*STARRED REVIEW A dead woman opens Catherine Adel West’s startling, haunting debut. Two fathers, two daughters, and the building that is Chicago’s Calvary Hope Christian Church will unravel her unfortunate murder, revealing generations of secrets and violence that culminate in young Ruby King cradling her mother...
*STARRED REVIEW Newbie narrator Keong Sim – who, although born in Vietnam, shares Korean American heritage with Mike Jung – has less than a handful of audio credits, but his effervescent energy is a perfect match for Jung’s rollicking, heartwarming MG buddy epic. Matt and Eric are...
A stepmother's unwanted visit, a mother's unexpected phone call, a lover's departure – all happening in a single month – precipitated the breakdown that eventually engendered Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu's penetrating debut memoir, Aftershocks. Owusu spent her youth navigating multiple continents, a half dozen countries,...
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, his Sherlock Holmes legacy comprised four novels and 56 stories. Sherlock has since become an unstoppable literary institution, proliferating across mediums; although his archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty, only appeared in six of Doyle’s original works, his own...
*STARRED REVIEW Born 10 months apart, September and July are the kind of sisters who don’t require words to communicate. Older September is clearly in charge, having trained July over years of playing “September says.” Something terrible has happened at their Oxford school, causing their mother,...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, when the father was a young boy – the same age as his young son now – he wanted to be a crossing guard. After that, he wanted to be a writer. “‘And now you are one!’” the son gleefully...
Measured and controlled, Amy Landon expertly ciphers this 11-story collection with a sense of purposeful detachment, as if these women’s stories are too difficult, too harrowing to risk becoming too involved. Three stories, each highlighting erasure, emerge as standouts: in “Lizards,” an angry Floridian transplant...
Always approachable, immediately engaged, Hillary Huber returns as Sigrid Nunez’s cipher after voicing her 2018 National Book Awarded, The Friend. Once more, suicide looms, this time as a future intention rather than in response to a foregone event. In this is spare, sharp, simultaneously both daunting...
*STARRED REVIEW On September 11, 1844, Heyum Lehmann from Rimpar, Germany disembarked from a ship in New York harbor to become Henry Lehman. Brothers Emmanuel and Mayer soon followed. From immigrant store owners turned cotton traders in pre-Civil War Alabama, the brothers moved to banking in...
Jenny Torres Sanchez’s latest doesn’t let up – beatings, rape, murder, and still more violence looms. Marisa Blake may be a relative newbie narrator, but her thoroughly bilingual ability ensures a fluent, heart-thumping listen following three teens on the run from their gang-controlled Guatemalan village...
Both Susan Dalian and Jay Aaseng are relatively new narrators, but theirs is no novice performance of historical romance novelist Alyssa Cole’s first thriller. The pair alternates bearing witness to the aggressive gentrification erasing a historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood by wealthy white families and investors. Dalian’s...
For three years, I've been reading along with two fabulously erudite co-horts – my Library Journal editor Barbara Hoffert and fellow LJ reviewer Lawrence Olszewski – to recognize and celebrate the best translated world literature. This year, we had well over 100 titles to discuss, debate, negotiate,...
Once upon a time, Beth and Sam Min-Lindstrom seemed like the perfect, wealthy family with two adorable daughters. But now Beth is in prison, convicted of pharmaceutical shenanigans. Without Beth’s oversight (never mind her hefty salary), Sam and the girls need his always-reliable older sister,...
*STARRED REVIEW Spare and devastating, At Night All Blood Is Black by French Senegalese author David Diop is a bone-chilling anti-war treatise. He chooses as backdrop a little-known chapter of World War I annals, when the French government drafted some 200,000 soldiers from its colonies, including Senegal....
The late, great Dorothy West's trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy, remains presciently relevant almost three-quarters of a century after its initial publication. Racial inequity, police brutality, Black incarceration all haunt West's biting narrative, ready to resonate with a new generation of contemporary readers. Set...
*STARRED REVIEW Although Thai Italian artist Elisa Macellari’s Kusama (2020) hit U.S. shelves first, Papaya Salad is actually her debut title, originally published in 2018 in her native Italy. Introducing her tale as “a story the protagonist told me when I was a child and which I stumbled across...
Some happy endings are inevitable ...
*STARRED REVIEW It opens with the mellifluous Dion Graham and ends with an always-appreciated who-read-whom at recording’s end. In between, the horror is unrelenting, yet the three narrators persist with tenacious dignity and grace. Graham enthralls as the titular “my mother’s house” – Kay Manman Mwen...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Junja was a “real” mermaid, a Korean haenyeo – one of the world-renowned freediving women who gather sea life – of Jeju Island. By 2001, she’s spent most of her life as “a pillar of the Korean American community in...
Friends from infancy, Jamie and Maya haven’t seen each other in almost 10 years – until food-related fiascos (runaway tangelos, tipped-over soggy pastries) lead to an awkward reunion. Both now 17, white Jewish Jamie has grown up shy, clumsy, and especially wary of public speaking....
