March 2019 - BookDragon

I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib [in Booklist]

Malaka Gharib’s Catholic mother regretted leaving her upper-middle-class Manila life, but unrest fueled by the 1970s Marcos regime sent her stateside. Meanwhile, her Egyptian Muslim father “had been scheming to get to America since high school” and finally enrolled at UCLA’s School of Management. They...

The Body Papers by Grace Talusan [in Booklist]

28 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Filipina/o, Filipina/o American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

Every day she didn’t tell, Grace Talusan thought she was saving her grandfather’s life. “There was a daytime grandfather and a nighttime grandfather, two different people in the same body.” Talusan was 7 when that nocturnal monster began the sexual assaults, which spanned seven years....

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo [in Shelf Awareness]

27 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Black/African American, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Latina/o/x, Repost, Young Adult Readers

It's the first day of school again, and Emoni Santiago tells her young daughter Emma, more commonly called Babygirl, "make sure you're nice to the other kids and ...

The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide by Julián Herbert, translated by Christina MacSweeney [in Booklist]

26 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Latin American, Latina/o/x, Memoir, Mexican, Mexican American, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

The “largest mass slaughter of Asians on the American continent” claimed the lives of over 300 Chinese immigrants in May 1911 in Torreón, in the Mexican state of Coahuila. Despite its magnitude, the massacre remains a “buried episode,” obscured by substantial erroneous coverage, that writer,...

Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan, translated by Janet Hong [in Booklist]

25 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha Seong-nan’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim. In “Flowers of Doom,” a loner painstakingly studies his neighbors by sifting through their trash – “Garbage never lies” – eventually deciphering...

All That Is Left Is All That Matters by Mark Slouka [in Booklist]

22 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Short Stories

James Anderson Foster narrates 13 of 15 stories in Slouka’s newest collection, his second in two decades after his 1998 short-fiction debut, Lost Lake. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, sons and mothers, men and animals figure prominently here. Foster effortlessly embodies these diverse characters,...

The Lonesome Bodybuilder, by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda [in Booklist]

21 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

Yukiko Motoya – who’s won major literary awards in her native Japan – makes her English-language debut (Anglophone-enabled by Asa Yoneda) with a label-defying, eyebrow-raising, beguilingly entertaining collection. Six narrators – Natalie Naudus, Brian Nishii, Erin Bennett, Paul Michael Garcia, Tanya Eby, and Kate Mulligan...

Five More to Go: Readymade Bodhisattva, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park [in The Booklist Reader]

20 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Australian, Chinese American, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Japanese American, Korean, Repost, Short Stories, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park Tenacious indie nonprofit Kaya Press launches its Magpie Series (which showcases Korean titles in translation that encapsulate “a reflexive picture of Korea and the breakneck speed of its...

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park [in Booklist]

19 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Korean American, Repost, Short Stories, Translation, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Science fiction in Korea is relatively new, initially imported from the West via early-20th-century translations. By the late-1950s, the rapid modernization of postwar South Korea proffered considerable fodder for sf-writer wannabes. Over the following decades, Korea’s ongoing political, socioeconomic, and technological reinventions created fertile...

Princess Bari by Sok-yong Hwang, translated by Sora Kim-Russell [in Booklist]

18 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Because she was the seventh daughter, Princess Bari – whose name means “abandoned” – was discarded as a baby only to return in triumph to save the world. Like her mythic Korean namesake, Bari is the unwanted seventh girl in a house desperate for sons....

Someday [Every Day series] by David Levithan [in School Library Journal]

15 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Constant corporeal manifestations aren't mandatory for certain souls in David Levithan’s Every Day series: waking up in someone else's body is 'normal' for some. A and X are two such wanderers, albeit with diverging agendas: A's a respectful temporary visitor, X a parasitic usurper. Rhiannon...

Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani [in School Library Journal]

14 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Fiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

In Robin Miles’s rich, rhythmic narration, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (I Do Not Come to You By Chance) latest – written in chapters that are sometimes just a few lines – sounds like verse poetry. The story is hardly soothing, based on interviews with 2014 Boko...

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong [in Library Journal]

13 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW The cover calls this a novel, but the autobiographical overlaps are many: a gay Vietnamese American poet, an October birth outside Saigon, an other-side-of-the-world escape, a biracial single mother, a Hartford, CT, upbringing, a New York City education. In his prose debut, T.S. Eliot-prized,...

Everlasting Nora by Marie Miranda Cruz [in Booklist]

12 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Audio, Fiction, Filipina/o, Filipina/o American, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American

If the middle-grade Filipino American market had an audio representative, Amielynn Abellera would be the reigning voice. She’s already narrated two of Newbery Medal-winning Filipino American Erin Entrada Kelly’s three MG titles, and she’s quite the energetic cipher for debut novelist Marie Miranda Cruz’s feisty...

White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar [in Booklist]

11 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Repost, Short Stories, South Asian, South Asian American

Loss – by disappearance, destruction, or death – looms throughout Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s award-winning debut collection. Priya Ayyar’s shared Indian heritage with both Bhuvaneswar and many of her characters adds a comfortable fluency, as Ayyar gives distinct characterizations to parents and children, siblings and lovers, friends and...

Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope by Davide Enia, translated by Antony Shugaar [in Christian Science Monitor]

08 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, European, Italian, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Whom to save, whom to let perish? The rescuers of refugees washing up on the Italian island of Lampedusa face an impossible choice, as memoirist and playwright Davide Enia describes in Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope “Calculate. It’s all you can...

Operatic by Kyo Maclear, illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler [in Shelf Awareness]

07 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Canadian, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Hapa/Mixed-race, Japanese American, Middle Grade Readers, Repost

Mr. K is one of those remarkable teachers who is memorable for what he's not: "He doesn't act like it's his job to shape [students] into considerate and well-behaved individuals who'll fit harmoniously with the rest of society." His final assignment for his middle-school music...

Five More to Go: Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women [in The Booklist Reader]

06 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Canadian, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Indian American, Japanese, Korean, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, South Asian American, Translation

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See Known for her Chinese and Chinese American sagas, mega-bestselling author Lisa See (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017) travels across the Yellow Sea to the tiny southern Korean island of Jeju to create a stupendous multi-generational family saga...

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal [in Booklist]

04 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, British, British Asian, Fiction, Indian, Repost, South Asian

Sita Kaur Shergill is dying of cancer. She has “had enough of this ghastly life,” but before she goes, she leaves epistolary final wishes that her three British-born daughters journey together to India “on [her] behalf.” Her detailed itinerary is exacting, from serving others to...

His Favorites by Kate Walbert [in Booklist]

01 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

Steely and controlled, narrator Gabra Zackman embodies a young woman’s harrowing crisis, ensuring not a single moment of the brief production can be ignored. At 15, Jo’s unremarkable life as just another teen in her suburban Maryland town is forever shattered when she kills her best friend...

BookDragon March 2019