By Gwen E. Kirby

I feel keen anticipation and anxiety when I start a book that has set itself A Challenge. Will the author pull off a magic trick or will The Challenge become a gimmick? Will it add a new dimension to the characters’ stories or will it become an intellectual exercise, A Challenge for the sake of itself?

In Daughters of the New Year (Hanover Square Press, 2022), E. M. Tran tells the story of the Vietnamese-immigrant Trung family through its women, beginning in present-day New Orleans and moving backward in time through Hurricane Katrina to the fall of Saigon, the French occupation of Vietnam, and finally to fragments of an almost mythic past. The novel is a beautiful example of when A Challenge—here, telling a story backward—can give new depths to classic themes. Tran’s exploration of legacy, family, and cultural memory is complicated and shows us how the past refuses to offer up answers even when we have imaginative access to it.

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By Nicole Walker

I first met Zoë Bossiere (they/she) when I visited Ander Monson’s undergraduate nonfiction course. We had an intense conversation about how to balance information and lyricism in our essays. I knew them as the managing editor of Brevity Magazine which publishes essays of writers working in the brief form. Many of these essays lean toward the lyrical side, like Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” which begins with one very grounded scene but then spins out to include a litany of mini-scenes whose sonic and imagistic connections blow the top of one’s head off. Bossiere also recently edited and published, with Erica Trabold, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) which draws from a broad group of writers to argue that the lyric is indeed a powerful persuasive force for change.

So, I was surprised when I started to read Cactus Country (Abrams Press, 2024). On a flight to Minneapolis, as I turned page after page like the book was on fire, I thought, This book is the most narrative memoir I have ever read. I am prone to exaggeration. I know of many memoirs that move by story more than association, but Cactus Country holds tightly onto narrative and doesn’t let go. And, neither could I, as I fell in love with the author’s rendering of place and of their allegiance to how the narrator’s body moved through that place.

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