Judge Gish Jen anointed Beauty, Christina Chiu’s first fiction since her award-winning 2001 collection, Troublemaker and Other Stories, for the Santa Fe Writers Project’s James Alan McPherson Award, enabling publication from 2040 Books. A simple summary reveals Amy Wong's trajectory from an unmoored Manhattan 16-year-old...
*STARRED REVIEW “Begin at the end,” Emily St. John Mandel’s (Station Eleven, 2014) highly anticipated latest opens. Relative-newbie narrator Dylan Moore, a Julliard-trained actor, instantly becomes Vincent as she is “plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s dark wildness.” She’s notably named by...
Retired pediatrician Bettye Kearse, her family’s eighth griot (storyteller/historian/genealogist), traces her lineage over two centuries: “Always remember – you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president,” her predecessors instilled. The fourth U.S. president, James Madison, never had biological children with wife Dolley. He...
In writing her now-classic The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), Pulitzer-Prized (and first Black woman so honored) Isabel Wilkerson reveals in her highly anticipated follow-up, “while working on ...
After last year’s The Matchmaker’s List, Sonya Lalli and Soneela Nankani return together for another cross-cultural dramedy about the challenges of balancing filial duties and modern relationships. Anu Desai was the perfect daughter for her immigrant Indian parents: she married the first (and only) boy she kissed,...
Ramón De Ocampo, co-narrator of Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly’s Hello, Universe (2017) and a fellow Filipino American, returns to Kelly’s work solo this time, ciphering three siblings who share an address but seemingly little else. Their combative parents are too distracted to be nurturing, leaving...
Seventeen-and-a-half-hours is a long, lonnnnnng commitment, and Scottish actor Angus King takes on his fellow Glaswegian Douglas Stuart’s resonating debut with meticulous devotion. While the title belongs to young Shuggie Bain, who comes of age in the poorest neighborhoods around Glasgow in the 1980s, the narrative...
*STARRED REVIEW A year has passed since the oldest Torres daughter, Ana, fatally fell (jumped?) from her bedroom window. Her sisters have endured their loss behind rigid defenses: Jessica assumed Ana's life, including claiming Ana's boyfriend; Iridian assuages her loneliness with Ana's books and writing; Rosa...
*STARRED REVIEW Yes, indubitably, you’ll need to first read/listen to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (2018) to fully appreciate April’s resurrection, why/how we’re not alone, the need to save humanity despite, well, humans. While Kristen Sieh helmed Hank Green’s bestselling debut almost solo – Green himself did a...
*STARRED REVIEW Banished from a large private city hospital, the doctor has run a remote village clinic for three years. His “pharmacist” is an untrained young woman, her husband on call for urgent labor. Despite the doctor’s acerbic demeanor, his care is unreproachable, even self-funding necessary...
*STARRED REVIEW S.A. Cosby and Blacktop Wasteland were featured in Booklist’s 2020 Spotlight on Crime Fiction, and his editorial proved to be thought-provoking and memorable. For readers seeking further Cosby-talk, choose the audiobook, because, while actor Adam Lazarre-White is absolutely convincing, the recording’s highlight just might be Cosby’s 10-minute...
After a minute of unnecessary, ill-suited music, this recording opens with a chilling content warning: “This book contains scenes depicting sexual harassment and rape.” Kelly Yang’s highly anticipated follow-up to her award-winning middle-grade debut, Front Desk (2018), is markedly different from that book, as she...
Readers might need the opening sentence repeated here: “Somewhere in the Américas, many years after once-upon-a-time and long before happily-ever-after, a boy climbed the cobbled steps of an arched bridge in the tiny village of Santa Maria in the country of the same name.” The...
If the narrator sounds immediately familiar, here’s why: Danielle Macdonald played Willowdean Dickson in the popular Netflix adaptation of Julie Murphy’s bestselling Dumplin'. Making her narrator debut in Jennifer Weiner’s plus-size empowering latest, Macdonald is so convincing that once listeners have begun the story, stopping...
*STARRED REVIEW British-born to a Greek Cypriot mother and Jamaican father, Dean Atta established himself as a poet and performer in 2012. Here he gorgeously debuts as both author and narrator of his novel-in-verse in which his fictional stand-in, Michael Angeli, matures from an end-of-the-millennium baby...
Following the über-success of his three-part Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan returns with another over-the-top bestseller, this time contemporizing and diversifying E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Lydia Look, narrator for previous Kwan titles, ushers the characters through a (practically) royal East/West wedding in Capri, then a...
Emily Lawrence narrates Hannah Capin's contemporized adaptation of Macbeth, featuring overprivileged L.A. teens with a #MeToo narrative overlay. Out at a party with her three best friends, Elizabeth Jade Khanjara is gang-raped by a group of prep school lacrosse stars. She refuses to be labeled...
Soneela Nankani continues to grow her resume as the South Asian American rom-com narrator-of-choice, once again convincingly transforming truculently mismatched sparks into eternally burning flames. In Canadian Sara Desai’s debut, Nankani introduces sparring partners, Layla and Sam, suddenly forced to share a San Francisco office...
Arya Sagar, who has dozens of Indian/South Asian audio credits, enhances Amitav Ghosh’s ("Ibis" trilogy) already penetrating around-the-world mythic quest with his mellifluous narration, especially heightened with (mostly) agile adjustments for regional accents. Ghosh’s peripatetic hero, Deen Dutta, is an earnest Brooklyn-based rare books dealer,...
Besides sharing a Dominican background with titular Adana Moreau, Coral Peña seems rather miscast for first-time novelist Michael Zapata’s predominantly male cast. Having made her notable aural debut (serendipitously!) with Angie Cruz’s lauded Dominicana (2019), Peña’s sophomore performance feels more determined than inspired. Zapata’s novel flows through...
