Making her dual print and audio debut, journalist Kat Chow relies on words to resurrect her late mother – and lost family, by extension – who died of cancer in 2004. Not yet 50, her mother seemed to fulfill the superstition that the women in...
When new kid Livy enters middle school, she doesn’t yet have friends, but she’s not exactly alone. Viola, her identical blue shadow no one else can see, never leaves her, but she voices every poisonous thought, insisting Livy is a “total disaster” doomed to be...
In her first book in a dozen years, Lan Samantha Chang (All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, 2010) – the first woman and first Asian American director of the storied Iowa Writers’ Workshop – introduces the family Chao who, for 35 years, has been feeding...
Eva Chen and Sophie Diao: A Collaboration of Joy and Empowerment Eva Chen and Sophie Diao have yet to meet in real life, but they already share important commonalities: both are American daughters of Chinese immigrants, both have multiple book credits, and both are multi-tasking multi-talents. Chen is a...
An Instagram executive and Google Doodler might not seem to be a literary match, but author Eva Chen (Juno Valentine series) and illustrator Sophie Diao (I Am the Wind) prove to be an ideal pairing in their fabulous first picture book collaboration, I Am Golden. "We...
*STARRED REVIEW Bilingual Chinese American writer, poet, and translator Ye Chun showcases her linguistic prowess in a prodigious debut collection featuring women on both sides of the globe, many defined and confined by and reliant on motherhood. The titular “hao” recurs, meaning “Good, yes, okay. The most...
For most of her first seven years, Anna Qu was "the girl without parents; a father dead, a mother who left to start a new life." And yet those years held the "love" Qu names in the subtitle of her bittersweet debut, Made in China:...
James Sie (Still Life Las Vegas) multitasks as author and partial narrator in his first YA novel: the theme might seem common – a high school love story complicated by parents and friends – but the narrative’s specifics elevate the familiar into memorable. Sie gamely...
Powerlessness pervades Ha Jin's perceptive A Song Everlasting, as his protagonist leaves fame and familiarity in one country to flee toward ambiguity and adaptation in another. Freedom, Yao Tian reasons, is his driving motive. National Book Award-winner Jin (A Map of Betrayal), notable for empathically crafting...
The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...
*STARRED REVIEW The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang's magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC's 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire's 2020 Books of the Year). Wang's seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing...
*STARRED REVIEW Perhaps what is most noticeable upon opening Pik-Shuen Fung’s elegiac debut is all the white space. Paragraphs, phrases, words, even detached letters float across the pages, undoubtedly an ethereal reflection of lost chances, missing time, stolen opportunities, and spaces impossible to fill. For most of...
Welcome to Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. The year remains somber, as the APA community combats dramatically increasing anti-Asian violence around the country and continues to mourn the eight people, including six women of Asian descent, killed in a Georgia mass shooting. Despite a U.S....
On June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Chinese American Vincent Chin was bludgeoned with a baseball bat by Ronald Ebens and stepson Michael Nitz. The two white men, like too many others, were driven by anti-Asian resentment over Detroit's declining auto industry due to Japanese competition. "It's...
Warning: the number of corpses could actually exceed the page count in Tom Lin's addictively gruesome debut, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Set between the Utah Territories and California in the late 1800s, Lin's novel manages to enhance a wild, wild western with Odyssean devotion, magic...
*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prized NYT editor/journalist Jia Lynn Yang makes history intimately personal: “This book is an attempt to fuse my family’s history to the history of the country that found a place for us ...
Claire Lou is restarting her life in Portland, Oregon, where she’s managed to find a new apartment (never mind the money she still owes on the security deposit) and she’s even gotten herself hired as the Portland Post’s photographer. Her mother is just two hours...
Relative newbie Mimi Chang and seasoned Josh Hurley prove well-paired narrating two 12-year-old seventh-graders in 1980s Sacramento who initially seem to share little more than loneliness – and the specter of missing fathers. Ro’s father is dead, killed by a drunk driver. She hasn’t moved houses,...
*STARRED REVIEW "Serendipity" perhaps best describes Richard Ho's (Red Rover) second picture book, The Lost Package, enhanced by writer/artist Jessica Lanan's (The Fisherman & the Whale) superbly expressive watercolors. Together, the creative pair present a wondrous story about separation and near-magical reunion. Under the watchful eye of a...
Short stories can be the perfect antidote to these days of winter blues, pandemic panic, and cabin fever. Deesha Philyaw’s debut short-story collection – The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a much-lauded, National-Book-Award-finalist – illuminates the lives of nine Black woman with a performance from Janina...
