Title: Milk Blood Heat by Danitel W. Monix
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Short story collection
Culture: Black culture
Themes: Love and loss, grief, family relationships

Short stories of compassion, humility, and savagery

Trigger Warning: Suicide, Cancer, Death

Book friends, I DID NOT have my tissues ready for this short story collection! I recently purchased Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz during independent bookstore day from Black Pearl Books (it was 1 of many books I bought from the bookstore). A book of short stories was on my “to-buy list” and Milk Blood Heat immediately caught my attention. Little did I know what awaited me on its pages.

Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story in Milk Blood Heat delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another. I don’t think I was mentally prepared to read these stories and the way the stories made me think and feel. Each story provides the reader with an in-depth look at common life situations – cancer, suicide, mother/daughter relationships but from only one point of view. Moniz forces you to have a laser-focused point of view of the entire situation and everyone involved from the protagonist’s eye in ways I didn’t think possible. She takes ordinary people and places them in everyday situations that we have all encountered but adds humility, compassion, savagery, fear, and anger in subtle imaginary ways using the most unlikely elements to express the main character’s thoughts and emotions. I found this book to be a literary dream with beautiful prose and double entendre throughout that keep the stories moving making it a quick and easy read.

What I loved most about these stories is that they are all connected in subtle but meaningful ways, keeping you from having a disconnected feeling while reading them and providing a smooth flow from one story to another. For example, many of the stories take place at night with moonlight as a central focal point for the main character. Moonlight is described as illuminating not only in times of darkness but also within the main character’s psyche. It is a beautiful way of seeing the protagonist’s eyes open in times of trial and tribulation.

Grief is also a recurring theme but it’s more than grief from the loss of a loved one. It is grief from the loss of self through loss of independence or loss of your physical body. Moniz gives a profound look at loss and the subsequent grief that follows from many different perspectives, angles, and situations.

If you’re a mood reader who likes dark emotional stories about everyday people on their journey of self-discovery during traumatic circumstances, then I recommend Milk Bood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz.