The year is 1913. Zeynep and Ali are teenage lovers in Anatolia (once Asia Minor, now modern Turkey) who part with a lingering sense of bitterness: Ali's impending departure breaks their promise of escaping their village together. Feeling betrayed, Zeynep turns away: "I refuse to be your...
Allow me to dispel any notions that the dragons within are why I'm insisting this is one of my Absolute Favorites ever. Plenty of other reasons make Nimona an irresistible delight: allow me to count at least the top-10 ways ...
In a house by the sea in Colombo, Sri Lanka, live two families: below are the Sinhala owners, the Rajasinghes with two daughters, Yasodhara and Lanka; upstairs are the Tamil clan of Shivalingams with their son, Shiva, twinned by a shared birthday to Yasodhara. While the...
Salmon meunière, acqua pazza, mizuna and onion salad, yellowtail teriyaki ...
*STARRED REVIEW Watanabe Yuichi sits behind bars in Japan’s infamous Fukuoka Prison. After World War II, the former “soldier-guard” is now an incarcerated “low-level war criminal” under U.S. control. His written confession, which highlights two people — “one prisoner and one guard; one poet and one...
Freshly back from the Jersey Shore, debut novelist P.S. Duffy talks about writing her first book at age 10 although she didn’t publish her first novel until she was 65, her inability to ever return to her birth country of China, and how a stranger’s...
“Define moral certainty”: The Great War in P.S. Duffy’s The Cartographer of No Man’s Land “Moral certainty.” “Righteous anger.” “God’s retribution.” The Great War implodes humanity in “No Man’s Land – a cratered landscape of ruin” in P.S. Duffy’s first novel. Published in October 2013 when Duffy was 65, The...
The late Iris Chang almost single-handedly taught the western world about the horrors of the Nanking Massacre in her 1997 The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Over six weeks that began with the Imperial Japanese Army's capture of China's then-capital city of...
The new school year has apparently already begun in certain parts of the country, including Hawai'i (which started in July!), parts of Alabama and Indiana, too. I'm sure other states, too, have begun to herd the masses back to classrooms, with the rest of the...
For the most magnificent experience, choose to go aural with a pitch-perfect quartet to narrate the four distinct stories that make up this stupendous new novel from award-winning Pam Muñoz Ryan. Then – in another reason to visit your local library often – make sure to at least...
Told in two distinct narratives by a mother and her eldest son, When the Moon Is Low follows an Afghan family's desperate journey through Turkey, Greece, Italy, and beyond, in search of safety and peace. [If you choose to go aural, Sneha Mathan (again, as always) is an ideal...
Ferguson one year later and another shooting. Black Lives Matter activists shut down Bernie Sanders. And that's just the last 24 hours. Listen to Toni Morrison: "This is required reading," she extols on the cover of this slim, tense volume of just 152 pages. Many have...
After more than two-and-a-half years since volume 13 hit Stateside shelves in December 2012, the Kurosagi quintet-plus-puppet (I mean alien) are FINALLY back. And then some. Because in this latest volume, it's Kurosagi x 3, as in three distinct Kurosagi versions fighting for page time. Guess they...
*STARRED REVIEW Before A Wild Sheep Chase made Murakami an international sensation, he wrote these “kitchen-table novels,” so named for where his composition efforts took place after he wrapped up managing his Tokyo jazz bar for the day. Both Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973...
