of the great Irish poets, including many of my favorites: W. B. Yeats, S. Beckett, S. Heaney, T. Moore. Burns’ poetry does justice to this great Irish heritage.

Near the end of this wonderful poetry collection, I came upon a gem titled No Words Are Necessary. This enchanting love poem touched my heart so much that I turned to my dear wife and read it to her, suggesting it could have been written just for us. The ending of this poems says it all: “I am you, and you are me.”

Thus, I close by expressing my greatest admiration for this extraordinary collection of poems. I have no criticism, only praise, and I know I will revisit these wonderful verses again and again. Congratulations to Mr. Dan Burns, very well done.

Book Review: The Sweetness of Venus: A History of the Clitoris

The Sweetness of Venus: A History of the Clitoris. Sarah Chadwick, Wild Pansy Press, February 14 2021, Paperback and E-Book, 253 pages.

Review by Julie S. Halpern.

Women’s health, particularly gynecology and female sexuality, has been the domain of male doctors and scientists throughout history. From ancient physicians and scholars such as Galen (whose theories were regarded as the gold standard for over a thousand years!) to Freud, women’s bodies have been diminished, feared, and pathologized.

The clitoris may be the least understood and most maligned organ in the human body. Missing or poorly represented in most paintings, sculptures, and medical illustrations of women throughout the centuries, Sarah Chadwick asserts that the clitoris deserves respect and understanding. It needs to be seen as its unique and very important self rather than an inferior, inverted, or lesser version of the male penis.

Ms. Chadwick, a British-born educator now living in Chicago, was frustrated with the lack of realistic sex education material for her young daughter. In response, Chadwick has written an extensively researched book, balancing the false narratives of entrenched male attitudes with lighthearted humor. Refreshingly free of feminist buzzwords and political posturing, Ms. Chadwick’s warmth and light touch reveal her dedication to women’s freedom and enjoyment of their bodies. Drawing on primary medical sources and illustrations (ranging from the ridiculously laughable to the disturbingly graphic), Chadwick details various tortuous remedies and cures for real or imagined maladies ranging from hydrotherapy to actual genital mutilation.

Throughout the years, literature of all types offers cautionary tales of the “trouble” a sexually aroused woman can create. Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hester Prynne, and countless other heroines of the Romantic and Victorian eras exemplify the societal fears of the times. Soon to follow were scientific “discoveries” fabricated by male doctors, claiming that female sexual need or pleasure was in fact a serious mental disease, referred to as “hysteria,” a term still frequently used to describe a woman suffering from stress or trauma.

In the most delightfully scathing portion of the book, Ms. Chadwick channels and “interviews” several iconic and notorious female authors by inviting them to tea. Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Sand, and even Jane Austen gleefully weigh in with their views of unbridled sexual enjoyment, set against the hypocrisy, paranoia, and often total cluelessness of their eras.

In the mid-twentieth century, researchers such as Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, Virginia Johnson, and Shere Hite and creators such as Georgia O’Keeffe and the Guerrilla Girls finally crack through centuries of ignorance and misunderstanding. The female body, particularly the clitoris, has at last come into her own. But even today, myths and fear, sometimes masquerading as religious doctrine, flourish, with the intent to subdue and frighten women. From masturbation to pornography, the still male-dominated scientific community is begrudgingly coming to accept the necessity for women to understand their bodies and embrace their sexuality.

Sarah Chadwick, an articulate and compassionate spokeswoman for a new generation of women, is to be commended for her exceptional research, kindness, and candor. May The Sweetness of Venus mark the beginning of a healthy (and hysteria-free) era for women.

Book Review: Last Hope for Hire

Last Hope for Hire. Matthew Wilcox, The Wild Rose Press, Adams Basin, NY, 2021, Paperback, 338 pages.

Review by Jose Nateras.

Last Hope For Hire, Matthew Wilcox’s debut novel, is an exciting, high-tech adventure exploit with futuristic mercenary Allen Moran as its protagonist. This book takes the trope of a super-soldier, the likes of Jason Bourne, and imagines what it might be like if said super-solider was a middle-aged father forced to put his experience to use as a mercenary to get treatment for his ailing son.

Wilcox effectively paints the picture of a loving father willing to do anything within his power to save his child while also building a world full of futuristic technology, robot soldiers, and a rag-tag team of adventuring associates—a testament to the author’s ability to embrace a variety of influences. Despite the high-stakes corporate espionage and sci-fi, action-hero antics of Last Hope For Hire, Wilcox never loses sight of the real world stakes at play for his hero—a real world where medical debt and access to health care are just the sort of struggles being faced by so many others. Similarly, by making his central protagonist a middle-aged father, Wilcox creates a character who is extremely relatable for his potential readers. A more typical Jason Borne-type protagonist, or even one similar to Liam Neeson’s character in the Taken films, while thrilling to watch, doesn’t encapsulate the experience of an aging soldier-turned-mercenary in the way that Wilcox’s Allen Moran does.

Despite this being his first novel, Wilcox creates a world and cast of characters that feel so thoroughly established that it almost feels like Last Hope For Hire might be the latest book in a larger series. For example, the book starts off with an exciting jungle escapade where Moran and the daughter of a former associate, Haley, battle off a robotic horde controlled by an out-of-control dictator. The sequence paints the picture of a man with a long history of former colleagues and field experience while establishing a relationship with a new generation of mercenaries. Right off the bat, Wilcox is building a world with decades of backstory and intergenerational relationships. The sequence also imbues humor to the sci-fi action as Moran’s cheaper, outdated weapons, and tech fail him.

Wilcox’s writing walks the fine line of genre fiction, allowing it to be familiar yet fresh, entertaining but grounded enough in relatable, real-world experiences. It imbues a sense of humor without undercutting the life and death stakes the characters are facing, nor the sci-fi action that makes this type of book so thrilling. Despite the fact that Wilcox’s Allen Moran starts the book off as a retired, returning to the fray to help his sick son, it feels as though Wilcox may be able to spin Last Hope For Hire into an ongoing series. He’s created a world and a rag-tag group of characters that are compelling enough for readers to come back wanting more.