*STARRED REVIEW Two hundred fifty years ago in what is modern-day Ghana, two half-sisters are each given a special stone by their mother. Effia marries an Englishman and lives in the ignominiously named Castle, the center of the African Gold Coast slavery trade. Esi is temporarily...
The Hogarth Shakespeare series—“Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers” – continues with three additional releases in 2016: Jacobson’s take on The Merchant of Venice, Anne Tyler’s reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew in June’s Vinegar Girl, and Margaret...
*STARRED REVIEW When Fen Danlin first landed in New York to join his wife, Yan Haili, she delivered him to a "seedy" Chinatown inn with $500 and instructions to stay – alone – within walking distance of an arranged restaurant job. She returned the next day...
Gifted artist Hannah was supposed to die of lung cancer, Congressman-for-sale David of brain cancer, has-been actor Connie of AIDS, and housewife and mother Linda trapped by immobility forever. Yet this quartet comprise the first SUBlife cases, and some of their brains – the parts...
Descended from a noble samurai family, 12-year-old Yuriko Ishikawa enjoys a privileged life in Hiroshima, Japan. While World War II rages on multiple continents, for now the seventh-grader exists in relative peace. Even when she's at school, with U.S. B-29s flying overhead, her legs wobbling...
Let me just say right up front: this is a (funny, yes – funny) story about cancer. As it might be expected of such stories, this is also filled with tears and resilience, suffering and hope, exhaustion and tenacity. And, it's undoubtedly one of the most unputdownable graphic memoirs I've read...
*STARRED REVIEW "The first thing you're going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?" Keep wondering: Riley Cavanaugh isn't answering. Riley is gender-fluid, information only Riley's psychiatrist is privy to, while Riley's conservative congressman father and teacher mother...
*STARRED REVIEW Somewhere close, sometime soon, war is coming. Twelve-year-old Peter and his fox, Pax, are forced apart by a father whose noble intentions have devastating results. When Peter's father enlists in the military, he pressures Peter to return Pax to the wild, while Peter is sent...
*STARRED REVIEW The 1937 school explosion in New London, TX, remains the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history. With that real-life tragedy as a starting point, Ashley Hope Pérez adds greater volatility with race, class, and family dysfunction, by introducing a love story between two teens from...
*STARRED REVIEW British-born of Welsh and Chinese parentage, Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl, 2007) has lived stateside since 1992, but this is his first U.S.-set title. In it he explores the history of his adopted home in four sections. In “Gold,” he links the completion of...
*STARRED REVIEW After the brutal murder of his father and the wrenching separation from his mother and sister, Yongju must survive a new life of deprivation after his privileged upbringing as the only son of one of North Korea’s power elite. Danny, a misfit immigrant teen...
The third installment of Keigo Higashino's Japan-set Detective Galileo series (after Salvation of a Saint) lands stateside, with plenty of didn't-see-that-coming surprises to keep listeners entranced straight to the end. Brilliant and eccentric physicist Manabu Yukawa – called Detective Galileo because of the sharp, unexpected...
