SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Last Green Tree

From Publishers Weekly
Grimsley's intricate, well-crafted sequel to 2004's Lamba Award– winner, The Ordinary, chronicles the rise of a war between epic forces; on one side is the powerful Mage, ruling an interplanetary empire that includes the interdimensional Anilyn Gate and the planet Aramen. There, the Mage orchestrates a redistribution of wealth between rich and poor, much to the dismay of the wealthy merchant Fineas Figg, the guardian of Keely File, a traumatized but strangely talented 10-year-old boy. But Fineas must soon worry about more than his money, as giant mantis creatures perpetrate a genocide that began as a rebel uprising against the Mage. Keely and Fineas team with the former rebel Kitra Poth and the priest Dekkar, who realizes that a powerful being known as Rao is orchestrating the mantis attack in a challenge to the Mage. Rao is also after Keely, but Dekkar is determined to protect him. The inconclusive ending to this complex work of world-building and large-scale politics seasoned with gore and desperation will have readers anxiously awaiting the next installment. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Ordinary

From Publishers Weekly
Set in the same future world as Kirith Kirin (2000), which won a Lambda Award, Grimsley's latest SF novel intimately explores the conflicts between magic and science, subconscious and conscious action, the past and the future. The planet of the tech-using Hormling of Senal is connected to the land of Irion, home of the magic-believing Erejhen, via the mysterious Twil Gate, a portal of unknown origins in the ocean. Although traders on both sides enjoy brisk commerce through the gate, Hormling leaders look more and more to Irion as a means to provide land and resources for their expanding civilization. Translator Jedda Martele, member of a Senal diplomatic mission to Irion, is caught in the middle when the delegation's true purpose is revealed: they are meant to be in place to parlay for a Hormling invasion force after it races through the gate to occupy strategic Irion ports, but they haven't reckoned with the ability of the so-called "backwards" Erejhen to handle invaders. Grimsley's finely textured societies have a clockwork intricacy that fascinates even as it dispels surprise. Unlike many "literary" authors who fail when they try to write SF, PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award winner Grimsley (Winter Birds) has the necessary world-building skills to shine brightly here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Boulevard

From Library Journal
In his most recent novel (Kirith Kirin, Comfort and Joy), multiple award winner Grimsley portrays a young man from a small town in Alabama looking to redefine himself in a big city. It's 1978, and Newell, recently graduated from high school and both afraid and joyful at finally beginning a long-desired journey, steps off a bus in hot and sticky New Orleans. After losing his first job as a bus boy for not sleeping with the manager, Newell quickly finds work in an adult bookstore. Once he feels secure in his new position, he begins to make friends. His good looks, youth, and friendly and polite demeanor make Newell very popular, especially as he begins to explore the physical side of his sexuality. His first boyfriend, Mark, is a drug user who introduces him to LSD and, even more harmfully, to Jack, a sadist who seduces him, causing him to return to his hometown the next day. Even though Newell leaves New Orleans, he knows he won't be staying in Alabama for long. Once again, Grimsley has created remarkably real characters and a New Orleans setting readers can almost smell. He has a way of touching very raw emotions without overemphasizing one specific detail by using everyday life and everyday events and then hinting at the darker side of human nature. This reviewer hopes that Grimsley continues Newell's adventures. Highly recommended. T.R. Salvadori, Margaret Heggan Free P.L., Hurffville, NJ -- Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Kirith Kirin

A Note from the Author, Jim Grimsley
"I've read fantasy and science fiction all my life and have always wanted to publish in this genre. For a long time I've been working on a fantasy novel about a world called Aeryn where science has never developed for one reason or another, but where magic is quite powerful. Kirith Kirin is my attempt to do justice to a genre that has given me some of the greatest moments of reading pleasure in my life. I'm attempting to tell the story of a boy who is called out of his own life on a farm in the north of this world to enter a legendary forest and learn magic, in order to help the man named Kirith Kirin to maintain the balance of order. His enemy in this effort is a very powerful, very old wizard named Drudaen. Since I have also published mainstream fiction I would warn readers of my other novels that this book is straight-up genre writing for people who are fans of fantasy."

From Rob Gates, NY Blade
"Jim Grimsley has done something few other novelists would. Forsaking the comfortable world of mainstream literature, he's journeyed deep into the genre ghetto with Kirith Kirin, a sweeping fantasy epic filled with magic and myth. Kirith Kirin has a little something for everyone. Fantasy readers will find a world of legends and wonders, and a story with mythic overtones. At the same time, fans of Grimsley's mainstream work (Comfort and Joy, Winter Birds) will find the complexity, lyricism, and gay sensibility common to his earlier works. The story follows a very established fantasy path, recording the coming of age and coming to power of a farm boy-cum-legend. In this case, the young man's journey brings him power as a mage and love in the person of the immortal King, Kirith Kirin. Grimsley has done his homework, filling his world with archetypes and themes familiar to anyone versed in Joseph Campbell and Jung. At the same time, he has managed to avoid the trap of excessive cliché. While his characters and situations are familiar, he finds new angles to view them and ways to combine them for a fresh story. For a first time fantasist, Grimsley has shown a remarkable understanding of what makes the genre powerful. And while he may have done well to cut down on the never-ending onslaught of created words, it's easy to forgive him this minor sin as one breathes in the lyrical and senses and emotion rich world Grimsley has created."

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Comfort & Joy

From Booklist - September 15, 1999
The more-or-less sequel to Grimsley's first novel, Winter Birds (1994), could have been titled Ford's Progress. For although we pick up Danny Crell, the main character from the previous book, the tale being told here is about how Danny's male lover, Ford, comes to take "comfort and joy" (ah, Grimsley's chosen title perhaps is the best after all!) in their relationship. It's Christmas, and Danny and Ford are going to visit Danny's mother for the holidays. In successfully handled flashbacks, we learn the circumstances of their meeting and of their quite dissimilar family backgrounds: Danny from dysfunction and lack of privilege, Ford from nothing but privilege. Ford's family has been after him for a long time to find a suitable wife and settle down; he is much less comfortable in his relationship with Danny than Danny is with him. But over the course of this particular Christmas, the two of them take some major steps in giving a secure future to their partnership. Sincere and never melodramatic nor maudlin.Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
My Drowning

From Kirkus Reviews
A young girl comes of age under duress and in the worst of circumstances, in Grimsley's (Dream Boy, 1995, etc.) delicate, perfectly paced narrative of childhood's pains. Although Ellen Tote is quite advanced in years, most of her story is a reminiscence, and she succeeds so well in bringing it to life that one quickly forgets that she is telling it across the span of many years. Ellen's childhood world, in the rural foothills of North Carolina, was a place of extraordinary simplicity: poor, brutal, and somehow quite innocent in its isolation from the rest of the world. Ellen's family, like most everyone in the region, makes do with very little. The homeless relatives who pass through the house on their way to and from prison, the persistently drunken men and pregnant women, the tormented familiarity with religion that pervades daily life are all drawn with the sort of ease that makes an exceptionally unfamiliar world at once compelling and recognizable. Ellen is a representative of the contradictions that surround her: An unwanted child, sometimes loved, often brutalized, she finds herself quite passionately attached to the frequently ugly and usually crude kinfolk in her life. A recurring dream of her own mother walking into the nearby river begins during childhood and continues into her old age, forming both the impetus and centerpiece of her tale. ``She glares at me coldly, as if I am some fish she has dragged off the end of her line, and she takes me by the shoulder and flings me high, end over end, into the middle of the river, and I sink into the cold, and I am falling forever, and I never look down.'' The gradual sorting-out of her childhood that the dream engenders is as credible and rich as the world that contains it. Moving, vivid, and very real: a work of tremendous, quiet intensity.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
My Drowning

The New York Times Book Review
The only triumph the book's sensitive narrator, a young girl named Ellen, experiences is escaping from her predatory family. "When I look back," she remarks as an adult, "I amaze myself that my hatred does not burn me to a crisp." . . . recollections of stolen moments of love provide welcome relief from the viciousness all around her. They also provide occasions for some lyrical prose amid Mr. Grimsley's powerful and painfully detailed descriptions of an especially vile sort of poverty...that prevents the members of this benighted family from finding any solace in one another's company.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Dream Boy

From Booklist , September 15, 1995
Nathan moves with mother and father to a farm. Roy lives next door with his mother and father. Slightly younger than Roy, Nathan is bookish and slight, whereas Roy is outgoing, popular, and a real farm boy. Nathan falls in love with Roy, and Roy falls in love with Nathan. They have sex. Meanwhile, Nathan's alcoholic father has sexually abused Nathan; Nathan's mother sighs about it all but seems helpless to do anything. Nathan starts sleeping in the woods and Roy's barn but eats at home when his father isn't there as his mother watches and says little. Nathan, Roy, and two of Roy's friends start swimming together, then go hiking to a place where there's an abandoned house, where malice in the interactions among them leads to Nathan's being raped. Grimsley tells this story as if it were a dream: the diction, pacing, and details all have a distant, almost fuzzy quality. This very unusual novel is a truly unique addition to gay literature. Charles Harmon
Copyright© 1995, American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Winter Birds

A Note from the Author, Jim Grimsley, December 9, 1998
"This book had a long strange journey to publication.
This was the first book I wrote, and for a lot of reasons publishers were slow to respond to it. I finished the book in 1984 and sent it out to publishers and agents for a very long time. Finally in 1992 the book was published by a German publisher in translation, and I had the unusual sensation of having my first novel in my hands even though I couldn't read a word of it beyond the names. My German publisher then took the book on as a mission and found first a French publisher and then a publisher in the United States in 1994. Most of the people I sent the book to in this country were wary of the difficult family material, the violence of the father, and the unrelieved sadness of the situation. I was lucky that books like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina changed people's minds about this kind of story."

The Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 6, 1994
Jim Grimsley's first novel is a painfully intense rendering of a family forced to endure a life harsh enough to nullify any threat posed by the possibility of dying and going to hell. The novel is unrelievedly grim, but Grimsley's genius lies in his ability to draw us so deeply into the narrative that we keep turning the pages even when we know that each holds nothing but the promise of more pain.

Danny Crell, an 8-year-old hemophiliac, is the narrator of this domestic horror story, his experience made all the more vivid by means of an unusual "second person" narrative voice that creates the impression of an older Danny reaching back to tell his younger self the story.

Like Greek tragedy, Winter Birds moves inexorably from its hypnotic opening to its final, chilling revelation, leaving the reader stunned, exhausted, and wonder-struck.

The New Yorker, October 24, 1994
The violence is just half the story. The other half is the poetry that infuses Winter Birds, and it only intensifies the terror. Danny remembers the hemophiliac bleeding that once brought him to the threshold of death, and how the blank promise of peace enticed him. The snow on that troubled Thanksgiving is the silent snow, secret snow of annihilation. And so his mother fights not just to protect him from the fury at home but to pull him back from the precipice that, she senses, something in him is longing to approach.

The title of the novel comes from the songbirds-wrens, starlings, cardinals-that Danny's brothers are out killing with BBs at the beginning of the book. The Crell children are harmless, lyrical little creatures, too. Some of this material may sound familiar. A monster of a father, a steadfast mother, a white-trash Southern landscape viewed from a gay perspective, with the bitterness of memory but also with unwavering, unsentimental love-all this, of course, is Dorothy Allison territory. I can't think of a solider tribute to offer Grimsley than to say that he doesn't suffer in the comparison.

From Booklist, August 19, 1994
The surface simplicity of this first novel--the story of a young boy who survives a violent Thanksgiving quarrel between his parents--masks an amazing voyage of self-discovery. Danny Crell comes from what must be the apotheosis of the dysfunctional family: his father, who has lost an arm in an industrial accident, is a mean and frequent drunk, and his mother appears to be a doormat for her husband's abuse. Danny and his baby brother are hemophiliacs, and metaphors of blood and bleeding permeate the book. Grimsley tells the story in the second person, with the narrator, who seems to be the grown-up Danny, offering sentences like this: "You brush bits of powdered grass from your fingers." At first, this device seems stilted and artificial, but as the novel gains momentum, one is swept into the story, and it almost feels as if the narrator is addressing the reader directly--and, occasionally, accusingly. Grimsley has created a harrowing southern gothic world, reminiscent of Faulkner or Caldwell. A remarkable first novel. George Needham, Copyright© 1994, American Library Association. All rights reserved