The childhood scenes within this psychological fiction gave me an unreasonable sense of hope for the cliches of a coming of age story, but instead I was met with characters I loved to hate and their ostentatious scenes. Nina’s character evolution never led her to true maturation despite her painful eagerness to better herself during her search for love, and remained as a shell of a writer. True Love’s other characters include a sexually deviant snob, a chaotic failed attempt of a boyfriend, a “filmmaker” that still lives with his parents, and a single mother with unendurable taste in men.

the exploration of love and its myriad facets. Nina’s journey, although not a traditional romance, delves into the intricacies of human connection and the emotional rollercoaster that is often associated with love. The novel’s satirical approach to psychological fiction allows readers to navigate the complexities of relationships with both humor and depth. Love, in its various forms, becomes a lens through which the characters grapple with their own vulnerabilities, unveiling the raw and authentic aspects of the human experience.

In moments of uncertainty and introspection, one might ponder not only the characters’ dilemmas but also personal questions about love and connection. Seeking guidance on matters of the heart is not uncommon, and people often wonder what to ask a psychic in their quest for clarity. The novel, much like life itself, invites readers to reflect on the unpredictable nature of love and the questions that linger in the depths of our minds. In this intricate dance between fiction and reality, the exploration of love becomes a thread that weaves through the narrative, offering both solace and contemplation for those navigating their own complex emotional landscapes.

I applaud Gerard for her surprising, nonlinear storytelling. It kept me on my toes and ready to see what would come next. Another merit included a scene that detailed the abuse experienced by the main character without reducing it to trauma porn.

The dialogue felt far fetched from reality, as if the only goal was to create conflict between the – already insufferable – characters. It felt somewhat counter intuitive that Gerard introduced humor early on only to result in an excessively bleak ending. If the book was not so hard to put down I would have torn it in half.

Nina’s search for love is a stinging critique of current society, as well as a sensitive analysis of our desperate need for connection in an age of alienation. These realizations only came to me after I peeled away the agonizing details.

All in all, True Love encompassed the best themes within Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë [pen name Currer Bell] and the worst captious characters in the psychological thriller Like Me, written by Hayley Phelan.

I would rate True Love a 4/5 because True Love is in no way the average YA romance novel I expected but was the chilling call to reality I needed.

Come see Sarah Gerard read her book and Kaveh Akbar read his, Pilgrim Bell, at Prairie Lights in Iowa City at 1:00 on Saturday, April 9. True Love is available for purchase at Prairie Lights.

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Bridget Bates opened the night with her award-winning collection of poetry, What Is Not Missing Is Light.  The book is an assortment of statues and muses, reflections on children, family, memory itself, and beginnings. Each poem seems to take place simultaneously, in a single moment in which Bates studies a statue of a woman inside an Italian museum.  But the poems are hardly repetitive; Bates uses the statue as a medium to move beyond  the museum, into a beach day with her mother when she was five years old, a memory of her childhood, or a meditation on a woman’s place in society.

It’s also notable that the collection never alludes to ends, only beginnings.

This is perhaps a reflection of the author’s past year, in which she produced an entire collection of poetry and gave birth to her daughter – a year of productivity that Lauren Haldeman, who also has a child, marvelled at. She explained that balancing time with her writing and her child took her years to master, and put into perspective how impressive Bridget’s feat was.

Lauren Haldeman’s book, Calenday, is a compilation of poetry from her first few years of raising her daughter, Ellie. The collection is a unique space in which everyday problems, including the complications of caring for a baby (like breastmilk missing your child’s mouth and getting in her nose) collide with imaginary worlds.  The connection gives each poem a light, playful feel. My favorite was a verse in which character Cynthia follows a rainbow and eats pills that are really tiny boats which make her feel bad about yelling at the IT guy this morning.

Lauren’s poems have a certain colloquial charm to them that make their whimsical allusions to faraway worlds seem embedded in reality and so, so relatable.

The second half of Calenday takes a more serious tone as Haldeman reflects on her brother’s unexpected death two years before the book was published. She describes his murder near a parking lot in Denver, the stab wounds, the bloody jacket, and does not try to make sense of what cannot be made sense of. The poems from this half of the book have a distant feeling to them – they are a narration of facts from the finding of a brother’s damaged body, rather than an elegy or lamentation – a reflection of numb and stunned grief.

Lauren ended the night on a lighter note, with a puppet show called a “cranky,” to illustrate a poem about a rabbit. The cranky uses a roll of paper – almost like a banner of a story, and is operated by crank which rolls the paper from right to left, and keeps the banner moving. The contraption also uses shadows from behind the paper, and the author made the cut-out of a house, a rabbit, a picket fence.  Lauren read her poem while cranking the machine, and the audience laughed at the rabbit and its shadow house and loved it.

For more readings, check out Prairie Light’s upcoming events.

The post Lit Circle: Bridget Bates and Lauren Haldeman at Prairie Lights appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Next, was Kembrew McLeod. McLeod read from his just released book, Pranksters, which tracked the role pranksters have played in English and American society since the likes of Jonathan Swift and Benjamin Franklin. He read from his book that he had “no interest in cruelty” and chose only to include pranks that had the aim of enacting some sort of change, whether it was social, cultural, political, or economical. Considering the subject matter, it wasn’t surprising that McLeod’s reading was light, sarcastic, and had the perfect amount of dry wit to keep the audience surprised and laughing. The Q&A session largely revolved around McLeod’s own pranks, which include him dressing up more than once as a robot to get noticed by big politicians.

Prairie Lights Bookstore is now selling copies of Made to Break and Pranksters. McLeod has also provided Prairie Lights with prankster trading cards, giving synopses of some of his favorite pranks featured in his book.

The post Mission Creek: Kembrew McLeod & D. Voy Reading @ Prairie Lights, 4/2/14 appeared first on KRUI Radio.