I see a lot of discussion about the decline of reading in America. Some people blame AI. Others blame America’s less-than-friendly attitude towards education. A few even blame capitalism’s trappings, since America’s 24/7 workaholic attitude does not exactly leave room for other hobbies or self-care. I grew up in a family of readers. My father, my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather—all of them read voraciously. All of them valued books, and all of them thought that the more well-read a person was—no matter their occupation—the better. Taking to time to read everyday has simply been something I grew up with and have maintained in my life. Why?

Well, reading is important.

I don’t own a television. I find that a television offers nothing but drivel and brain rot. Books, however, allow me to travel. They allow me to think. Spending time alone with a book has, over the years, also allowed me to become comfortable in my aloneness.

That’s a good thing, I think, since in the third grade my teacher, Mrs. Belding, wrote in my report card’s comments section, “Nicole has difficulty working in groups with others of varying abilities.” What she really should have written is, “Nicole prefers to be alone in the corner of the classroom which a book that is not age-appropriate” (in third grade, I was in gifted because I was a few grade levels beyond my peers).

Hey, Mrs. Belding—you’d still be writing the same thing today. I promise.

My friend I’m hanging out with doesn’t read. His grandmother, like mine, read voraciously. His mother, who is in her 80s, reads avidly. My friend finds books a waste of time and of space. Now that I think about it, his attitude is primarily why our relationship never functioned well when we lived together as a (highly dysfunctional) couple (that story is one for another Substack post, though).

A few days before my father died, I found him lying in the hospital bed, reading. I nearly cried when I saw what book he held—a copy of my poetry collection, The Pale Goth.

Yes, to my father, reading was that important. I frequently replenished his book supply during his hospital stay. We spent hours, even during those tumultuous months when I recognized he was about to make a new journey (sadly, without me), discussing books.

My dear friend, Socrates, whom I’ve mentioned before was another avid reader. He not only lived a life filled with clandestine adventures due to a long career in US Army Special Forces, he also lived a life filled with books. During the 20+ years that I knew him, we exchanged numerous books and hundreds of letters discussing books. Our conversations frequently began with a single question, “Have you ever read [insert book title here]?”

As I sat reading Vasyl Shevchuk’s fictionalized account of Skovoroda’s life, I thought about how Skovoroda himself dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth, freedom, and poetics. Nature, solitude, and books offered him a certain respite that the world and all its other trappings could not offer him. I think the same applied to my father and to my friend Socrates. I know that it definitely applies to me. I am much happier when I’m sitting alone, soaking up the sunshine, with a decent book in my hands. Amid life’s chaos and seemingly constant hurdles (of which there have been many lately), reading is part of my re-centering process, since a book’s pages offer a meditative place in which I can escape the world for a few minutes or hours.

Books are a huge part of my identity. My house is filled with them. I always have a book in my workbag or in my purse. I read while sitting in waiting rooms at the doctor’s office or at the car dealership; I’ve been known to almost miss flights because I’m sitting at my gate, reading. Entire flights go by (it’s a long 7 hours to Dublin from Washington, DC) where I do nothing but read books and write in my journal. I sadden at the thought that some day my book-filled house might, in the not so distant future, be considered a museum, a literary archive or relic of sorts. Years ago, I heard a person state that libraries had basically become museums since no one read books anymore.

I guess my mornings or my afternoons of engrossed reading are, quite possibly, an anarchic act of rebellion. If so, good. I’ve always been quite unconventional, and maybe loving books makes me even more so.

How about you?

I mean, I did, but even into adulthood, my passion for paleontology and appreciation of Sam Neil and his films followed.

In my (dirty and turbulent) thirties, I found myself rekindling my love of fossil hunting. I spent hours wandering creek beds in rural West Virginia, searching for fossilized shells. I traveled to Calvert Cliffs, Maryland where I unearthed a fast-cooled lava shoot as well as massive chunk of Miocene era rock containing dozens of bivalves fused together. I spent a week in Wyoming, pulling large sheets of laminated limestone and calcareous shale and unearthing hundreds of Diplomystus dentatus while cosplaying Dr. Alan Grant.

Let’s just say that after my trip to Wyoming, I watched Jurassic Park a few more hundred times because rekindling my love affair with fossil hunting also reignited my passion for Sam Neill’s films.

Between 2023 and my father’s death in January 2025, I watched The Hunt for Red October another half-dozen times. I viewed The Hunt for the Wilderpeople more times than I care to admit. The Omen III: The Final Conflict? Well, it doesn’t have to be Halloween or Summerween to watch that.

A few months after my father died, I found myself watching The Hunt for Red October. He wasn’t there to make fun of Sean Connery’s very non-Russian accent. Tato wasn’t sitting across from me—one of his beloved cats asleep on his lap—in his recliner, teasing me, “Close your eyes. Sam’s about to die.” Instead, I did as I always do when watching that film alone. I turned it off after Igor Loginov shoots Vasily Borodin. I went outside. I went for a long walk. I cried. Without my father, one of my all-time favorite films just wasn’t the same.

Then, in July 2026, Sam Neill died. I woke to the news, and a strange, inexplicable heaviness filled me. I couldn’t quite explain it, and so I told everyone, “Today is a day of mourning for me.” Sam was gone. My father was, too. Sam Neill—in our family, we often spoke about him as though he were some long lost cousin whose films we’d just watched and praised—never knew how much his Two Paddocks Instagram posts or his films meant to me and my dad. My father, however, knew how much Sam Neill’s films had meant to us. For days after Sam Neill’s death, I spent time with his films: Jurassic Park, The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Merlin. I read his memoir Did I Ever Tell You This? I laughed. I ugly-bawled. I laughed again when I read that Sam had spent part of his early years in Armagh, Northern Ireland, where I was—oddly enough—traveling to a week or so after his death in order to facilitate a workshop at the John Hewitt International Summer School.

Admittedly, I watched Jurassic Park with awe and wonder on the flight to Dublinn. I texted my mother from the plane: Guess what I am watching? I sent her a gif of Alan Grant. It’s still just as wonderful as it was when Tato took me to see it all those years ago, I told her.

When I reached Armagh days later, I pestered my boyfriend about walking to see the military barracks where Sam Neill had spent a few years of his childhood. Suddenly, I was six years old again, filled with excitement and giggly enthusiasm. My boyfriend kept saying, “Just think. Sam Neill walked these streets.”

Yes. Yes, he did, but it made me a little sad, thinking about Little Boy Sam (or Nigel, as was his given name). My comfort: Little Boy Sam probably never guessed he’d grow up to be a beloved actor who inspired a passion for dinosaurs in an entire generation or that he’d give two Ukrainians in Pennsylvania some of the best father-daughter times of their lives.

My mother, my friends, and my boyfriend often tease me, because I have a framed autographed photo of Sam Neill as Sidney Reilly hanging on my bedroom wall. I hung it there after my father died. I don’t know really know why I chose that specific spot—above my the piled-high-with-books wooden dresser at the foot of my bed. Maybe because during the nights after my father’s death, horrible nightmares in which my father looked at me as I held him and then let go of this life filled me. Maybe because, just as I had often done when I was afraid as a child—when I’d hold my Alan Grant action figure and think “Save me, Alan”—I thought Reilly might emerge from the photo and keep the grief-demons at bay. In some ways, he did, because watching Sam Neill’s films in the months after my father’s death became a form of much-needed therapy as I grappled with the beginnings of a new era of my life.

About three weeks ago, my mother called me one evening: “Sam’s on TV. There’s a film called Rams. Want to watch it with me and have tea?”

“I’ll be right over,” I told her. I was tired and jetlagged from the long-haul Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Washington, DC. I recognized, nonetheless, that this was a new moment in the new era I’d entered upon my father’s death.

Now, my mom and I would watch Sam Neill films together. We’d have our laughs. We’d remember. We’d cry.

“When you were little, you had the biggest crush on him,” my mother commented, smiling. “You cried whenever he died in a film.”

I blushed as I thought about the six-year-old girl I’d once been: gushing over the handsome New Zealand actor as he ran from dinosaurs; daydreaming about the iron-faced Vasily Borodin who never got to see Montana.

The little girl who grew up to be a woman who’d travel the United States, searching for fossilized shells, ferns, and shark’s teeth—all because of a loving father who, decades ago, took her fossil hunting and then to see one of the greatest films ever made: a film that starred one of the most brilliant, versatile actors who ever graced a stage or a filmset with his presence.

Rams, by the way, is a brilliant film. Some day soon, I’ll give you my thoughts about it. In the meantime, watch it for yourselves.

And, thanks, Tato—that is, in reality, all I can say.

Friends, listen up.

Throughout my reviewing career, a lot of novels have crossed my reading-path. I make acquaintances with most of them. With others, I make friends. Rarely do I read a novel and think, “This is my new best friend.”

A novel that becomes a “new best friend” is a novel that, when I leave its pages, I immediately feel like I need to return to that novel and spend more time with it. A best-friend-novel is the kind of novel that I want to sit down with and have another tea. I want to talk to it, ask it questions—and I usually do in the pages of whatever journal in which I’m writing.

In 2026, I’ve made a lot of novel-acquaintances. I’ve made few novel-friends. Until I read Laura Evans’s Little Wild (thank you, Henry Holt, for the review copy!), I had made even fewer novel-best-friends. Little Wild, however, entered my life after I recently returned from Ireland and had to begin a new, chaotic Fall 2026 semester at the community college where I teach. Even from its initial pages, I knew Little Wild was a gift to cherish.

Set in Suffolk, 1937, Little Wild portrays a sweltering English country side. At an estate called Snare House, the Winthers family and staff are prepping for a party to celebrate the return of their daughter, Joanie, who is returning from a summer on the Continent. Joanie’s visit is a swift one before she leaves for Oxford University. The Winthers’ longtime ward and Joanie’s closest friend, Margaret, is the only who knows the truth: Joanie isn’t going to Oxford. Joanie and Margaret, who are secret lovers, will be leaving for London—together.

Their plans, however, collapse after Joanie’s father, the eccentric and wildly unpredictable Fabian, discovers the pair. Fabian banishes Margaret from Snare House; Joanie goes to Oxford, and Margaret must unwillingly rely on her estranged father. In the isolation of the estate’s woods and The Lodge, an unkept and ramshackle house where Margaret’s father has lived for many years, Margaret begins experiencing dark, extremely terrifying nightmares. As she struggles with the dark forces that Margaret believes led to her mother’s ostracism and death, she also wonders if she might somehow harness that power and use it to gain what she really wants—Joanie.

While Margaret and Joanie’s love story is the novel’s crux, Margaret’s struggle against class and social expectations is also inherent in it. Margaret, as the Winthers’ ward, is not privy to the financial, even educational stability, that Joanie’s status offers her. Margaret, most obviously, is the smarter of the two. She wins awards at her school, and literature and languages are an integral part of her being and daily existence. Margaret makes keen observations about the estate, the Winthers, the town, and so many of the others around her. She mirrors other feminist, literary-minded characters often found in Mary Costello’s novels and short stories. At times, particularly at the novel’s beginning, she comes across as much younger than she really is. As the novel progresses, nonetheless, she develops more fully. One can attribute this to her return to the woods and to The Lodge, where despite her grief about losing Joanie, she begins to thrive and to learn more about herself and her mother.

Thanks to Laura Evans’s marvelous writing, Little Wild is deeply romantic and Romantic. Margaret frequently gushes poetically about Joanie. Her reflections are anything but superficial. They’re philosophical and self-aware, especially as she wonders about her own presence in Joanie’s life: “Maybe she pictures me picturing her, and that is all we are today, reflections of the other all the way down.” In another chapter, Margaret becomes even more grandiose in her romantic poesy. She says that Joanie, “even in spring…is summer” and that even “in winter—she carries it with her, sun and sand, warm wine and strawberry ices.” Margaret’s infatuation and desire, and how she communicates them as the novel’s narrator, create much of the novel’s emotional momentum. The momentum builds and builds until it breaks, which—when their relationship comes to an unexpected halt—deepens the intensity of Margaret’s grief.

Margaret, too, is an interesting case study of women who recognize that they do not—and will never—meet society’s expectations. The clash between selfhood and religious dogma—particularly for women—is extremely evident in Little Wild. A slightly humorous, thought-provoking moment is when Margaret how being near a church causes an adverse physical reaction. She shares, “Even now when I’m near a church I get a creeping in my palms, and I can’t go inside without knotting my hands into claws like she [Margaret’s mother] taught me: middle fingers over ring over index, as if trying to cancel out a particularly egregious lie.” Margaret recognizes that she is marked because of who her mother is and that many of the townspeople approach her with deep reproach and suspicion. Another humor-filled scene is when Margaret visits a shop, and the shop-boy treats her with obvious contempt: “As I leave, the shop-boy scowls, and I mouth at him to Va te faire voir. Which means something rude in French, but with a bit of luck he won’t know that, and will spend all day worrying it was a love spell, or some kind of Anglican hex.” Margaret seems to embrace the otherness with which others mark her as well as the distances at which they keep her.

Little Wild embodies so much of what makes Romanticism memorable and timeless. Margaret’s desire for Joanie often overrides her reason and rationality, which eventually leads her to make a drastic decision (which I’m not revealing!). The heavy reliance on natural imagery reinforces the Romanticism, frequently culminating in beautifully written passages that combine nature’s wildness and Margaret’s inconsolable grief: “Every minute of the last three months has fallen on me like a stone. I am pressed into the hard earth, rooted—except not, because I’m moving, the earth is moving me, a tide of earth, it looks like walking but it’s only current, picking each foot up, putting it down.” Such passages capture a soulful oneness with nature often evident in original Romantic works.

Evans’s novel also fully models the Romantic another ideal—imagination’s fusion with the supernatural. Evans’s writing is magical and hallucinatory, and at times Margaret’s experiences with reality and the supernatural bend and blur. One cannot decipher Margaret’s reality from an imagined or even supernatural state. This concept reflects in how Margaret views the light and the dark as well. She states, “light and good are supposed to go hand in hand, but there is an equal holiness in dark. Dark is soothing, it demands no effort or pain; but the light of heaven, when I imagine it, is stark and unforgiving. Darkness, for all its faults, is always soft.” This specific ideal captures the novel’s evident dualities: nature versus society; gender divisions and representations; the accepted juxtaposing those who are unaccepted.

Little Wild possesses a lot of social commentary about women’s rights, identity, and self-determination that resonates with modern day’s ongoing conversations about, well, those same exact things. It matches well with books like unforgettable novel Emilia Hart’s Weyward and Agnieszka Szpila’s riveting Hexes of the Deadwood Forest.

Believe me, it definitely leaves its audience hoping Laura Evans decides to write another book soon.

On 23 August 2005, I began my undergraduate studies at Bridgewater College, a small liberal arts college in Virginia.

Wow. I really hate admitting—and realizing—that I began college that many years ago. Yikes!

23 August is therefore significant for another reason. It’s the day I began keeping a journal. Since that day 21 years ago, I have filled 365 journals, and I am about to begin Journal #366.

Let’s do the math: 365 journals total divided by 21 years equals 17.38 journals filled per year.

Now, to be fair, throughout my childhood and my adolescence, I’d always kept a journal. In fact, the first journal I ever began actually belonged to my grandfather: a red, cloth-cover journal on which one could mark the pages. My grandmother gave it to me and said I could use it since he never finished it (he died before he could). I cherished it, considering I’m named after my grandfather, Mykola (Mykola is Nicholas in Ukrainian; my name is Nikola in Ukrainian, Nicole in English, and I’m named after both my grandfather and my father).

The next journal I received during my childhood was a hardback, beige-covered thing adorned with a cherub-faced angel—a gift from my mother. Perhaps even then she sensed my tendency towards the unholy. I filled its pages, daily, with a simple reflection— “I’m sad.” Pretty profound self-awareness for a nine-year old, I’d say.

Middle school and high school rolled around, and I still kept journals—infrequently. I filled them with fanfiction about The Who, System of a Down, the (great) Scottish actor Ewan Stewart (who portrayed First Officer Murdoch in Titanic). I wrote a lot of angry things about not fitting in, not having friends, and not really liking my overly strict Ukrainian parents (who would call my teachers and request extra homework for me, despite the continual straight A’s I brought home each marking period).

I still have all of these proto-journals, somewhere in a box—one that’s hidden in a dark corner of my upstairs crawl space. Maybe the occasional flying squirrel reads my teenage ranting and raving each winter when one decides the crawl space is their new home. If so, I really hope said flying squirrel has developed a flair for The Who, Type O Negative, Oasis, and Depeche Mode.

On 23 August 2005, after a long day of classes and once again not fitting in (a common theme through my entire life, really), I decided I needed a bookstore break. This meant driving from campus to the nearest Barnes and Noble in Harrisonburg, VA. All these years later, I’m still not sure what I expected to find at that particular store. A new book to read? A new notebook in which to write? A much-needed friend?

It turns out I found two of those in one item.

In reality, I didn’t have the money for the journal. I was on scholarship, and I worked two jobs to pay for gas and food. However, the sleek brown Italian leather journal definitely called “Nikola! Nikola! Nikola!” I checked my checkbook balance (back then we carried these archaic tools called checkbooks, and you had to know how to make your signature for the check to be valid). The $30-plus-tax purchase would definitely take a chunk of that week’s gas money, but what else did I have to lose?

Not much. Believe me.

I left the store that day, the smell of fine leather and blank pages filling my car, and returned to campus, where I found a quiet spot and began writing.

That’s when it all really began, really—my love affair with writing self-reflections and daily journal entries. That journal became a place for everything—class notes, to-do lists, playlists, random thoughts, sketches and drawings. That brown leather journal—the first of many journals to come throughout my college years. My classmates always joked, “Don’t piss off Nikki. She’ll write about you.” One of my friends once commented that my journals were really just simplistic scrapbooks, since I would spend ours copying song lyrics, taping photographs, and writing down memories. Another friend told me I reminded him of Robert Shields, a Washington state high school teacher famous for keeping the world’s most extensive diary. From 1972 until his 1997 stroke.

Listen, I’m eccentric, but I am not that eccentric.

Nonetheless, my journals have always been one of the few places I can truly express myself. I don’t necessarily write each day—a practice my favorite undergraduate writing professor, Dr. Bryan Duncan, said he supported since it can lead to burn out. Even now, two decades after beginning that first real journal, I don’t pressure myself to write each day. If I don’t write, I sometimes make a nonverbal entry: I tape the label from the wine or beer I drank that evening with dinner; I glue a cut-out of the packaging from the Ukrainian biscuits I had with my tea; I fasten the fortunes from the Chinese takeout I shared with my mom for lunch. Why? Well, some days it’s just best to not say anything at all.

A journal’s pages are also where nearly all of my poems and short stories take shape. It’s a rare—nearly nonexistent—day if I sit down, open a Word document, and begin typing a poem or a short story. Instead, I do what I have always done since those too-long-ago undergraduate days: I pick up a Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil (my favorite pencil brand/type!) or a black gel roller pen, and I begin making my own kind of magic.

For me, writing is just as physical as exercise (and I’m a workout junkie). The connection I make with the page—I can’t describe it. I can try: cathartic, therapeutic, necessary, challenging. Some days, putting a poem down on the page, considering line breaks and word choice while writing longhand is just as taxing as doing the 25 burpees I really do not want to do (but I do them anyway, because I’m an adrenaline/ pain junkie).

I grow leery of—and afraid for—a world in which writing has gone digital. For me, writing and journaling are yet another form of intimacy. Those initial, longhand drafts and the daily entries about what went well and what didn’t on any given day are sacred. A journal’s pages are, for me, an inviolable space since as soon as I finish a journal, I add it to a box that eventually finds its way into a crawl space. My dear friend and mentor, Socrates, once told me he greatly admired me for not only consistently keeping a journal, but also having gorgeous handwriting. “Both are lost art forms,” he stated numerous times throughout our 20-year friendship. It’s a sad state of affairs—for self-awareness, self-reflection, emotional regulation, and the literary world—that journaling has become an archaic form of self-expression.

(I feel oddly blasphemous and hypocritical writing that as I type away on this Substack. Perhaps the point is the two—digital writing and handwriting— can coexist together!)

These days, I favor buying blank journals from independent bookstores or directly from the publisher rather than from conglomerates like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble. Hopefully, since I’m the proud owner of 100+ blank journals (forget stocks and bonds—what an investment!), the publishers-that-be don’t decide to stop producing fine journals and notebooks any time soon.

To be honest, though, I’m fairly certain I have enough blank journals to last me the rest of my life. That is, until I’m traveling and find my next new best friend on a shelf in some shop, marketplace, or museum.

Until then, keep writing, friends. It’s a practice that’s good for the soul.

Read more: 14 Famous People Who Kept Journals (And What They Wrote)

As the war in Ukraine nears the five-year mark, many of us who are Ukrainian in some way, shape, or form continue to advocate for Ukraine in whatever ways we can. Ukrainian Independence Day—24 August—approaches, and for many of us in the diaspora it has held a different—possibly even more meaningful significance—during the last 12 years (yes, 12!) of war in Ukraine. Everyday, however, is a good day to uplift Ukrainian literature—especially that which is written by Ukrainian women who are serving on the front, who are volunteering in other ways, and who are advocating for Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian culture wherever they go.

Linen Press is a small-but-mighty press whose slogan is “fine writing by women, for women.” Their literary offerings include a wide range of topics. I was very honored when, via Instagram, they contacted me about an upcoming reading from their latest poetry anthology, War-Torn Voices: Ukrainian Women’s Poetry. After choosing NOT to return to Ukraine and enlist in Ukrainian Armed Forces and making reviewing Ukrainian literature in translation my “war effort,” so to speak, I couldn’t help but tear up a bit. After nearly five years after the full-scale invasion, finding dedicated supporters can be a rarity, and learning that another press decided to carry a small torch and light the path to Ukrainian poetry—and Ukrainian poetry by women—moved me greatly.

After all, I’m a Ukrainian American woman who knows just how tough Ukrainian women are, particularly in the face of adversity.

War-Torn Voices is an illustrated anthology. It compiles the work of twelve Ukrainian women who write from various perspectives. Some are soldiers. Some are humanitarian volunteers. Others are journalists, critics, cultural curators, and activists. The line-up includes Ukrainian literary greats like Yaryna Chornohuz (whose collection Dasein: Defense of Presence won the National Taras Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine); Iya Kiva (check out Silenced Dressed in Cyrillic Letters); and Yuliya Musakovska (check out my review of The God of Freedom). Kristina Otchich-Cherniak’s illustrations separate the poems, adding visual contemplation points between the already philosophical and immediate poems.

It’s difficult to know which poems to highlight first, because all of the poems in this anthology are quite strong. One of my personal favorites is Olena Herasymiuk’s “May Love, Like Pain, Never End” (translated by the brilliant Grace Mahoney). Herasymiuk’s poem is darkly romantic, opening with beautiful and direct lines such as “May love, like pain, never end. / I don’t want to forget the contours of your face.” Romantic imagery blends with war's brutality: “I would give you my hand, but I know longer have one—/ it left my body to reach you faster.” The speaker also poses questions like “What is blood to the bloodless?” and “River water to the bodyless?” A certain fearlessness and defiance conclude the poem:

What is fear? We’ve reached Hell’s gates.
Open them and breathe in the world,
like the pages of a textbook.
We’ve mastered immortality,
conquered darkness together.
I’m afraid to look back.
And you know why.

Iya Kiva’s “Once You’ve Left Your Home,” translated by Philip Nikolayev, in many ways, thematically and emotionally resonates with Serhiy Zhadan’s famous poem “Take Only What You Can Carry.” The poem bluntly captures the refugee experience of leaving one’s town, one’s village, one’s city, even one’s homeland. The speaker states, “once you’ve left your home, you can never stop on the road / never again say “‘Put down your luggage, we’re here’.” They describe footsteps as “the only cradle you carry on your back.” The inability of language to capture certain experiences dominates the poem. The speaker notes that “words cannot describe the love / for a place to which you cannot return—the silent corridor / of childhood.” The poem flows in an eerie, haunting way. The elongated lines move, one into the other, with only the phrase “once you’ve left your home” that opens each stanza acting as a grounding place. This linguistic and stylistic structure mirrors the constant flux, movement, and uncertainty with which many refugees of any background, from any place, experience. The lack of capitalization throughout the poem reinforces the concepts of instability and even intangibility.

Svitlana’s Povalyaeva’s “Rockets Grace My Skin,” translated by Grace Mahoney, is a jarring look at how war manifests physically. It also captures how younger Ukrainian generations will grow up with war as an inherent part of their lives: “Since childhood, I’ve known these small pecks—ravenous / fish with toothless mouths.” The speaker describes the rockets with a strange intimacy: “and I still feel these kisses fresh on my calves because I still / swim in that river.” The poem sadly acknowledges how engrained war is in the Ukrainian memory, too, as the speaker observes how the “welts swell at the whir of rockets over Ukraine” and admits “that’s all I feel. Nothing else stirs within me, not even a / twinge in my diaphragm.” The physical connection the speaker maintains with the rockets is disturbing. Interestingly enough, it provokes one to think of the speaker as either a Ukrainian living through the war or as Ukraine herself, enduring century after century of occupation, colonization, and imperialistic brutality.

You won’t forget War-Torn Voices: Ukrainian Women’s Poetry any time soon. I find myself returning to it frequently, particularly on the days when the war is heavy upon my soul and my mind and I’m thinking about how it has been seven (very long) years since I last saw my beautiful Ukraine. For Ukrainians, poetry has always been a weapon against dictatorships and colonialism. Here’s a huge «дякую!» to Linen Press for arming us with yet another poetry anthology and for preserving some Ukraine’s strongest and fiercest female voices.

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I spend a lot of my day thinking about death. I think about my father’s death in January 2025 daily. Every now and then, thoughts about my own death pop into my head. I ponder questions like “Will I live to be old?” and “How will it happen?” and “What’s it like?” After all, as my father used to say, “It’s not like anybody comes back and tells you what to expect.”

How true.

Lately, the last moments of my father’s death have been replaying in my mind—vividly. I can still see myself, holding him up after he’d taken a sip of water. Throughout my entire my life, my father and I had always had a strange bond, both of blessed with that Ukrainian intuition that leads others to see us as “too superstitious” in this modern world. Thus, when he looked at me with his old, tired green eyes at that specific moment, I knew.

The day before he died, my father drifted in and out of sleep. At one point, when he woke, he said to me “Nikola, you and I have many more adventures to come.”

The adventure began in those moments after his death, and I often wonder what my father saw as he looked at me and then took that first step towards his next journey. Was it my face? Was it my mother’s? Was it his mother—my grandmother—who guided him onward? Or did, as we so often hear, his life flash before his eyes, a series of memories and flashbacks and images that no camera or computer could capture?

My contemplation of such questions is why I have, for over a year, resisted picking up a review copy of Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (and received courtesy of Grand Central Publishing). The other night, nonetheless, I found the sleek copy resting on top of yet another stack of to-be-reviewed (at my own pace, please and thank you) books. At the time I found the book, I was actually thinking about (and quietly grieving) the death of my friend and mentor of 20+ years, an old, gruff, polyglot Green Beret I affectionately refer to as Socrates. I’d like to think it was either my father or Socrates who prompted me to pull The Lantern of Lost Memories from the stack and begin reading.

Whoever—even whatever—it was, I’m glad they did.

The Lantern of Lost Memories consists of three compressed short stories about a magical studio owned by Mr. Hirasaka. Mr. Hirasaka collects antique cameras. What makes Mr. Hirasaka’s studio so fantastic is that it actually acts as a door to the afterlife. Those who are recently departed have one last opportunity—to see their entire life flash before their eyes via a “spinning lantern of memories.” Mr. Hirasaka also offers his guests another gift—a chance to revisit a single moment and take a photo of a special moment they wish to cherish. They can then add the photo to their lantern and take it with them.

What a concept, right?

The Lantern of Lost Memories features an intriguing cast. First, we meet Hatsue, a 92-year old woman who worked as a nursery teacher and who eventually established one of her cities most respected nursery schools. Second, we encounter the rough and rowdy Waniguchi, a yakuza overseer who, surprisingly, is capable of great compassion. Third, we watch Mitsuru—a young girl who tragically died at the hands of her abusive parents—struggle to understand death.

Mr. Hirasaka’s own story is integral to those in the book. He has no memories, and he has only a single photo—one of himself. He frequently wonders what he did and who he was in his own life. Despite the unknowns surrounding Mr. Hirasaka, he has seemed to find a new, meaningful purpose in his role as cameraman and photography guide to the afterlife. His rediscovery of self and of purpose is one of reclamation, in a sense. While Mr. Hirasaka busies himself giving others a second chance, he, too, has a second chance.

If only death really worked that way, right?

The Lantern of Lost Memories hosts another character that will bend heartstrings—Mouse. Mouse appears in the story “The Hero and the Mouse,” which also features Waniguchi. Mouse is robotic, possibly even neurodivergent. He can fix anything, and he can even calculate the time it will take to fix whatever needs fixing. In one section of the story, Mouse goes as far as to resurrect a little girl’s dead hamster in a matter of eight days. In another section, he reconstructs a little boy’s beloved family photograph that bullies destroyed. Mouse is logical, like Spock in Star Trek, and his interactions with Waniguchi and other characters in “The Hero and the Mouse” are some of the collection’s most humorous. However, what also makes the story endearing is the surprising compassion Waniguchi shows to Mouse. Waniguchi remains fascinated by Mouse’s work ethic, personality, and abilities throughout the entire story, and that fascination leads Waniguchi to express rather uncharacteristic behaviors like threatening Waniguchi’s “business partner” Kosaki if he hurts or fires Mouse. Waniguchi, of all the characters in The Lantern of Lost Memories, shows the most development, while Mouse’s development is subtle and not fully evident until the story’s end (and, no, I’m not providing spoilers!).

Overall, The Lantern of Lost Memories is a brief, fantastic read. I read it in less than two days, and I’ll definitely be thinking about its messages about death, grief, choices, kindness, and sacrifice for awhile.

This book also made me think about, if given the chance to return to a single moment and snap one last photo, what moment I would choose. I think I’ll have to get back to you on that.

At certain points, A Beautiful Loan drags a bit. For example, as the novel concludes, Anna visits a psychoanalyst, and their long and drawn-out conversations about Jung and other theories permeate page after page. Had Costello simply continued writing about Anna’s harrowing emotions of watching her romance with Karim careen slowly down a path on which she is losing her self, her interests, and even Boo, the chapters would have been much more eloquent and structurally tighter.

A Beautiful Loan, nonetheless, is not simply another novel about a middle-aged woman attempting to understand the relationships and (failed) romances defining her life. It, like nearly everything Costello writes, is heady and book-ish. Some chapters center around Anna’s embrace of Jungian philosophy, while others convey her obsession with Camus. Despite Anna’s relationship foibles, her life is a testament to how much more fruitful one’s existence is when they make literature an every day part of it. Considering Anna’s embodiment of this ideal, it’s only apropos that the JHISS powers-that-be selected A Beautiful Loan as a feature. After all, the John Hewitt Society’s mission is “To promote literature, arts and culture inspired by the ideas and ideals of the poet, art historian and political thinker John Hewitt,” which basically amounts to living, breathing, eating, and sleeping literature, arts, and culture.

It must be said: after having read Costello’s stunning short story collection The China Factory and her novel Academy Street both in the span of two days, A Beautiful Loan does fall short of Costello’s usual linguistic majesty. Anna’s story, nonetheless, will resonate with a majority of readers.

And as for Costello’s interview with Martin Doyle? Don’t worry. Seats filled. Her answers about philosophy, world violence, books, and accepting one’s hero’s foibles captured the audience and, I’m fairly certain, leaving each of us eagerly anticipating her next book.