Sixteen years ago, a pregnant woman walking the hospital halls found a lottery ticket on the floor. The ticket proved quite the winner, enabling the new mother – and her three co-parents – to "buy a big house to fill with lots more kids, and...
Kimeli, a young Maasai man, returns to his village in Kenya after being away for a long time with “one story [that] has burned a hole in his heart.” He remembers the “[b]uildings so tall they can touch the sky,” he saw the “[f]ires so hot...
Beloved novelist Gish Jen (World and Town, 2010) expands on the East-West cultural paradigm she applied to examining art and culture in her previous nonfiction work, Tiger Writing (2013), to see “what it can show us about the world.” As the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants,...
Well holy, moly! How did a dozen years fly by so quickly?! San Francisco indie press Immedium’s 12-part Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, written by founding publisher and author Oliver Chin, comes full circle with a final, rousing cock-a-doodle-dooooo!! Mama and Papa welcome Ray to their flock, earning his name...
From our northern neighbors comes the story of Irene Couchie Dupuis, co-author Dr. Jenny Kay Dupuis’s grandmother, who at 8 years old, was forcibly removed from her home by the Canadian government and sent to a faraway residential school with her two brothers. The strict nuns...
When Sofia’s bouncing ball knocks over her mother’s purse, what spills out is more than just the usual keys and wallet – she finds proof that her mother is a registered ALIEN, “¡una extraterrestre!” She’s even more surprised when her mother confirms that the card...
*STARRED REVIEW In the fourth – and most entertaining – of the updated-by-famous-contemporary-authors "Hogarth Shakespeare" series (which also includes Jeannette Winterson's The Gap of Time, Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name, and Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl), The Tempest gets reset to an Ontario theater festival and a correctional...
"I wanted to write about girls and monsters, which has been a theme of mine from almost the start of my career — girls and giant monsters, and the supernatural," bestselling author Marjorie Liu told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2015 interview. "I wanted to...
*STARRED REVIEW Walter Forrester, a self-described "stubborn old man" without living relatives, contacts Alaska museum curator Joshua Sloan with an offer to donate numerous effects of his great-uncle Lt. Col. Allen Forrester and Forrester's wife, Sophie. In 1885, Allen Forrester embarked on a formidable mission to chart...
*STARRED REVIEW The collective elder mothers of Upper Room Chapel open with a Greek chorus-esque recitation about happenings affecting their congregation. At the center of the chatter is Nadia, 17, who had "earned a wild reputation" since her mother committed suicide six months earlier; the Upper Room...
Having survived too many violently nightmarish years in foster care, Mallory knows how lucky she is to finally have two unconditionally loving parents. After years of intensive therapy, she's ready to try something most teens expect to experience: her senior year of high school. Mallory's...
*STARRED REVIEW With Han Kang’s The Vegetarian awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, her follow-up will garner extra scrutiny. Bottom line? This new work, again seamlessly translated by Deborah Smith, who also provides an indispensable contextual introduction, is even more stupendous. Han drops readers into a...
Still reeling from her mother's sudden death, Wylie – already fighting debilitating anxiety – has become even more self-isolating. When her former best friend's mother shows up desperately seeking her daughter Cassie, Wylie doesn't confess that the two have barely seen each other since Cassie...
River Dean, 17, is not a bad kid: he's got warm relationships with his family (except his runaway dad), does well at school, and has good friends. But when Penny, the love of his life, dumps him, River starts making awful decisions, starting with stumbling...
Twelve-year-old Reena's outburst during a family conversation about parental careers, geography, and the future "ten years from now" catapults the family from a city of monuments, subways, and museums and lands them in rural Maine. Her expectations of her new home include lobsters, blueberries, beaches,...
*STARRED REVIEW Guy Lockard has assumed the mantle of narrator-of-choice for Jason Reynolds’s fiction: Ghost (2016 National Book Award finalist) is Lockard's third Reynolds title, following As Brave as You and Rashad's chapters in All American Boys. Here, as seventh grader Castle "Ghost" Crenshaw, Lockard performs...
*STARRED REVIEW The latest from Newbery Medal-winning author Richard Peck takes on important and timely topics – marriage, sexuality, manhood, nontraditional families –and alchemizes them into an affecting story full of warmth, acceptance, and understanding. Sixth grader Archer Magill narrates what he calls "A Tale of...
A young boy, curious about his “Ammi’s dot … a bright and pretty spot,” innocently asks, “Why do you wear that dot?/What’s so special about that spot?” His mother crouches to eye level so he can touch her forehead as she explains, “It’s not a...
*STARRED REVIEW A mother, Soledad, flees Cuba, abandoning her revolutionary husband Uxmal and absconding with their 12-year-old twins Ulises and Isabel. She bypasses Miami for Hartford, CT, finding work as a court stenographer, making her the transcriber of other people's words. Although Uxmal’s presence never seems to...
The dozen stories in Ali Smith's (How To Be Both) latest collection share a common characteristic: a contagious sense of wordplay, from obscure etymology ("buxom" originally meant "obedient, compliant, gracious") in "Last," to multiple meanings of "fraud" linking D.H. Lawrence to credit card theft in...
