The wife-and-husband team of Anna Kang and Christopher Weyant make a splash with their third gleeful collaboration. Meet Monty, a frog who has a secret to share with the reader: he is afraid of the water. Though he has managed to stay dry since his...
Even as Mercy Wong's father expects that she will marry the herbalist's son and be a "meek" wife, he also insists that she never stop learning because she must "be as smart as the white ghosts." In San Francisco's Chinatown in 1906, 15-year-old Mercy's graduation from...
Jung Yun’s Twitter profile reads: “Fiction writer. Late bloomer. Better late than never.” Indeed, more than four decades passed before she earned that “fiction writer” mantle, but clearly the careful gestation paid off. So wowed was Yun’s publisher, Picador, with her first novel that hundreds of...
*STARRED REVIEW Richard Chapman – husband, father, businessman – hosts a bachelor party in his Westchester, NY, home for his younger brother. Two strippers are hired to provide the expected entertainment, until the debauchery ends abruptly when the girls murder their bodyguards and flee. Richard must...
Four decades have passed since Amaterasu Takahashi lost her daughter and grandson in Nagasaki's atomic destruction. Now an octogenarian widow living in Philadelphia, she's shocked by the arrival of a disfigured stranger claiming to be that grandson. He brings letters from the past, as well as...
Barbara Thorson is most definitely not your average fifth-grader. She refuses to buy the "motivational speaking" going on in the front of the classroom on career day, quipping to the less-than-esteemed guest, "I already have a 'career,' thank you." Indeed, Barbara's calling is so much greater:...
*STARRED REVIEW In his sublime "foreword [that] might be better thought of as an afterword," physician and bestselling author Abraham Verghese reveals that he came to know Paul Kalanithi "most intimately when he'd ceased to be." That, too, is true of every listener here. Neurosurgeon Kalanithi died in...
Zomorod Yousefzadeh hasn't "met anyone who has moved so many times before sixth grade." Her peripatetic upbringing has already encompassed long distances – not just in miles, but across cultural, social and political divides, as well. Originally from Abadan, Iran, her family moved to Compton,...
*STARRED REVIEW Many years earlier, Lucy Barton spent two months in a hospital after a routine appendectomy; no one ever figured out what was wrong. She wakes one morning to find her mother sitting on her bed, arrived in Manhattan from their rural Illinois hometown. Too many...
*STARRED REVIEW On an afternoon in November 1999, the 50,000-strong disruption of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle imploded with tear gas and violence. Sunil Yapa’s debut pivots around teenage runaway Victor, whose initial plans to sell marijuana for profit morphs into tenacious participation with...
*STARRED REVIEW Jackson was 7 the last time he saw his bubble-bathing, purple jelly bean-loving friend Crenshaw. But now that Jackson is 10, the oversize imaginary feline explains, "You need a bigger friend now." Jackson and his family must sell everything they can to pay their overdue rent...
*STARRED REVIEW Hippo doesn’t know it yet, but Bird is exactly the friend he needs. Despite Hippo’s insistent rejections (grunts, sighs, definitive cries of “Go away!”), Bird doesn’t give up. Just look! He can be a stylish hat, provide umbrella-like shelter, even stand in for a “hippopota-mustache”! Yet...
From the creator of the internationally bestselling Chi's Sweet Home series comes another frolicking feline with irresistible energy. As an elderly woman reminisces about the early days of her now overgrown (still adorable) cat, FukuFuku, her photos become a portal back to kittenhood: "You really were so very...
*STARRED REVIEW "This, reader, is a mother-daughter story," the American writer-who-is-also-the-mother insists in the latest from Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase). The mother-writer has battled debilitating bouts of depression but she's survived thus far, until her daughter's stillborn birth spirals her into silent withdrawal. In an...
*STARRED REVIEW "I was taught to avoid showing off," Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson (writing, Columbia University; On Michael Jackson) begins. "But isn't all memoir a form of showing off?" That hesitation permeates throughout, the restraint perfectly mimicked in Robin Miles's elegant recitation. This work is a...
“A house. A writing machine. …[And her] animals” are the “home” Sandra Cisneros needs to “feel like writing.” The MacArthur “Genius”-author of The House on Mango Street – one of those celebrated pivotal titles readers never forget – offers the “stories from my life [that]...
*STARRED REVIEW At 16, Binti embarks on an interplanetary voyage to Oomza Uni, the galaxy's supreme institution of higher learning. As the first of her people offered such an opportunity, she leaves home without even warning her family of her departure. When the vessel is attacked by...
Thanks to his "fellow countryman," our peripatetic Turkey-bound Englishman, Mr. Smith, finds himself welcomed into a lavish Persian home. "I'm impressed, Boss," his guide and companion Ali remarks, "You sure know some powerful people." Momentarily glimpsed but intentionally hidden in the sprawling compound is Anis, the...
Sam, Samir, and Nina met in law school in Paris. Sam and Nina were lovers. While Sam was briefly away, Samir shared Nina's bed, after which Sam attempted suicide and won Nina back. Fast-forward almost two decades: Sam and Nina are poor and desperate but still...
Here’s a ‘did you know …?’-fact about the Smithsonian Museums … they’re all free, all the time. That’s not the case in many museums around the country, so the Smithsonian created Museum Day Live!, an annual event in which participating museums across the country open...
