The Vanished Birds – Finding Your Family

Have you ever wanted to turn to a colleague and exclaim “wow, you’re a coward,” and have legitimate grounds to stand on? What if that colleague was a good friend who told you to read a book, and you stonewalled them forever because “you had better books to read than ones they already read?” Well,…

The Spear Cuts Through Water – And Heart

Back in 2020, Simon Jimenez released his first major book, The Vanished Birds. I actually read it then and declined to review it despite all the buzz surrounding the release. My reasoning for this was simple: despite being one of the best books I had read that year, the subject matter (the torture and death…

The Dark Horse Initiative: January-June Wrap Up

Welcome to our Dark Horse Initiative wrap up for the first half of 2020! This year, we found a surplus of debuts we wanted to review, so we divided our Dark Horse list into two halves.  January through June brought us 12 debuts. After a handful of delays, we finally knocked most of these off…