*STARRED REVIEW The Seoul subway system's line #2 is a circular route that's also the city's busiest; it happens to include Gangnam – as in "Gangnam Style" – among its dozens of popular stations. Author/illustrator Kim Hyo-eun's magnificent I Am the Subway highlights a train traveling...
*STARRED REVIEW Nine electrifying stories comprise Anthony Veasna So’s debut, and while many were previously published, when read together their magnificence is enhanced as they create an interconnected Cambodian American community. Most autobiographical is “Human Development,” in which the narrator is also Anthony, a gay, Stanford-degreed...
James Sie (Still Life Las Vegas) multitasks as author and partial narrator in his first YA novel: the theme might seem common – a high school love story complicated by parents and friends – but the narrative’s specifics elevate the familiar into memorable. Sie gamely...
Next-door neighbors Cora Hamed and Quinn McCauley’s best-friendship began in toddlerhood, but they’ve spent the last 10 months in silence. Cora’s sister Mabel is dead. Quinn’s brother Parker murdered her; he took a gun to school and killed four people, including himself. Mourning defines the Hamed...
*STARRED REVIEW Singaporean creator Weng Pixin's vibrant Let's Not Talk Anymore began with a "big 'f*ck this, f*ck you!' kind of attitude" after one of her "many disputes and disagreements with [her] Mom." The work made her think more deeply about not just her mother, but her...
Shifting back and forth between present-day San Francisco and a private orphanage in Sri Lanka in 2002, Jayatissa’s debut thriller takes every opportunity to lead readers astray. Paloma Evans was adopted at 12 by wealthy white parents. At 30, she’s living in a grim apartment,...
*STARRED REVIEW The book is labeled fiction, but the extraordinarily haunting narrative is inspired by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s mother and two elderly survivors of Korean War separations who were briefly allowed to meet their North Korean families; Gendry-Kim’s mother still hopes to glimpse her sister. That survivor...
Maxine Beneba Clarke: Uplifting Black Lives Matter Around the World Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Afro-Caribbean Australian author/artist who creates across genres and audiences: adult fiction, nonfiction, memoir and children's books. Her award-winning titles are steadily migrating to the United States, including her second picture book...
"Little one," two Black parents address the baby in their arms, "when we say Black Lives Matter, we're saying Black people are wonderful-strong." Award-winning Australian author/illustrator Maxine Beneba Clarke's opening sentence visually accentuates the phrase "wonderful-strong," distinguishing the lettering with yellow-orange color and gradually increasing...
Her model – yep, as in runway – older sister Jeannie couldn’t be more perfect, leaving Liza all too familiar with their Taiwanese immigrant mother’s disappointment and frustration. Despite Mom’s “no dating while you’re in school” rule, she ironically can’t get over Liza’s lack of...
*STARRED REVIEW The “Before” was when ZJ’s football-playing father was “everybody’s … next great hero,” but to ZJ, world-famous “Zachariah 44!” was “just my dad … which means / he’s my every single thing.” For most of 12-year-old ZJ’s life, Daddy was the very best parent,...
A book about a possible murder, award-winning French Canadian Pascal Girard's Rebecca & Lucie in the Case of the Missing Neighbor guarantees delight – if nothing else but to laugh with Girard himself. Here in his vivid graphic world, translated by Aleshia Jensen, Pascal Girard...
Introduced in Jasmin Kaur’s debut, When You Ask Me Where I’m Going, mother Kiran and daughter Sahaara return in this timely hybrid prose/verse novel that deftly addresses the perils of being undocumented and surviving sexual assault. Kiran enters Canada from India on a student visa, already...
Making her solo audiobook debut, Richa Moorjani affectingly channels Zara Hossain, a Corpus Christi, TX, high school senior who stands up to Tyler Benson, the school’s football star who’s also a racist bully. After Zara refuses to stay silent while Tyler and his cronies hassle...
*STARRED REVIEW When Kristen Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) began writing Seek You in 2016, the world was rather different. "Loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel," her author's note posits, but still-looming, pandemic-mandated isolation imbues her spectacular graphic memoir with...
*STARRED REVIEW “Imagine that your home is on fire. You’re allowed to save one thing. / Your family and pets are safe … / Your Most Important Thing. Any size.” With that, Ms. Chang challenges her class to name their Most Important Things. “For once we...
Sure, reading is rewarding, but here you’ll want to listen in to share the delighted wonder of narrator Avi Roque and writer Aiden Thomas discussing their affirming #OwnVoices debuts as trans Latinx creators, a bonus at recording’s end. Deservedly lauded and awarded all over the...
Eleven-year-old Ellie has been bullied most of her life for being fat. The mean girls are bad enough, but her weight-obsessed mother might unintentionally be her worst enemy – what mother pushes bariatric surgery on her tween? Ellie’s best friend is moving away, which means that...
Once upon a time, Lita “turned from star-stuff thrown off a meteor into a girl” and became “to everyone around” the daughter of the local curandera Bruja Lupe. That meteor gave the New Mexico town its name – yes, Meteor – as well as the...
The incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II is undoubtedly one of the most egregious episodes in 20th-century U.S. history. Third-generation Japanese American Naomi Hirahara carves a little-known sliver from that grievous experience and layers it with mystery to create her...
