BookDragon

No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories by Jayant Kaikini, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana [in Booklist]

24 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian, Repost, Short Stories, South Asian, Translation

Seemingly quotidian lives centered in Mumbai fill Jayant Kaikini’s second translated collection, the first book in translation to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. These 16 stories, written from 1986 to 2006, were selected and translated by the award-winning Tejaswini Niranjana, who in...

I’ll Be the One by Lyla Lee [in Shelf Awareness]

23 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Fiction, Korean American, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Helmed by director Nahnatchka Khan (Netflix's Always Be My Maybe), an HBO Max adaptation of Lyla Lee’s I'll Be the One was announced six months prior to the book's publication date. Before Hollywood hijacks your imagination, though, get to know Skye off-screen in this delectable...

Must I Go by Yiyun Li [in Booklist]

22 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

Missing children loom in Yiyun Li’s latest novel, her second since her teenage son’s tragic 2017 suicide, which inspired Where Reasons End (2019). MacArthur “genius” Li is herself a suicide survivor, as revealed in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). In her...

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd [in Booklist]

21 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Egyptian, Fiction, Jewish, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW To begin at the end seems most fitting: “If Jesus actually did have a wife ...

Deacon King Kong by James McBride [in Booklist]

19 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW On a cloudy September 1969 afternoon, septuagenarian widower Sportcoat – less respectfully dubbed Deacon King Kong for his addiction to the local moonshine – shot 19-year-old drug dealer Deems, then saved Deems’ life with an unseemly version of the Heimlich maneuver when Deems nearly...

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo [in Booklist]

18 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Audio, Black/African American, Caribbean American, Fiction, Poetry, Repost, Verse Novel/Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Producers/directors, take note: this is how to effectively record an audiobook with more than a single narrator. Here, Melania-Luisa Marte reads Camino’s chapters, while author Elizabeth Acevedo picks up Yahaira’s. For chapters featuring both girls, Marte and Acevedo take turns in dialogue. When their...

Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford [in Shelf Awareness]

17 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Kelli Jo Ford makes a magnificent #OwnVoices debut with Crooked Hallelujah. The book already has significant plaudits: the seventh chapter, "Hybrid Vigor," won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize in 2019, and her pre-publication manuscript won the 2019 Everett Southwest Literary Award from the University of...

Skin Deep [Siobhan O’Brien Book 1] by Sung J. Woo [in Library Journal]

16 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Despite her Asian features, her father really is Irish, her mother Norwegian. Her name is Siobhan O’Brien, never mind everyone’s surprise when trying to gauge the incongruity between her face and that moniker. Short answer: Siobhan is a Korean-born, upstate New York–raised transracial adoptee. At...

The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem by Sandra Tsing Loh [in Shelf Awareness]

15 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Despite the "golden years" promised by many, for writer, performer, and University of California, Irvine, professor Sandra Tsing Loh, her "fifty-fifth year was more like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-old's life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-old's body." With the same self-deprecating wit and sardonic charm with...

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener [in Booklist]

14 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Jewish, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

Once upon a time, Anna Weiner was a literary agency assistant, living on “the edge of Brooklyn with a roommate [she] hardly knew, in an apartment filled with so much secondhand furniture it almost had a connection to history.” She was “broke” but “never poor,”...

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore [in Library Journal]

12 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW On the eve of her 19th birthday – which is also New Year's Eve – Oona is having the celebration of her life, madly in love, about to embark on a dream-come-true band tour. But when she awakes, she's jumped forward in time to...

Apeirogon by Colum McCann [in Booklist]

11 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Biography, Fiction, Irish American, Israeli, Middle Eastern, Nonfiction, Palestinian, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW When Colum McCann first considered narrating his books, he offered to audition for his own National Book Awarded Let the Great World Spin: “...

Red Dress in Black and White by Elliot Ackerman [in Shelf Awareness]

10 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Turkish

*STARRED REVIEW At the center of 2017 National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman’s formidable Red Dress in Black and White is William, "about seven years old," whose relationship to parents, place, and history is brilliantly revealed over a single day. William is the son of Catherine,...

The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg [in Shelf Awareness]

09 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

Yoshiharu Tsuge abandoned making manga in 1987, and yet his legacy has only expanded – deservedly so – during the decades since, far beyond his native Japan. Considered one of the originators of the graphic 'I-novel' (shishōsetsu), he eventually "abandoned what had been considered one...

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida by Clarissa Goenawan [in Library Journal]

08 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Indonesian, Japanese, Repost, Singaporean

Indonesian-born, Singaporean-domiciled Clarissa Goenawan (Rainbirds) takes her sophomore title back to a death in remote Japan. This time, death arrives via suicide, claiming the titular Miwako, an enigmatic university sophomore who disappears without notice, and is found only after death. Desperate to comprehend her fatal...

Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith [in Shelf Awareness]

05 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation

If anyone can deeply understand a foreign text, the translator surely tops the list. "Like Bae's others, this book is simultaneously a detective novel and a surreal, poetic fever dream," explains Man Booker International Prize-winning translator Deborah Smith. Provocatively demanding, Untold Night and Day is Smith's...

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora [in Booklist]

04 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

The eponymous conjure women here are two midwife/healers: enslaved mother May Belle and her eventually free daughter Rue. Their story gets revealed in three time-jumping segments – slaverytime, wartime, freedomtime – that readers will need to realign for full disclosure of brutal secrets, hidden pasts,...

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Genevieve West [in Booklist]

03 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Short Stories

*STARRED REVIEW Armed with significant acting credits and plentiful lauds, Aunjanue Ellis makes her audiobook debut as the voice of one of the 20th-century’s most celebrated, iconic writers. In a word, her performance is stupendous. Texas Woman’s University professor Genevieve West’s definitive new collection features, for...

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio [in Booklist]

02 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Latina/o/x, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, South American, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Making both her print and audio debut, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a double powerhouse. As a writer, she gifts readers her “creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read.” She’s anything but hard to...

Outside the Lines by Ameera Patel [in Shelf Awareness]

01 Jun, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, African, Fiction, Repost, South African

"We know what you did," an ominous warning, proves pivotal in Ameera Patel's electrifying debut novel, Outside the Lines. In a predominantly white middle-class neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, the threatening phrase inextricably links five disparate characters. "You took the money from the vase," the drug-addicted,...

BookDragon Books for the Diverse Reader