This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Menace often comes from ordinary situations in the stories found in Bluebeard's First Wife by Ha Seong-nan (Flowers of Mold). How well do people know each other, and what can happen when they are carried away by obsessions? Couples who decide to marry while still strangers to each other figure in several selections, such as "Joy to the World" and the title story. In some cases, the engagement is quick, in others after the relationship "started to feel a little boring," but always one person's secrets intrude to overturn the other's world, raising the question of how well two people can ever know each other.
In stories such as "Pinky Finger," a quotidian risk like taking a taxi alone at night proves dangerous in ways beyond the expected. Lives end or are merely upended. A sense of unease pervades every story, whether it traces the slow breakdown of a relationship or abruptly startles readers with an opening line such as, "The fisherman is trying to drag me to the riverbank."
In stark, unflinching prose, Seong-nan plumbs feelings of isolation in a modern world in which characters often find themselves bent under the force of traditional expectations, with new dangers looming every day. This is a uniformly captivating collection of stories that could be incidents from a local paper, but which are no less haunting for it. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: Horrors lurk beneath the surface of daily life in this precisely written collection of stories.

This review was originally published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
Secrets and revenge haunt a Mississippi plantation in Pale, the potent debut novel from Edward A. Farmer. Bernice takes a job as a servant in the Kern household to find stability and a place with her brother when she was otherwise alone. Jesse and Fletcher, the two sons of fellow servant Silva, arrive to work the cotton harvest in the summer of 1966, and the Missus sees an opportunity to repay old wounds. Flirting with Jesse is only the beginning of a plan that will destroy families. Bernice struggles to discover the roots of the Missus's anger while shielding those that she cares for as much as possible.
Pale is a spare book, full of characters that do not give up their secrets easily. The world is changing as the civil rights movement surges across the country, but at the Kern plantation, young men ask what makes them different from slaves. Missus's revenge is for wrongs a generation old, and its aftermath will stretch into the next. Although this is a brief book, Farmer takes his time setting out the methods by which characters will destroy each other over the course of years. Small, cruel truths slowly come out. Readers will hang on each page, just as Bernice feels bound to stay until the story is done. This intergenerational story of racism, patriarchy and vengeance is one that will not soon be forgotten. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: Vengeance unfolds slowly in this tense, mid-20th century Southern gothic.