I got to get this started for The Booklist Reader ...
*STARRED REVIEW Little Star and her Mama are such good bakers that Mama must remind Little Star once more to curb her appetite: "Can you remember not to touch this Big Mooncake until I tell you to?" Little Star's immediate agreement lasts through teeth brushing, face...
Time manipulation – obsession with, desire for, and attempts at – is a timeless conundrum and, thus far, an elusive temptation. Our ever-waxing fascination is evident in classic stories and sci-fi favorites. Contemporary pop culture continues to feed the frenzy, from Harry Potter and the Prisoner...
“I sound like the hayseed I am and the smoker I was and the drinker that I expect I’ll continue to be,” Lorena Hickok describes herself. With her raspy, no-nonsense delivery, Tonya Cornelisse embodies “Hick,” the real-life lover, confidante, and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt....
The Unwanted’s first two images couldn't be more jarring: on the title page, a hijab-wearing woman raises her hand to her face in overwhelming distress; a turn of the page reveals a girl holding flowers, smiling back over her shoulder as she walks across a...
“Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet,” writes New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma. In his mid-20s in 1975, the Dutch-born Buruma, who is half English and half German Jew, arrived in Tokyo to study film at Nihon University College of...
At 26, Mara is the titular caregiver for a lonely woman in her early 40s with stomach cancer, who insists she’ll bequeath Mara her exclusive Bel Air home upon her impending death. Mara is already too familiar with loss, having grown up in Rio de...
With a superb blend of historical, cultural, socioeconomic reportage, and plenty of engaging real-life stories, The Economist’s Cuba correspondent Roseann Lake alchemizes her five years in Beijing into a lively first book about the fate and future of China’s accomplished, independent, powerful – and unmarried – women. Over the last...
*STARRED REVIEW “[B]eing able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories” could be goals for any community – but the words are especially resonant for debut novelist Tommy Orange’s sprawling Native American cast: “the world is...
*STARRED REVIEW Cats may have nine lives, but Maggie O’Farrell, who won the Costa Book Award for The Hand That First Held Mine, has had 17, as revealed in this stupendous collection of essays named for various body parts that have caused her near demise. Her...
Within the first few minutes, the chameleonic Adjoa Andoh quickly grabs listeners' attention with the high-pitched ululating trilling that will repeat throughout the almost 10 hours of narration here. Ethiopian Canadian journalist Edemariam couldn't have found a better narrator to embody her late nonagenarian grandmother,...
