In sleepy Pine Valley, MN, 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman – beloved daughter, excellent student, best friend, adored girlfriend, talented actress – lies dead. Solving her gruesome murder is up to local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend who watched Hattie grow up. Her English teacher Peter Lund...
Once upon a time, Cuba was an enigmatic, faraway place that conjured up images of I Love Lucy, history lessons about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and recurring headlines about Guantánamo. As far as books go, two loomed large: Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, a multi-generational...
Narrator Em Eldridge is undoubtedly convincing – and her range here impressive. She’s youthful and innocent as almost-14-year-old Ginny, gently gruff but patient as Ginny’s Forever Dad, and alternately understanding and stressed as Ginny’s Forever Mom. Eldridge also moves seamlessly among the other characters who...
Certain authors are their own best narrators – even more true for memoirs (think Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Luvvie Ajayi). Here, Scaachi Koul’s accomplished reading comes with the bonus of regular vocal interjections from her father. With this first book, a collection of smart, sassy, revealing...
Sometimes – way too often, these days – reality is just, well, too real. So into these beckoning pages I retreat. Novels about bookstores are ultra-alluring, since the possibility of escapist respite is virtually limitless. To follow are a dozen recent titles celebrating those literary...
'Letters to Memory' tells the story of author Karen Tei Yamashita's World War II internment “I have no formed definition of this project except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand,” Karen Tei Yamashita writes in Letters to Memory, her sagacious follow-up...
ABSTRACT These books feature diverse characters who – in a multiplicity of ways – suffer, learn, and generally triumph in their differences. Varying in genre from picture book to poetry, in setting from Kenya to California, and in ethnic focus from Muslim Bangladeshi to Ojibway/Anishinaaabe (Canadian...
"[D]ecidedly catholic" tastes aside, The Manga Critic is oh so right: I DOOOOOOOOOOOO "religiously" review every issue of this toothsome series! How could I ever ignore such delicious delights, I tell you! So what's the latest for our favorite Tokyo lovebirds? While Shiro takes his parents...
Ready to get graphic? If you’re new to the genre, might I suggest you go directly to the godfather of manga, the late Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989). Astro Boy ring a bell? Speed Racer? Kimba the White Lion? “There’s a reason why the Japanese call [him] the God of Comics,”...
Favorite Manga Series, Part I: 20th Century Boys through Ultraman Graphic titles are big news. Even if you’re not a pop-culture connoisseur, you can’t have missed the graphic titles regularly popping up on bestseller lists—not to mention their various incarnations on film and even the stage! When...
Debut novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi's protagonist, like the author herself, is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee father and Israeli Jewish mother. Ahlam comes of age in the Arizona desert, physically safe from war but damaged by the bitter fighting between her parents that too...
'Reading with Patrick' tells of a teacher's extraordinary journey Pontificating with superlatives only halfway through the calendar year might prove short-sighted, but risking humiliated inaccuracy seems to be a negligible consequence for claiming that Reading with Patrick could be the most affecting book you’ll read this...
*STARRED REVEIW Before Adichie became a mother herself, a childhood friend – the titular Ijeawele – asked Adichie to tell her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. She begins here with two "Feminist Tools": 1. "I matter equally. Full stop"; and 2. "Can you...
*STARRED REVIEW If anything about this sounds familiar, that might be because you may have already come across the TEDxEuston talk of the same name, presented by Adichie in December 2012 and widely circulated. Think of that as a highly successful test run, and consider investing...
Q&A with Thi Bui: Writer, Illustrator, Teacher On the cover of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir is a perfect quote: “A book to break our heart and heal it,” blurbs fellow Vietnamese American refugee and 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction...
In 2017, Cammie O'Reilly is an elderly grandmother visiting her childhood home with her 12-year-old granddaughter after half a century away. While the outside still looks like the same "fortress from the Middle Ages," the inside now houses birds, butterflies, and turtles rather than the...
The unrelenting conflict between Palestine and Israel keeps the Middle East in the news. But for a fuller picture of the Palestinian and Palestinian American experience than what the media can provide, here's a starter reading list for young people. Stay tuned for our list of titles about...
Tom Grendel can divide his 17-year-old life in "exactly three phases: before Mom, after Mom but before Dad/Iraq, and my current post-Dad/Iraq period." Tom's mother died suddenly when he was 9. His father deployed to Iraq, leaving Tom and his sister, Zipora, with their grandmother....
On September 11, 2001, 9-year-old Amani Al-Khatahtbeh should have been enjoying Yearbook Day at her New Jersey elementary school. Instead, “[t]hat day has become crystallized in my memory,” Al-Kahatahtbeh writes – and narrates, “not just for how harrowingly scary it [was] – how we didn’t...
This is the second in a two-part series of recommended books for youth about the refugee experience. For a list of picture books, click here. Canada, with her groovin' President, functional healthcare system, and more welcoming borders, is currently in the throes of "Month 13," the first month following...
