Thank you, Literary Titan!
Thomas Anderson, editor in chief at Literary Titan, just gave my latest novel Shinbone Lane a five-star review. It’s pasted in below
This review gave me a big boost on a chilly February day:
Shinbone Lane is a work of magical realism set in 1970s San Francisco, following sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy as she stumbles into a pocket of the city that feels almost hidden from time. Taken in by warm-hearted Clara and her neighbor Ted at 346 Shinbone Lane, Maddy finds herself surrounded by artists, misfits, and dreamers, watched over by Captain, a vividly colored, opinionated pigeon with a spring for a foot. As she settles into this found family, the lane’s history starts to surface: a bitter neighbor whose daughter vanished, a house that seems to reconfigure itself, a ripple tree that hums and shimmers, and secrets that tie the past and present together until they converge at the annual Shinbone Fair, where healing and reckoning arrive side by side.
Reading it, I kept feeling like the lane itself was the main character. The magical realism sits lightly on the story, but it is everywhere, from the impossible backyard at 346 to the soft chiming of the ripple tree’s heart-shaped leaves and the way Captain quietly nudges people toward wiser choices. Laura McHale Holland writes San Francisco with such affection that I could almost smell the mix of diesel, ocean air, and bakery sweets, especially when the scent of those famous Star Bakery scones with their butterscotch maple glaze drifts up the hill. The choice to juggle many points of view, not just Maddy’s but also people like Clara, Lark, Eloise, and others, gives the book that classic ensemble feel you often get in community-centered magical realism.
What stuck with me most were the emotional currents under the whimsy. This is magical realism, but the magic never erases how hard it is to be human. You feel Maddy’s hunger for safety after months on the road, Lark’s bruised self-image as she compares herself to every woman who passes beneath her window, and Eloise’s grief curdling into control and cruelty as she clings to the idea that her missing daughter must be close by. The book does not shy away from darker turns, including violence and betrayal, or from the way people can exploit each other while insisting they are acting out of love. At the same time, there is a steady thread of resilience that feels very much in line with women’s fiction: characters keep getting knocked down, then choosing, sometimes shakily, to reach for connection again. I appreciated that the magic, whether it is a talking pigeon or a mysterious flute sending shimmering mist across the hillside, mostly amplifies what is already in the characters instead of fixing their problems for them.
By the end, I felt like I had been invited to a long, slightly chaotic block party where people sing show tunes off key, argue about renaming the street, fall in and out of love, and still manage to show up for one another when it really counts. The book sits comfortably in the genre of magical realism with a strong blend of historical and women’s fiction, and I think it will land best with readers who enjoy character-driven stories, found family, and a city setting that feels almost like a living spell. If you are up for wandering a strange little lane in 1974 San Francisco, listening to a wisecracking pigeon and a singing old house while a group of wounded people figure out how to be kinder to themselves and each other, Shinbone Lane is a very satisfying place to spend some time.