At 16, Twinkle Mehra is the youngest junior at her Colorado Springs charter high school. She doesn't have a cell phone and she can't drive because she doesn't have her license (nor a car). Twinkle knows "[s]ome might call people like [her] losers," but Twinkle...
"Indian girls can be forgotten so well they can forget themselves." After reading Terese Marie Mailhot’s 160 pages or listening to not-quite-four hours narrated by Rainy Fields, forgetting is not an option. Presented as an essay collection, Mailhot's work lays bare her experiences as a...
Emulating the larger-than-life characters in Joseph Cassara's debut novel, narrator Christian Barillas’s gender-defying performance vacillates smoothly from sass to introspection, rage to desperation, elation to detachment. During the 1980s New York City ball scene, the House of Xtravaganza was the first Latinx house, later made...
After a decade of driving the same bus route, "Mr. Bertram Brown has had quite enough." He resents the old ladies, "old blokes," "dippy mothers," "babies puking," "lovey-dovey" lads and lasses "going coo coo coo," but "[d]on't get Bert started about kids! ...
When Chinese American immigrant Bobby Han died, entrusting his Beijing Duck House restaurant to the next generation, he couldn’t have fathomed how quickly his 30-year-old legacy would go up in flames. His younger son, Jimmy – dubbed “little boss” by the restaurant staff, many of whom...
*STARRED REVIEW In Canadian novelist Sharon Bala’s debut, a 60-meter freighter reaches British Columbia in 2009, carrying 500 survivors of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war. The arrivals are herded into detention centers by a government fearful of terrorists hidden among these "boat people." Mahindran and his six-year-old...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Henry Goodman self-righteously sputters, resignedly accepts, viciously plots, frantically searches, and plays especially well the Fool – all in the service of expertly, effortlessly voicing the latest in the Bard-updated-by-famous-contemporary-authors "Hogarth Shakespeare" series. In Edward St. Aubyn's (Patrick Melrose series) wickedly compelling, guiltily provocative...
*STARRED REVIEW In nursery school, Keiko pragmatically suggested that the dead bird in the park could become a grilled treat for her father. In primary school, she ended a forbidden brawl by hitting a boy on the head with a spade. She stopped a teacher’s hysterics...
The first thing Walter Mosley (Charcoal Joe) devotees will want to know is whether Joe King Oliver is getting a series of his own. That future seems currently unclear, but should King proliferate on the page, then Dion Graham must be conscripted to continue his...
*STARRED REVIEW Yes, reading the inimitable Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel Lecture is easy, but the better option is listening to his crisp, gentle voice instead. Perhaps Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, missed the memo on properly pronouncing Ishiguro's first name, but her introduction...
Riding the subway after a visit to the pool with his grandmother, young Julián notices three glamorous fellow passengers he's convinced are mermaids. And, of course, "Julián LOVES mermaids." Inspired by the company, the rest of Julián's train ride morphs into a dazzling underwater daydream...
After a Salt Lake City reading, novelist Tim is approached in – okay, stalked to – a convenience store by Danny, a former college writing classmate. Danny has a mysterious manuscript for Tim, which has quite the provenance story involving Danny in São Paulo on...
*STARRED REVIEW Difficult life circumstances bring together two Indian village girls: Poornima meets Savitha because Poornima's recently widowed father needs help weaving saris; clever, kind Savitha must help support her impoverished family. The pair are soon inseparable, nurturing each other in a society in which their...
Nigerian-born Akwaeke Emezi makes a double debut as both author and narrator of her autobiographical first novel. As creator, she knows precisely how her story should flow, where emphasis is required, when to draw back, push forward, add breathing space. Her stand-in is Ada who, from...
Candace Chen arrives in New York City post-college because "it seemed like the inevitable, default place to go." After a summer of wandering Manhattan wearing her dead mother's dresses – taking pictures and getting picked up – she unexpectedly falls into a publishing job. She...
Never mind the children who play in the Upper East Side schoolyard of St. Timothy's just off Park Avenue – it's the parents who display the serious behavioral issues. On everyone's radar is Philippa Lye, whose elegant aloofness makes her the most coveted friend. Into this...
*STARRED REVIEW Memoirs by North Korean defectors have proliferated, but Masaji Ishikawa's, originally published in 2000, might be the first available in English translation by a Japanese-born escapee. The Japanese bestseller, I Was Kim Jong Il's Cook (2004), by pseudonymous Kenji Fujimoto, could be the only other...
For Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela, her oversized moniker is "'so long ...
Reba Buhr can't correctly pronounce the California city of Marin, but she sure can modulate her versatile voice to match the various ages and backgrounds of the women and girls who populate the 16 stories of Danielle Lazarin’s superb debut collection. Buhr embodies youth in...
Shoved onto the asphalt by police, lying "parallel like burial plots" next to her husband Roy in a motel parking lot, Celestial recalls her wedding proclamation: "What God has brought together, let no man tear asunder." But an American marriage – especially if a black...
