Lisa A

BookBrowse Reviewer

0 followers 0 following

+ Follow

BookBrowse Reviewer Lisa is a BookBrowse Reviewer and has written reviews featured in The BookBrowse Review.

"Lisa Ahima is a New Orleans-based, black writer and content creator. She works for a major literary agency, a black-owned bookstore, and judges fiction for a literary magazine. She especially loves lyric essays, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. She owns "The Black Joy Podcast," a visual podcast about breaking out of the idea behind a "black monolith," exploring in a digestible manner the different facets of black media representation while balancing academic sources, accessible language, and meme culture, which you can view here.

BookBrowse Editorial Reviews (14)

BookBrowse Editorial Review

All the Other Mothers Hate Me
by Sarah Harman

(3/12/2025)

Sarah Harman's All the Other Mothers Hate Me is a darkly funny exploration of maternal existential dread, loneliness, aging, and identity that had me equal parts barking out laughter and holding my breath. Harman's ability to wield playful humor without undercutting the seriousness and grave circumstances of her subject is something I absolutely loved. As much as I enjoyed the ridiculousness of the novel, the ending is so very strange. I think the novel could have maintained its sinister

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

(11/6/2024)

Coates begins by bringing readers alongside him to Senegal, on his first trip to Africa. Then, he reports to South Carolina, in response to the attempted banning of one of his books. Lastly, he travels throughout the Middle East to witness firsthand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (prior to 2023). Here I understood that Coates and I, despite having both lived in a country that contradicts our knowledge of our oppression, were somehow also victims of our own biases. I think neither of us will ev

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Night Guest
by Hildur Knutsdottir

(9/18/2024)

What do you do when your world seems like it's falling apart all around you, and when even before the incident that set things off, you were barely holding it together? In Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest, translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal, Iðunn grapples with this question. In search of the answer, she descends into a darkness that will leave readers shocked and terrified. Knútsdóttir's novel is a horrifying look into how being a woman com

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
by Ananda Lima

(6/19/2024)

There is humor in how matter-of-fact the narration is when personifying the devil. Lima's characterization is both funny and believable, such as, "[t]he Devil loved the DMV." This is balanced with beautiful, poignant reflections. The writer contemplates how it feels to grow up, and the nostalgia one experiences when looking at old pictures: "How those silly nights feel like some freaky moving Escher picture of a mountain peak appearing to get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, but someh

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Neighbors and Other Stories
by Diane Oliver

(2/21/2024)

Diane Oliver's Neighbors and Other Stories challenged my own understanding of America, during and after de facto segregation. Each short story is an observation of individual lives. Oliver wrote many of these stories in her early 20s, during the early-to-mid '60s, and this posthumous collection brings a youthful, introspective twist to our comprehension of the time. It is a unique peek into the past, and, in many ways, a soothsaying of the future we're living in.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Let Us Descend: A Novel
by Jesmyn Ward

(10/18/2023)

By default, slavery offers its horrors as a tension. Annis's overwhelming grief as she loses people close to her is also a relatively expected narrative layer. Mama Aza's mystical, sometimes sinister presence is a fascinating, unexpected tension that complements Annis's experiences very well. But these tensions are not the only moving pieces of the plot as it unfolds: Ward's novel is also a coming-of-age story. Alongside the bleak reality of her life, readers grow up with Annis, hearing her inte

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Happiness Falls: A Novel
by Angie Kim

(10/4/2023)

Within all of Kim's wonderful writing, I was still left so curious about Eugene's personhood outside the context of his disability and familial relationships. Most of the characterization we get of Eugene is tied to his lack of speech, but he feels like such a core part of the novel that I wanted more of him. That said, Happiness Falls is not only a great suspense novel where every page pulls you toward the edge of a horrific cliffhanger, it is also a novel that confronts you. It alerts y

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Making of Yolanda la Bruja
by Lorraine Avila

(5/3/2023)

The description may lead readers to believe a major point of the plot hinges on whether Yolanda can convince people not only that she has visions but of what the visions entail: a premonition that Ben will shoot up the school. However, the conflict Yolanda encounters concerning her visions is internal and more about whether she believes in herself, as she seems too terrified to tell people about them in the first place. Nonetheless, I was fine with how the direction of the narrative steered. I a

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Bandit Queens: A Novel
by Parini Shroff

(3/1/2023)

Parini Shroff's The Bandit Queens is a darkly comedic tale about female friendship and women's empowerment that upholds respectful discourse about violence against women in India and the systems that perpetuate that brutality. Shroff's novel is a delicate tightrope act, always balancing on the line between comedy and tragedy. It quickly won my heart in engaging with sexism and casteism gracefully. Seamless dialogue reads as if it's from a binge-worthy Netflix series and descriptions perfe

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
by Franny Choi

(2/1/2023)

How Choi plays with tense and time is my favorite aspect of her collection. In "Comfort Poem," the speaker of the piece is sitting at home curled up with a cat, using the present tense through the first two stanzas. In the third stanza, the poem moves into the past tense as the speaker comforts someone through a life-altering surgery. Throughout the next section, Choi uses variations on the phrase "comfort woman" to detail explicit moments of sexual violence in the past. That section is very vis

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Lost Ticket
by Freya Sampson

(10/5/2022)

A quirky commercial take on a coming-of-age story and travel narrative, The Lost Ticket at its core is about trusting one's nonlinear path to happiness and self-acceptance, as well as discovering the true value of kindness. Sampson's novel is a balancing act of humor and heartbreak that makes a cathartic comfort read for anybody who enjoys stories of compassion. The most compelling part of The Lost Ticket to me is how Sampson writes certain types of characters who are not usually a

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Most Precious Substance on Earth
by Shashi Bhat

(8/3/2022)

The structure of The Most Precious Substance on Earth was something I both enjoyed and struggled with throughout my reading experience. Bhat's book feels more like a short story collection than a novel, and this is a major factor to take into account when considering whether it would appeal to you. What I loved about the book regarding its short story presentation is Bhat's economical use of language. Readers quickly get a sense of Nina's personality, what she thinks about and the central

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Let's Not Do That Again: A Novel
by Grant Ginder

(5/4/2022)

This is a tender novel at its core. In the midst of its horrors (which are sometimes inappropriately funny), there is fighting, which means there is hope. There is hope for love to prevail, for oneself and one's family. I was enraptured by how much these characters would fight to love, under any and all wild circumstances. Ginder's book is not only a love letter to dysfunctional families, or even that side of the family you only see over holidays — it is a love letter to all families, to o

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Nobody's Magic
by Destiny O. Birdsong

(3/16/2022)

Don't mistake Birdsong being a poet for her being inaccessible. Her sometimes crude humor is full of pop culture references, as seen in Maple's story: "Ms. P was a rich chocolate brown, over six feet tall, and had the biggest natural titties I've ever seen…And it was torture watching her dance anywhere that wasn't on the pole. You kept wondering when those titties were gonna pop out like the Kool-Aid Man." Moments like this are sprinkled throughout the narrative, showing that the author kn