Update your bookmarks! The Florida Book Review is currently moving into its new site, at FloridaBookReview.net.

Founded by Lynne Barrett and Susan Jo Parsons, The Florida Book Review features reviews of books with Florida settings or subjects, as well as interviews and essays about Florida’s literary scene.

Editor Lynne Barrett was one of my mentors at Florida International University. She is the award-winning author of  the story collections The Secret Names of Women, The Land of Go, and Magpies. She co-edited Birth: A Literary Companion and The James M. Cain Cookbook.  Her work has appeared in Delta Blues, A Dixie Christmas, Miami Noir, One Year to a Writing Life,Simply the Best Mysteries, A Hell of a Woman, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Night Train, The Southern Women’s Review, The Review Review, and many other anthologies and journals.

Lynne has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery story from the Mystery Writers of America, the Moondance International Film Festival award for Best Short story, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Florida International University and edits The Florida Book Review.

*

In the fiction category of The Florida Book Review, check out a review of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, written by my dear friend Anjanette Delgado.

Set in vibrant Little Havana, the book tells the story of Mariela Esteves, a woman whose choice to renounce her true calling results in two failed marriages, a brush with murder, and a lot of heartbreak. It will be released in the Fall of 2014 by Kensington Books Publishing, and in Spanish in the U.S. and Mexico by Penguin Random House. Both novels have also been optioned recently for film and television.

Are you into nonfiction? Don’t miss the review of Cecilia’s Fernandez’s Leaving Little Havana. (Cecilia’s publisher, Beating Windward, recently acquired my memoir, A Sky the Color of Chaos. The book is coming out next year!)

Revolution uprooted six-year-old Cecilia from her comfortable middle-class Cuban home and dropped her into the low-income Miami neighborhood of Little Havana. Her philandering father all but abandoned his family to focus on his mistress and rebuilding his career, chasing the American promise of wealth and freedom from the past. Her mother spiraled into madness trying to hold the family together and get him back. Neglected and trapped, Cecilia rebelled against her conservative heritage and embraced the 1960s counter-culture, seeking love and attention anywhere she could get it. And just maybe a place of her own in America. But immigrant children either thrive or self-destruct in a new land. How will Cecilia beat the odds? While most memoirs by Cuban-Americans revolve around childhood scenes in Cuba and explore the experiences of a young man, Leaving Little Havana is the first refugee memoir to focus on a Cuban girl growing up in America, rising above the obstacles and clearing a path to her dream.

Much love to FBR. These guys rock!

And it’s not just because they gave a positive review to Badass, an anthology edited by Andrea Askowitz and in which my work appears.

This is what The Florida Book Review said about ‪Badass‬ and our show at the Miami Book Fair: (Thank you Jennifer Maritza McCauley for the fine words and Lynne Barrett, FBR editor, for covering us. There are still some copies of Badass left for you and your loved ones for the holidays. For sale at www.lominybooks.com.)

“Lominy Books’s Badass features short, true stories that showcase the many kinds of badassery in Miami. In this book, being a badass doesn’t mean you have to be good at throwing down or that you own fifty leather jackets. Being a badass, according to editor Andrea Askowitz, means you know how to grow, stay true to yourself, or put your pride aside and let someone else be the hero.”

Read the entire review here.