In a mesmerizing genre-switch, YA author Traci Chee moves from the fantasy worldbuilding of her acclaimed The Reader trilogy (The Reader; The Speaker; The Storyteller) to World War II historical fiction, with unforgettable results, in We Are Not Free. As a fourth-generation Japanese American, Chee gets personal, affectingly...
Helmed by director Nahnatchka Khan (Netflix's Always Be My Maybe), an HBO Max adaptation of Lyla Lee’s I'll Be the One was announced six months prior to the book's publication date. Before Hollywood hijacks your imagination, though, get to know Skye off-screen in this delectable...
*STARRED REVIEW Producers/directors, take note: this is how to effectively record an audiobook with more than a single narrator. Here, Melania-Luisa Marte reads Camino’s chapters, while author Elizabeth Acevedo picks up Yahaira’s. For chapters featuring both girls, Marte and Acevedo take turns in dialogue. When their...
Kelli Jo Ford makes a magnificent #OwnVoices debut with Crooked Hallelujah. The book already has significant plaudits: the seventh chapter, "Hybrid Vigor," won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize in 2019, and her pre-publication manuscript won the 2019 Everett Southwest Literary Award from the University of...
*STARRED REVIEW Making both her print and audio debut, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a double powerhouse. As a writer, she gifts readers her “creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read.” She’s anything but hard to...
So this isn’t Shakespeare. No, wait ...
In this delightful, already Ignatz-nominated debut by Japan-born, Brooklyn-based Rumi Hara, 3-year-old Nori is cared for by her grandmother (who can’t always keep up) while both parents work. Each of these six adventurous shorts features a contrasting single color overlaid on otherwise black-and-white panels, capturing...
*STARRED REVIEW Lauded (worshipped?) food journalist/activist Michael Pollan has seven simple words for us here: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the third iteration of his 2009 bestseller (#2 was a charming 2011 illustrated collaboration with artist Maira Kalman), Pollan takes the mic 11...
*STARRED REVIEW What began as a New York Times series becomes a captivating book – and with Chris McDougall narrating, quite the aural gift. Sherman arrived on McDougall’s Pennsylvania farm close to death, rescued from an (unintentionally) abusive hoarder. A supportive herd – McDougall’s family (human...
Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook with Ryan Estrada, illustrated by Ko Hyung-Ju Busan-based wife-and-husband team Kim and Estrada mine Kim’s young adult experiences to expose a chilling period of Korean history so antithetical to the globally addictive entertainment of K-dramas and K-pop currently synonymous...
The publishing industry has been hard hit by COVID-19: festival and conference cancelations, library and bookstore shutterings, disappearing book tours, publishers’ office closings, production delays – especially with international printers – and, alas, probably more obstacles to come. But digital audiobooks can be the ideal,...
June Hur's gripping debut re-creates the Joseon Dynasty, when Korea relied on brutality to contain the spread of foreign Catholicism. During this bloody time, 16-year-old Seol's irrepressible curiosity is about to become her best asset for solving crime ...
He’s “something like a six-legged beast made of pure darkness,” but come morning, he’s back to being “too serious” middle-schooler Adachi. More observer than participant among his peers, he keeps silent as the class pariah, Yano, is bullied almost daily. When a few boys, claiming...
*STARRED REVIEW Novels featuring neurodiverse protagonists are claiming more space on both adult and children’s shelves. The most common underlying message encourages kindness and empathy, despite obvious, sometimes impenetrable, differences. In what might be the first novel to feature a protagonist with alexithymia – an inability...
*STARRED REVIEW The rest of that subtitle goes “A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning,” with the keyword being Remix, thanks to Jason Reynolds’ (Long Way Down) remarkable synthesizing of Ibram X. Kendi’s 600-page, 19-plus-hour original. Kendi reads his introduction, lauding Reynolds’ superb...
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo and translated by Jamie Chang Cho’s narrative is part bildungsroman and part Wikipedia entry. She opens with “August, 2015,” immediately divulging the fragile mental state of her titular Kim Jiyoung, who now as a wife and mother has...
“The invisibility of the women, in particular of my community, fueled this desire to write the Dominican experience, the Latinx experience, the immigrant experience, the New York experience,” reveals Angie Cruz in an interview accessible only if you choose audio. Making her narrator debut, fellow...
*STARRED REVIEW The U.S.’s April, 1975, withdrawal from Vietnam enabled the so-called Vietnam War to spread into Laos and Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime stormed Phnom Penh and dispersed its inhabitants – mostly to brutal labor camps – eliminating 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians....
Finishing what she so affectingly began, Kyla García returns to conclude Tehlor Kay Mejia’s high-octane duology in which the privileged world of Medio and the rebellious encampments of La Voz implode, with the inevitable showdown of Medio’s heir-apparent Mateo Garcia and his two wives –...
*STARRED REVIEW Ishmael Beah, who recounted his brutal experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone in his bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone (2007), understands all too well the horrors that can befall children. Here his fictional “little family” numbers five, the two oldest still...
