Letters from Alice

is alive. It is alive with the dead, and alive with the Mexican landscape. It is alive with the scent of fresh lime.

Shaka Izawa is in her forties. She doesn't want for money, as her now deceased parents have left a generous inheritance. But her life carries the tone of ostracization--she suffers from a muscle disorder that distorts her physique and forces her to rely on carers from within a care home set up by her parents.

While society often sees the disabled as disengaged from culture and intellect, Shaka subverts this expectation; she is deeply involved with her online studies and writing. As the short novel progresses, she increases her pursuit of autonomy and, in doing so, leads her life somewhere jarring and unexpected.

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With Hunchback, Ichikawa asks us to consider feminism from the perspective of those who can't make it to the marches. She challenges our ideas of the unseen and, particularly, the physically different. To be sure, our protagonist is not pure and solely good, but this deepens the complexity of her experience--the complexity which is often lacking in our perception of the different. We also confront the nuances of how we, as people, use one another. The power dynamics among the characters are challenging to digest, leaving us to consider who in this world dominates, and why.

The only area in which it lacks is fullness; perhaps a more rounded image of Shaka's activities and relationships is warranted. That being said, this book achieves what it was intended to.

There are times I feel I've read too much to fully connect with characters anymore, but Angie Cruz's Dominicana is completely subverting that. I feel completely attached to Ana's journey; the narrative voice is immensely clear and intelligent while subsequently being believable at the same time. Dominicana is a brilliant portrait of a budding twentieth-century woman and a masterclass in the modern novel!

In the mountains of a Europe haunted by the Second World War, a girl finds love -- but it is not so straightforward.

The seasons of adolescent Eve's life are dictated by letters sent from her mother in Brazil. She transfers schools and follows her studies by the matriarch's wish, and it is through this that she winds up in a boarding school in Switzerland's Appenzell, bearing icy winters and violently lush springs alongside the other girls. A classic plot point, the arrival of a new girl, throws Eve's hazy and lonely life into disarray -- and, in its way, brings purpose.

Fréderique is a perfect student, obedient and beautiful, if a bit of a loner. Perhaps it is this quality that attracts Eve to her, and the two grow to spend all their moments discussing life and all its questions in the shade of the school. But the narrative is threaded with strains of longing for something more and, perhaps, obsession. The novel, a short one, reflects on Eve's isolated youth and the dark and forbidden love that torments her teenage years.

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This novel burns slow but steady, like a small flame in a dreamlike winter night. That is the feel of this work -- as readers, we seem to be high in the mountains, warming our hands by a flicker of warmth and connection right alongside Eve. The novella is not meant to keep us on the edge of our seats, but rather to travel with us for some time and demand more of us than our eyes on the page. The picture of privileged girls in a boarding school is somehow both outdated and universal, at certain moments feeling tired and at others like there has been nothing more insightful and representative of the youth experience.

Certain moments are dry, but this one is definitely worth keeping with if the reader is ready for a reflective, nearly surreal rumination on what it is to desire and be young.