BookDragon Books for the Diverse Reader

Fagin the Jew by Will Eisner, foreword by Brian Michael Bendis, afterword by Jeet Heer

14 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, British, European, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Jewish, Young Adult Readers

"I am Fagin the Jew of Oliver Twist," begins the 'father of the graphic novel'-Will Eisner's 21st-century literary reclamation of the 19th-century classic. "This is my story, one that has remained untold and overlooked in the book by Charles Dickens," a tattered old man insists....

The Circle by Dave Eggers

13 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific

Thanks to Annie, her college roommate and best friend, Mae's escaped from her stupefying utilities job in her "wretched" hometown and entered the Circle, an enviable high-tech company (think Google + Apple + steroids) where Annie is one of the "Gang of 40"-power wielders. Mae begins...

Interview: “Writers’ Spotlight: Bich Minh Nguyen”

13 Mar, by SIBookDragon in BookDragon Book Club

How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Anthology edited by the Hmong American Writers’ Circle

12 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Hmong American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Poetry, Short Stories, Young Adult Readers

"For any serious artist, it is a terrible feeling of surrender when you realize there is no place in the world for your voice, when all that you express seems marginalized or in vain ...

Ripper by Isabel Allende, translated by Ollie Brock and Frank Wynne

11 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Latina/o/x, South American, Translation

Just as her latest book was hitting shelves, the near-deified Isabel Allende opened mouth, inserted foot during an interview on NPR and set off a firestorm of negative reaction. On mysteries, she intoned, "I will take the genre, write a mystery that is faithful to...

Numeralia by Jorge Luján, illustrated by Isol, translated by Susan Ouriou

10 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Children/Picture Books, Fiction, Latin American, South American, Translation

Alphabet and counting books are understandably so predictable as to often be interchangeable in their sameness. ABCs and 123s are really immutable ...

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

09 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific

Meg Wolitzer's latest bestseller begins with an intricate overview of the hierarchy of privileged teenagers. In the summer of 1974, six 15- and 16-year-olds meet in Boys' Teepee 3 at Spirit-in-the-Woods, an arts-focused summer camp for the entitled, and baptize themselves the titular Interestings. Four of the...

The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça and PizzaBoy (I and II: Apocalypse) by Filipe Melo, art by Juan Cava, colors by Santiago Villa, translated by Raylene Lowe (I) and Philip R. Simon (II)

07 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, European, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Translation, Young Adult Readers

While watching evening TV that's been interrupted by a special bulletin about the unending "wave of child abductions in Lisbon," Eurico nods off, only to be jarred awake by the ringing telephone. He's late again to his pizza delivery job, where his boss thinks he's...

The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical by Warren Hoffman [in Library Journal]

06 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Black/African American, Chinese American, Drama/Theater, Jewish, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost

Theater producer/critic/playwright Warren Hoffman (The Passing Game) insists that audiences have been "duped" into believing that the Broadway musical "is the most innocent of art forms when, in fact, it is one of America's most powerful, influential, and even at times polemical arts precisely because...

Author Interview: Vaddey Ratner [in Bloom]

05 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Cambodian, Cambodian American, Fiction, Memoir, Repost, Southeast Asian American

Almost two years after  Vaddey Ratner made her New York Times bestselling debut with In the Shadow of the Banyan – her fictionalized account of her survival, as a young child, of the Khmer Rouge genocide that took most of her family along with some two million others...

Review: “masterfully told, heartrending and inspiring”

05 Mar, by SIBookDragon in BookDragon Book Club

Interview: “Q&A with Bich Minh Nguyen”

05 Mar, by SIBookDragon in BookDragon Book Club

I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-sook Shin, translated by Sora Kim-Russell [in Library Journal]

04 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW "I do not specifically reveal the era or elucidate Korea's political situation," writes Kyung-sook Shin, recipient of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, in the ending of her latest spectacular novel in English translation. Ironically, those missing details make this story...

Author Profile: Vaddey Ratner [in Bloom]

03 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Cambodian, Cambodian American, Fiction, Memoir, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American

"To transform suffering into art": Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan While the Vietnam War ended for the United States with the April 1975 military withdrawal, death and destruction continued, moving into neighboring Cambodia and Laos. With the evacuation of U.S. troops, the Communist...

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

02 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, European, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Young Adult Readers

Whenever I hear that a book is about to be transformed into celluloid, I get into a little panic to read the original, oftentimes titles I ironically wouldn't have opened otherwise. Occasionally, I'm pleasantly rewarded, Miss Peregrine among those few that fill me with literary gratitude....

Avatar: The Last Airbender | The Rift (Part One) created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, script by Gene Luen Yang, art by Gurihiru, lettering by Michael Heisler

28 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Chinese American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Middle Grade Readers, Pan-Asian Pacific American, Young Adult Readers

Although our son incessantly watched various versions of the Avatar series on television and even more often on DVD, I had little knowledge for years of who's who or what's what. The casting controversy of the 2010 film version disastrously directed by M. Night Shyamalan is what...

We Are Water by Wally Lamb

27 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Nonethnic-specific

Over the past couple weeks, I've been a bit of an ethnic voyeur, picking up bestselling 'mainstream' titles in search of their APAness. I confess I picked up Wally Lamb's latest purely because I somehow learned the protagonist is named Annie Oh – Oh usually being a Korean...

Hidden Girl: The True Story of a Modern-Day Child Slave by Shyima Hall with Lisa Wysocky

26 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Egyptian, Egyptian American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

"If this book leads to even a single rescue, then my time in bondage was worth it," Shyima Hall writes in the penultimate paragraph in the final chapter of her new memoir. That "time in bondage" she refers to is four long years during which...

Hi, Koo! A Year of Seasons by Jon J. Muth

25 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Children/Picture Books, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific

What is it about panda bears that makes them soooo utterly irresistible? Click here to see if you could possibly be immune to those "chubbly-wubbly." Curmudgeon that I usually am, even I succumbed to "beary love." Jon Muth personally knows their inevitably undeniable appeal: his giant panda, Stillwater,...

Flight by Sherman Alexie

24 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Young Adult Readers

I spent my last birthday with Sherman Alexie ...