I've never seen, but have read about (no surprise) the international popularity of telenovelas, but I imagine that if this, Isabel Allende's latest novel, was transferred to the little screen, it would fit quite well in what seems to be a rather histrionic genre with...
* STARRED REVIEW After surviving the Korean War, Yohan spends another year in a prisoner-of-war camp south of the new border that splits the country in two. Rather than return north, where no one awaits him, Yohan begins life anew in a faraway coastal Brazilian village as...
In the same delightful, sequential fun of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – if you do x, then y happens – Brazilian überauthor of more than a hundred books, Ana Maria Machado, puts on a party of epic proportions. "If a few days before your birthday your mother should...
The words "A Novel" adorn the top of the cover of Chopsticks – but that's definitely a debatable label. No such limits necessary here! A hybrid creation by novelist/short story writer Jessica Anthony and book designer/creative director (for Farrar, Straus, Giroux, who is not Chopsticks' publisher, in case you...
Being always a dozen or so titles behind, a confluence of certain events seem to need to happen for some posts to finally get from my brain to the ...
"On a continent of many songs, in a country shaped like the arm of a guitarrista, the rain drummed down on the town of Temuco [Chile]," the invitingly dreamy Dreamer begins. Neftalí Reyes, the eponymous dreamer, is most content to live in a world of stories,...
An 18-year-old boy, Camilo, is dead, his youthful body prepared and confined forever in a coffin that now sits in a living room, attended by his estranged parents on either side. Through the course of the inaugural night that marks his sudden, violent passing, his...
Little orphan Teodora promises her dying godmother to look after her worthless bed-hopping son. Raised Cinderella-style in a small village in Colombia, Teodora willingly enslaves herself to ensure handsome but immoral Galaor's every comfort, and not surprisingly falls madly in love with him. 'Love is...
With prolonged bleak skies across the East Coast thanks to Katia, Lee, and incoming Nate (not to mention recovery from Irene), Marisol McDonald is one brilliant, rambunctious, delightful diversion. "My name is Marisol McDonald, and I don't match," the flame-haired, brown-skinned, fearless, Peruvian Scottish American little girl announces....
Here's another intriguing premise from Ana Maria Machado – one of Brazil’s preeminent writers for children, and winner of the highly prestigious 2000 Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing ...
If the writing is a bit stilted and uneven in this middle grade novel, Ana Maria Machado – one of Brazil's preeminent writers for children – has a plausible excuse. Her fictional writer/narrator here is a schoolboy named Mariano who is "only writing – or trying to write –...
Daytripper is a gift of unexpected brilliance. That's all you really need to know. And just as I soooooo appreciated knowing almost nothing about this title before I opened its enticing pages, I will try not to spoil a moment for you. If you're not ready to...
A magazine reporter, referred to as "La Monita, Blondie" – because of her "mass of blond hair" thanks to her Belgian grandfather – is sent to cover an angel sighting in the Bogotá...
Based on actual tragic event in a remote Indian coalmine in 2001, Badahur – an ex-director in the Indian Ministry of Coal until 2006 – makes his literary debut with a scathing insider's look at the tainted coal industry. Badahur recounts the multifaceted layers of the...
A unique collection of essays that explores the experience of being Japanese in Brazil (during the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of Japanese immigrated to Brazil)...
