Milk Blood Heat

November 23, 2020
Northern Florida looms large over the 11 stories that comprise Moniz’s smart debut collection, a comingling of themes of adolescent discovery, family strain, and temptation’s dangerous appeal. In the title story, a friendship between two eighth grade girls, complete with awkward companionship and blood pacts, turns to conversations on death, and “An Almanac of Bones” sees another pair of tweens bonding over animal skulls and one girl’s family tradition of moon festivals. An absent mother figures in the latter story, and fractured relations populate several others. “Thicker Than Water” follows estranged siblings as they reluctantly reunite to drive their father’s ashes to his final resting place. “The Loss of Heaven” stars a 50-something man who begins spending more time at the local watering hole after his wife refuses chemotherapy treatments for her cancer, and in “Snow,” the icy sexual relationship between a woman and her husband leads her to contemplate their future during a night of spiritual awakening while bartending. Some stories end abruptly, but Moniz knows her characters well and writes with confidence throughout, letting narratives meander without losing sight of their destinations. Each of these humanity-studying journeys through the Sunshine State easily stands on its own. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore and Company

Starred review from December 1, 2020

DEBUT Moniz has won multiple awards for her individual stories, and this excellent debut collection shows why. Focusing on marginalized communities and limning relationships, longing, and our uneasy passage through a world that often confounds us, she nails aching moments of naked human emotion in direct if luscious language. A woman unable to recover from a miscarriage is plagued by strange visions often featuring the lost child's body parts. A teenager rebels against her pastor's veiled aggressions, refusing to attend church while trying to help a troubled sibling. A man whose wife is dying of cancer must face her coolness toward him and his own shortcomings. And a 13-year-old Black girl struggles with a wayward white girlfriend in a story that ends in tragedy. While many story collections suffer from a sameness of theme, character, or plot, that's not a problem here. The tales are generally set in Florida, but the similarities end there; each entry is distinctive in its premise, and each will surprise the reader in a different way. What gives the collection coherence is Moniz's distinctive vision. VERDICT Highly recommended; catch this writer early in her game.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2020
This powerful debut collection is a wonderland of deep female characters navigating their lives against the ever changeable backdrop of Florida. The feminine is sublime throughout these stories, featuring girls and women who are submerged in loss, love, death, temptation, and the cruelty and benevolence of motherhood, two sides of the same coin. Each story vibrates with a thrumming undercurrent of primal power, found in both nature and in the most shadowy parts of ourselves. In "The Hearts of Our Enemies," Frankie navigates the rockiness between herself and her teenage daughter, Margot, after she tells her husband about her almost-infidelity and he moves out; then she finds a note in Margot's jeans that leads her to discover how far she will go to protect her child against an insidious predator. The title story deals with two friends on the cusp of adolescence, one Black and the other White, as they embrace their inner wildness until tragedy befalls one of them. In "Tongues," a tensile power struggle between a teenager and the emotionally brutal, restrictive religious patriarchy of her family and their pastor sends her on a journey to unwrap her truest self. A woman must reckon with her thorny relationship with her mother as she decides whether to continue her weeks-old pregnancy while planning her mother's overly grand 50th birthday party in "Necessary Bodies," and "Thicker Than Water" sends a sister on a road trip with her estranged brother and their father's ashes to Santa Fe, where she must find a way to make peace with both her brother and the ghost of a man she loved who hurt her in the worst way a father can hurt a child. Dark and lushly layered, these stories will bewitch you.

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December 1, 2020
This debut collection from award-winning Moniz sets its fascinating and difficult stories in Florida. These stories are fascinating because their connective moments are both unpredictable and earned, and difficult because the characters, many of whom are Black, manage the hardest of hard in life, including sexual abuse, suicide, and cancer. In standout story "Feast," the first-person narrator spends a day with her husband's daughter from his first marriage, her own miscarriage aflame in her mind and vision. Baby parts appear in marigold bouquets. The new beginning the narrator eventually finds is brutal, hard-won, and powerfully imagistic in a way that feels true to life. In "Tongues," young teen Zey rejects the predatory advances of her church's pastor only to be rejected herself by the powerful social system that protects him. By juxtaposing major physical violence--a teen jumps from a roof--with intimate, emotional violence--a husband withholds from his dying wife--Moniz reinforces that pain is pain is pain. Sometimes it is transformative; sometimes it only hurts. This story collection is for readers who want to be both challenged and compelled.

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