'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...
Spanning 17 titles over a quarter century, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has published books for every possible type of reader, including Grandma and the Great Gourd for the youngest, the three-volume Brotherhood of the Conch trilogy for middle grade/young adults, Black Candle for poetry lovers, Arranged Marriage for short story enthusiasts, and eight...
Award-winning writer Sarah Weeks (Pie; So B. It) and India-born debut author Gita Varadarajan present a poignant, comical cultural exchange in the alternating voices of two fifth-grade boys. Joe Sylvester has been living in the same New Jersey town, going to the same school and hanging...
The year was 1994. Hirsh Sawhney was in junior high school when Kurt Cobain's suicide made international headlines that April. Just a few weeks later in a suburb of New Haven, Connecticut, the boy with the locker next to Sawhney's took his own life with...
*STARRED REVIEW In his sublime "foreword [that] might be better thought of as an afterword," physician and bestselling author Abraham Verghese reveals that he came to know Paul Kalanithi "most intimately when he'd ceased to be." That, too, is true of every listener here. Neurosurgeon Kalanithi died in...
*STARRED REVIEW On an afternoon in November 1999, the 50,000-strong disruption of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle imploded with tear gas and violence. Sunil Yapa’s debut pivots around teenage runaway Victor, whose initial plans to sell marijuana for profit morphs into tenacious participation with...
Here’s a ‘did you know …?’-fact about the Smithsonian Museums … they’re all free, all the time. That’s not the case in many museums around the country, so the Smithsonian created Museum Day Live!, an annual event in which participating museums across the country open...
Ria Parker has avoided going home to Chicago for far too long, offering up convenient excuses about her demanding Bollywood career. With her beloved more-brother-than-cousin's impending wedding, Ria finally heads stateside from Mumbai to face the family. For 10 years, she's managed to avoid first-and-only-love Vikram,...
‘In Other Words’ traces Jhumpa Lahiri's love affair with the Italian language A few days before Christmas 1994, Jhumpa Lahiri made her first trip to Italy. She left a week later, in “[l]ove at first sight” not with a person, but with the Italian language. Over...
Somewhere in an old forest, a little tree grows. But the forest is shrinking, the rains shower less often, and the little tree knows that her precious seed cannot flourish there. With the help of a brown bird who has flown far into the blue skies, she sends...
In a house by the sea in Colombo, Sri Lanka, live two families: below are the Sinhala owners, the Rajasinghes with two daughters, Yasodhara and Lanka; upstairs are the Tamil clan of Shivalingams with their son, Shiva, twinned by a shared birthday to Yasodhara. While the...
Flood of Fire brings the astounding, exceptional Ibis Trilogy to a close Readers of this review will fall into two categories: (1) Those who are already two-thirds invested in the Ibis Trilogy, and (2) Newbies who might be wondering if continuing the perusal of this review...
As minimal as the text might initially appear, Muon Van’s debut picture book is as deep as the Sea she references in her title. The resplendently rendered story seems simple: a family awaits for the safe return home of the fisherman father. But, of course,...
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao explores grief that lingers long after the bombing of an airliner Two weeks short of the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 – which disintegrated off the Irish coast on June 23,1985 – psychologist Ashwin Rao...
Aatish Taseer's latest opens with a mother's call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father's body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, "Toby" G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu – half-actually Scottish, half-Indian – was more a foreign "novelty" in his...
Yes, indeed – too much of a good thing is detrimentally possible. Take electricity, for example: as much as we need and use that energy, "city lights always [turn] the night sky gray and dull." For young Phoebe, that's especially disappointing, because tonight, Saturn and...
