As a young man, Anders Hill was rather a rebel, abandoning his stifling southern roots, estranging himself from his acerbic father by forsaking Duke University for an exclusive New England college. There he fell in love with his roommate's girlfriend who would become his wife. Becoming a husband, then...
Probably my brain is showing its advancing age, but I can't remember the last time I stayed up half the night to finish a book unless I had an impending deadline (procrastinate? me?!). While I started Sleepwalk-ing in daylight stuck in the ears (debut novelist Mira Jacob...
Oh, oh, oh. You know something special is coming when I start with those three simple syllables. Because big words like 'remarkable,' 'marvelous,' 'resonating' just don't carry the same admiring adoration as plain old 'oh, oh, oh.' I'm also hoping that sort of speechless reaction...
If you've never read a Julia Glass novel (2002 National Book Award winner that she is, chances are slim, I suppose), just don't until after you've finished this one. If you have, forget you ever did. Only after the final Dark Sacred page (or last track; if you choose to...
Leslie T. Chang’s bio notes her gratitude to her immigrant parents for "forc[ing] her to attend Saturday-morning Chinese school" while growing up outside New York City. That multilingual skill clearly gave her privileged access during the decade she spent as a China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, while that lofty journalist...
So maybe I'm getting older faster, but oh my goodness, I'm surprised this trilogy is rated for kids – ages 12+ and grade 7+! Fair warning from this parent: the violence is graphic, the body count immeasurable, and by the end, most of the main characters...
"Once upon a time, there was a family with two daughters, and a mother and father who promised to love them both exactly the same." "She was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. It's important to note that I was also all those...
When Jace Witherspoon arrives at Christian Marshall's address after 19 hours of driving straight from Chicago to Albuquerque, he's not quite sure what he's going to say. "'I was in the neighborhood,' ...
Readers with groupie-tendencies (like me), take careful note: Hattie Ever After is positive proof that if you ask an author enough times for more, you just might receive. "When I left Hattie at the end of Hattie Big Sky," confesses Kirby Larson in her ending "Author's...
So here I sit facing a familiar conundrum ...
Micah is a boy. Micah is a girl. Micah is 17, a senior in a progressive New York City private school. Micah's father went to Marseille in search of his unknown black French father and came back with a white French wife. Micah's father is an...
See the entwined pair of hands? Although the girl and woman never meet, they remain forever bound by both blood and experience over a tumultuous century in Afghanistan. The woman is Shekiba, the only daughter in a family of sons, whose gender alone makes her a target of abuse...
In a roundabout way I can't quite recall, I ended up at this 2007 New York Times article, "Young Man Behaving Badly," and learned that bestselling author Glen Duncan is hapa British Asian. I found his latest title, By Blood We Live, magically waiting on my shelves, only...
"In 1975 ...
Although Fridays are predominantly reserved for manga, I thought July Fourth trumped the usual today. Kirby Larson’s Hattie Big Sky, a 2007 Newbery Honor title, examines American patriotism from a perspective I can't remember encountering before in fiction. While the target audience is younger readers, surely adults...
Nate Foster, who at "four foot eight" looks much younger that his almost-14 years, makes up for his diminutive height with outsized dreams – and the grandest of plans to make them come true. While his parents are away for a romantic weekend (Dad's trying to make...
I can't believe we're already in the last full week of LGBT Pride Month! I confess that my June literary goal was to read as many David Levithan titles as possible (without guilt even, given what month this is). Alas, I didn't make much progress in any...
If, like me, you have trouble with accents, dialects, or unfamiliar vernacular, choose audible here. Narrator Peter Macon couldn't be smoother and clearer: I couldn't figure out "meejit" on the page, but in Macon's voice, no problem (turns out I'm just the "eejit" who can't understand 'midget,'...
"Look at us. A family of four. Seated around the dinner table," 16-year-old Simone observes. "We do this every night. ...
