While Xu crafts breathtaking prose in her debut, her storytelling doesn't yet match her formidable writing prowess. The book opens with a tantalizing premise: Li Jing – 32-year-old Shanghai finance wizard, devoted son, husband, and father – emerges from a horrific accident with Broca's aphasia, which leaves...
I've been doing an annual New & Notable roundup of APA titles for The Bloomsbury Review for more than a few years now. This year's installment is running a little later than usual. I know you can't see it here, but the roundup is referenced...
Sharing Humanity: A Talk with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about Her Latest Novel, One Amazing Thing Over the last decades, tragedies – both human-made and those wrought by an ever-angry Mother Nature – seem to be coming at humankind with fast and furious regularity. The latest oil...
In the book of Exodus in the King James Version of the Bible, Moses first called himself a “stranger in a strange land.” From then on up through Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel of the same phrase, the “stranger in a strange land”-genre has been...
If you're a parent, go get this book and start reading NOW. Even if you don't have a son. While you're ordering, make sure to also include Leonard Sax's latest, Girls on the Edge, another life-changing read. If you're a parent, truly, you owe it...
That it has taken me months to write this specific post is NOT an indicator in any way that this book was not informative, entertaining, useful, and often just downright fun. I also 'read' most of it via iPod, which I'd also highly recommend because...
Jane Jeong Trenka's follow-up to her phenomenal debut memoir, The Language of Blood, is a searing, disturbing account of why transracial adoption does not work. Newly divorced, having severed her relationship with her adoptive parents, escaping from a violent stalker now in jail, Trenka arrives in Korea having...
Holy moly! This manga is older than I am! No snickering, please! First published in Japan in 1956 by a then very young Yoshihiro Tatsumi (who memorialized his own artist-as-a-young-man development in his autobiographical graphic memoir A Drifting Life – in which you can also read more...
The first reaction to finishing Lucky Girl is 'lucky readers.' Definitely of the 'you can't make this stuff up'-genre, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood's debut memoir is one lucky surprise after another. Paced just right to keep you reading, the Taiwanese-born Hopgood reveals a remarkable story of her Midwest...
With the publication of her first memoir, Infidel (2007), Ayaan Hirsi Ali spent the better part of a year seeing her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Born in Somalia, at times neglected, abandoned, or abused by her parents, the strictly-raised Muslim child that...
For the last two months or so, Karen Tei Yamashita will not get out of my life. And I say that with a goofy-grinned "wahhh" of delighted surprise. While I’ve been an ardent admirer of Yamashita’s books for some 20 years (yup, I have all...
Award-winning Fumi Yoshinaga's dramatically entertaining gender-bender series, which offers an alternate history of premodern Japan, concludes the story began in volume 2 of how the first female shogun inherited her post and rose to power as recorded in the Chronicle of a Dying Day. Having grown...
If you're a parent (or a parental figure) to a girl (even if that girl is still an infant!), you MUST read this book. Which means you can stop reading this post here. Go get the book already ...
Six months after Nitish Roy’s death, his wife and two daughters gather in Calcutta, India where Bijou Roy as the oldest must send her father’s ashes down the holy river to eternal rest. The haphazard ceremony – made even more so because she is not...
Tracy White’s graphic sort-of-autobiography is “only mostly true because I skipped over things, moved events around, embellished, and occasionally just plain made things up,” she explains on the first page. “The technical term for this is dramatic license. I used it,” she adds in the...
The town of Musashigawa has a graffiti problem ...
*STARRED REVIEW Comprising 10 novellas that took 10 years to craft, this is Yamashita’s (Circle K Cycles) magnum opus. Year by year, the novellas mark a decade’s worth of tumultuous Asian Pacific American (APA) history, from 1968, when ethnic studies was painfully birthed in San Francisco,...
Stuck in a virtual version of 1971, Koizumi Kyoko knows that unmasking the Friend will have irrevocable consequences. Past and present, both the 1971 and 2014 versions of the Chief try desperately to save her ...
It's 2014 and just-escaped-against-all-odds Otcho and his manga artist sidekick Kakuta are finally back in Tokyo ...
Certain writers – Chang-rae Lee and Khaled Hosseini immediately come to mind – paralyze my reading capability. I say that with the utmost respect. I become so attached to an author's previous book (in the rare case, books), that I find myself unable to even...
