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...
“Girls don’t ride bicycles,” Wadja hears repeatedly. Being an 11-year-old in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, she finds herself constantly at odds with the societal limitations of her gender, from being forced to wear the all-covering abaya to adjusting her feisty behavior in too many restrictive ways. When...
To get her four-eared infant to safety, Nouri Ahmad Mohammad ibn Mahsoud al-Morad's mother gave first her body, then her life. In 13th-century Persia, a child so different would require divine intervention to survive, and Nouri literally falls into the arms of a gentle, crippled...
One Monday in January, 63-year-old Britt-Marie enters an unemployment office, having last worked as a waitress in 1978. After decades of fastidious living – perfect cutlery drawers, coasters under every drink, dinner at six, beds disinfected with baking soda – Britt-Marie needs a job. She's left...
*STARRED REVIEW Originally published in 2003, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s groundbreaking memoir chronicling her transition from James to Jenny was updated in 2013: "Man, what you don't know could fill a book. I'm unique, however, in that the book filled with the things I don't know is...
'The Bones of Grace': Anam's ‘Bengal trilogy’ comes to a graceful close First, a warning: The Bones of Grace is the final installment in Bangladeshi-born, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam’s “Bengal trilogy.” If the trilogy’s publication history is any indication – A Golden Age in 2008, The Good...
*STARRED REVIEW Presenting her dozen stories in six interlinked pairs, Shobha Rao uses the savage 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan as her narrative center, with reverberations moving outward beyond borders, cultures, countries, and generations. A 13-year-old's would-be widowhood spent in a refugee camp is the best...
