Posts by Amber Ruth Paulen

How to Find Your Home: A Review of Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum

January 19, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Amber Ruth Paulen

Tangerinn is . . . a story of blooming beyond the social images and pressures that can get confused with a meaningful life.

Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand, Europa Editions, 2026

When Mina, the first-person narrator of Emanuela Anechoum’s debut novel Tangerinn, returns to her childhood home in southern Italy after the death of her father, she is argumentative and defensive. She fights with her sister Aisha who picks her up at the airport—about hair removal, head scarves, who knew their father best. Though some of this prickliness could be due to grief, her pre-loss self has already been established as someone quick to judge, who has shored up a levee of self-defense. Mina readily admits to herself that she is a knot of “inadequacy and fear” and is most on edge trying to answer the question of who she really is. Though this query is always loaded, it is particularly so in this novel that takes on the weighty contemporary topics of cross-generational immigration and the social digital landscape.

The beginning of Tangerinn takes place in London and shares resonances with Vicenzo Latronico’s Perfection, published in English earlier this year. Like Mina, Latronico’s couple have moved from Italy to northern Europe and define themselves by their curations—what brands, plants, colors, furniture, and neighborhood they live in. But while the insecurities of Perfection remain mostly placid below this veneer, Mina dislikes her acquiescence to this powerful, social dictate, which is represented by her roommate/mentor/idol Liz. Before Mina receives the call about her dad’s death, she and Liz are having a conversation about envy, at which Mina thinks: “I envy everyone, all the time. I constantly envy people who are beautiful, rich, happy, sure of themselves. I’m full of venom for other people’s privilege, and I also envy their merits. I hope Liz loses everything she has.” Yet Mina must have Liz as her friend, because only Liz—the influencer who has everything—can be the reassurance that she is getting her life in London right.   READ MORE…

Growing, Growing, Gone: A Review of Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov

October 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Amber Ruth Paulen

[T]he fiction of Death and the Gardener is suggesting that the only way to get through both death—and life—is by transforming experiences.

Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Liveright, 2025

“What happens to the garden . . . when the gardener is gone?” asks the narrator of Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel, Death and the Gardner. After winning the International Booker Prize in 2023 for Time Shelter, the Bulgarian writer returns with a novel featuring a similarly famous Bulgarian writer—with the additional autobiographical detail of a father who has died from cancer, leaving his garden behind. Within this autofiction, the reader will not have to wait long for an answer to that primary, haunting question: “The garden will continue to flourish, even without its gardener, what he has planted will still grow, bear fruit, but wildness will also start to make inroads, after some time weeds and grasses will overtake everything.” The seasons will cycle the plants through life and death—and life again. In a garden, even without its gardener, there is still promise of spring; perhaps it’s this promise of revival that makes gardening an ideal outlet for grief.

I began my first garden three years ago as my dad lay dying of cancer in the living room. His friends—now my friends—had shown me how to hoe a straight line between two markers and brush in the seeds, then how to cover them with soil, going back down the lines. What they couldn’t do was prepare me for when the tilled dirt filled with weeds, for when my dad died and I inherited his house and its garden. That first summer, I ripped up endless roots, but the weeds kept on growing.

The narrator of Death and the Gardener does not work at his father’s garden after he dies, but he does use it as the central grounding image for the book that he writes. Though Death and the Gardener calls itself a novel on the cover, it reads with the intimacy of a memoir in Angela Rodel’s expert translation. Acknowledging this slippery approach to genre, the narrator admits, “This book has no obvious genre; it needs to create one for itself.” He too wonders “whether the kindling of those words cools [grief], or just inflame it all the more.” Writing, then, is taken to be like gardening after a death: a way to bargain for just a little more time with that person. This cathartic use of writing (and gardening) in grief is nothing new, but Gospodinov’s approach draws particular attention to the push and pull of the writing itself, and how this kind of detailed remembering both brings back his father and reproduces the trauma of witnessing him suffer and die. READ MORE…