Nina Riggs died February 26, 2017. Cassandra Campbell gently narrates most of the work, until Kirby Heyborne takes over to read the afterword by Riggs’s husband, John, and shatters your heart. For a book about fatal diseases – Riggs was diagnosed at 37 with breast cancer;...
As Sarah Jessica Parker’s inaugural selection for the American Library Association’s Book Club Central, Stephanie Powell Watts’s (We Are Only Taking What We Need) first novel is getting well-earned attention. Initially inspired by The Great Gatsby, Watts wanted to give voice to the mostly silent...
*STARRED REVIEW Kimberly Farr, who gracefully, achingly gave voice to the eponymous protagonist in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, returns here as Lucy but adds to her repertoire Lucy’s family, neighbors, and long-ago acquaintances who call Amgash, IL, home. When Lucy’s mother unexpectedly arrived...
*STARRED REVIEW The morning after Election Day 2016, Buzzfeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen produced her essay, “This Is How Much America Hates Women.” Women who questioned, challenged, feuded with Trump – especially “nasty woman” Clinton– were degraded and dismissed. This unruly behavior – outside the “boundaries...
Narrator Em Eldridge is undoubtedly convincing – and her range here impressive. She’s youthful and innocent as almost-14-year-old Ginny, gently gruff but patient as Ginny’s Forever Dad, and alternately understanding and stressed as Ginny’s Forever Mom. Eldridge also moves seamlessly among the other characters who...
*STARRED REVIEW For such a vulnerable, raw memoir, no one but the author could voice the breathtaking revelations, brutal truths, and profound knowledge contained here. “Every body has a story and a history,” Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) begins. Gay stands 6'3"; at her heaviest, she...
Certain authors are their own best narrators – even more true for memoirs (think Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Luvvie Ajayi). Here, Scaachi Koul’s accomplished reading comes with the bonus of regular vocal interjections from her father. With this first book, a collection of smart, sassy, revealing...
Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Man Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things, made her an international superstar. Twenty years later, Delhi-based Roy is an activist power house – feted and feared – with an expansive list of nonfiction credits; her second novel should placate her...
*STARRED REVIEW With his uniquely sing-songy cadence, almost-chuckles, and uncontainable tears, Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) gives a raw, superb performance. No one else could have narrated the stories of his difficult youth, his lifesaving education, his struggles between familial obligations...
*STARRED REVIEW Kevin Kwan’s third volume continues to expose – albeit with plenty of schadenfreudian humor – the outrageous excesses and over-the-top machinations that began with his debut, Crazy Rich Asians (currently in highly anticipated celluloid production). Lydia Look, who voiced book two, China Rich Girlfriend,...
Lady Daniels is supposed to be writing a memoir about raising her now-18-year-old mute son Seth, who communicates just fine using American Sign Language (ASL) and rapid typing on various screens. Lady’s toddler needs child care, however – Lady has recently pushed hubby out –...
*STARRED REVIEW Set in the fictional Balou Mountains in Yan's home province of Henan (also the setting for Lenin's Kisses), these two compelling novellas both exalt emotional bonds and warn against their fatal consequences. To escape endless drought, an entire village flees in search of sustenance...
'Little Soldiers' examines the Chinese education system from the inside Born in Philadelphia, reared in a Houston suburb, Stanford- and Columbia-educated, journalist Lenora Chu has a resume that – at first glance – looks very American. But her “connection to China came by birthright”: she’s “a...
One word describes Bae Suah's latest: enigmatic. The seven stories that comprise her first translated-into-English collection (and her third collaboration with prolifically adroit British translator of choice Smith) are more fragments than linear narratives. In the opening "First Snow, First Sight," unreliable memory between two...
*STARRED REVIEW Most of Anne Lamott’s nonfiction titles are generally variations on a theme: be kind – to yourself, to others – and you’ll make the world a better place. Somehow, though, each book arrives sounding fresh and new – and effective. That Lamott narrates almost all...
*STARRED REVIEW Since Obama’s 2014 visit reestablishing ties between the U.S. and Cuba, American travelers have had the long-lost opportunity for direct exploration, but there are “no easy answers,” warns Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero at the start of her anthology of stupendously astute essays. Half are...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Xe Sands delivers this Book with control, even detachment: the almost languid tone chillingly amplifies the hideous near-future Yuknavitch exposes in her highly anticipated follow-up to The Small Backs of Children. At 49, Christine is in her “last year until ascension,” an anachronistic term that...
Somewhere in a city, people are homeward bound at day's end. Among the commuters are a skateboarding boy and presumably his father; walking slightly ahead are a violin case-carrying girl accompanied by a flower-toting woman, most likely her mother. Waiting for the subway, boy and...
Sometimes – way too often, these days – reality is just, well, too real. So into these beckoning pages I retreat. Novels about bookstores are ultra-alluring, since the possibility of escapist respite is virtually limitless. To follow are a dozen recent titles celebrating those literary...
'Letters to Memory' tells the story of author Karen Tei Yamashita's World War II internment “I have no formed definition of this project except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand,” Karen Tei Yamashita writes in Letters to Memory, her sagacious follow-up...
