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training was tough, physically and emotionally, but she struggled on. Then came the Gulf War, and to her shock (“War wasn’t supposed to be part of the equation”), she found herself in the desert during Operation Desert Storm, right behind the front lines as soldiers pushed on to Baghdad. It proved to be a brief war, but due to an act of passion with a fellow soldier during the conflict, Reese became pregnant, complicating her struggles with Army life: sergeants who singled her out for hard duty (including burn-pit duty, tending “fires that consumed not just human waste but trash, plastics, electronics, chemicals”) and the loneliness and fury that plagued her but also motivated her. When she was ordered to report for a year’s tour in Turkey but told that she had to leave her infant daughter stateside, she took a hardship discharge. This is a powerful account that states the author’s feeling plainly: She describes soldiers’ MREs (meals, ready-to-eat) as “individually packaged sadness”; her heart breaks for the ragged young Iraqi soldiers lining the roadside, and she’s moved when Saudis, recognizing her isolation, invite her to their Ramadan fast-breaking meal. Both the author and Wilson, Reese’s daughter, are credited as co-authors, which works well; Wilson, a successful fashion designer, writes the prologue and epilogue and is effusive in her love for her mother. (Reese also went on to a successful career, in the federal government.) The memoir is presented in a rather blocky typeface, with a lot of white space and extremely short paragraphs that give a telegraphic feel to the reading, resulting in thoughts and observations that feel scattershot. This style is effective at times—when stung by injustice, Reese ruminates with a controlled fury: “I’d survived it all. / And I’d survive this too. / Because I had her. / And she was worth fighting for”—but it also gives the work a feeling of fragmentation. Overall, although Reese’s account of her circumstances and struggle is sympathetic, but the formatting of the text, as striking as it sometimes is, becomes wearying. Interspersed throughout the text are reproductions of military documents (including awards), letters home, and 186
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photographs of happy times, including a cascade of images at the end. A sincere and passionate remembrance that will draw readers in, despite occasionally uneven execution.
Encounters With Jane Austen: Celebrating 250 Years Robson, Cheryl | Aurora Metro Books (256 pp.) $21.99 paper | November 30, 2025 9781913641511
Robson collects writings about and inspired by the iconic English novelist. Few writers have seen their work reinterpreted as much as Jane Austen’s. “We all encounter Austen differently and from the position of where and when we read her,” writes the scholar Jennie Batchelor in the book’s introduction. “How we read her changes as the world changes around us.” This anthology, a melange of fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews, reflects the diversity of reactions to Austen’s work. Katherine Reay writes of the healing experience of reading the novelist while recovering from a severe injury, while Katie Lumsden discusses the pleasure of rereading Austen’s novels over and over at different stages in her life. Fiction pieces imagine the author and her characters in new, often revisionary arrangements; in Julia Miller’s “Georgiana Darcy—Pistols at Dawn,” Pride and Prejudice’s Georgiana Darcy exacts satisfaction from the gold-digger George Wickham in the form of a duel, while in Charlie Lovett’s novel excerpt “First Impressions,” Austen defends herself against the accusation that she has “a too highly developed interest in fictionalizing [her] acquaintances.” (One particularly meta piece is an Austen update written by actress and novelist Talulah Riley, who starred in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film adaptation.) Interviewees include Jeff James, the director who brought Persuasion to the stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange
Theatre, and Martin Jennings, the sculptor who created a bronze sculpture of Austen for Winchester Cathedral. Numerous poets contribute poems, including “Witch-Wife” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, about a woman who “was not made for any man, / And she never will be all mine.” The range of the contributors leaves the reader with a sense of how important Austen is to writers in particular, who see in her not simply an antecedent or role model but as an old friend who, with constancy and wit, is always there during those transitional moments in life—the very moments that Austen herself wrote about with such precision. A loving tribute to a legendary author whose work continues to resonate in the current day.
From the Cold Rose, Mia K. | Rose Quill (380 pp.) | $16.99 paper | January 27, 2026 | 9781764251501
In Rose’s fantasy romance novel, a young woman sheds the constraints of her noble status to join a hunt for a male volent creature. As the daughter of the Comte de Grecy, 20-year-old Claris knows that her expected role in life is to marry a fellow noble, become the new Comtesse, and give birth to an heir. However, as a passionate practitioner of the impalement arts, Claris yearns to be like the blade-maidens in the neighboring country of Suevia: “fierce in battle and beholden to no man.” When a man named Brahim comes to her father’s estate with news of a demi-lich entering their domain, the opportunity to shake off her constraints presents itself. Demi-lichs are former mages who’ve traded their souls for immortality, spread death and destruction, and steal their victims’ souls. Demi-lichs only can only be killed by a specific type of blade thrown directly into one vulnerable spot. Claris, a highly skilled knife-thrower, successfully convinces her ill father to K IR KU S R E V IE W S
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