Fourth grader he may be, but our narrator is quite the sharp observer of his surroundings. His father is dead; his mother runs a "fortune-telling and that kind of stuff" salon. She's often the recipient of his unguarded bluntness: "If video games make you stupid,...
*STARRED REVIEW "We live in the same city, go to the same school, but each of us has a different story," a student observes. "What we have in common is trying to figure out how to tell it." Welcome back to Mr. Ward's English class, introduced...
Now-adult adoptees who arrived in the United States from other countries are learning that their U.S. citizenship can’t be assumed. Two recent tragedies have highlighted the shocking realization: the May 2017 suicide of Phillip Clay, adopted at eight by a Philadelphia family and deported to Seoul 29...
While we groupies wait for the next volume-in-translation of Shimura Takako's internationally-lauded and mega-awarded Wandering Son series (one of my personal favorites ever) from Fantagraphics, take a look at this endearing new (in English) series from manga powerhouse Viz Media about complex relationships between high...
*STARRED REVIEW The term "refugee" is constantly in the news. In direct response, Alan Gratz gets personal with desensitizing statistics, policies, and politics by giving names, families, and histories to three tweens fleeing three countries during three time periods. Each fits the "refugee" label but is...
A young daughter is "having a hard time falling asleep tonight." To lull her to "dream," her mother offers a story about "a baby wrapped in a white sheet and her mother smiling at her." That baby is the titular jazz legend Nina Simone. Her...
*STARRED REVIEW Arimah's debut collection comprises a dozen surprising, affecting stories. Narrator Adjoa Andoh sublimely intensifies the author's already breathtaking prose into an irresistible, spectacular performance, as she effortlessly modulates her distinctive voice, picking up genders and generations, cadences and accents, and just as easily discards...
Without a doubt, A Bride's Story is the most intricately detailed, magnificently exquisite graphic series currently on my shelves. Every volume is a lavish gift to pore over, to enthusiastically applaud, to be gobsmackingly impressed by again and again and again. Superlatives just aren't enough. To...
*STARRED REVIEW Emma Gregory, with her impressive range of Anglophone accents – differentiated by age, region, country – is the ideal conduit for the 10 nuanced, exquisite stories in Tessa Hadley's (The Past) latest collection. Loss of innocence looms large in many of the pieces, from a...
*STARRED REVIEW Caroline Preston collaged combinations of vintage photos, drawings, clippings, advertisements, and all manner of 1920s tidbits in The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt (2011), onto which she overlaid the text of her titular heroine’s peripatetic adventures-into-adulthood. In her sophomore scrapbook presentation, Preston displays the left-behind...
President Obama’s historic December 17, 2014 order to “normalize relations” between the United States and Cuba began the restoration of diplomacy after more than half a century of hostile restrictions. His 72-hour visit to Havana in March 2016 – the first made by a sitting...
Columbia undergrads Lucy and Gabe meet in a Shakespeare seminar – on 9/11. Their class – including the professor who glibly asks if the pilot was drunk when his TA announces the first tower crash – is as yet unaware of the devastating reverberations to...
Café Leila & Beautiful Ruins: Q&A with Donia Bijan “Strange things happened when I returned to Tehran in 2010 after thirty-two years in exile,” writes Donia Bijan in her recent essay, “The Women’s Hour.” Traveling with her sister, she found her childhood home – the hospital their father built...
Kym’s first violin was a paper cutout copied from an encyclopedia; her first actual instrument was a “harsh, factory-made thing” on which she immediately taught herself “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” By her first or second lesson, Kym knew playing the violin "was not simply for...
In sleepy Pine Valley, MN, 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman – beloved daughter, excellent student, best friend, adored girlfriend, talented actress – lies dead. Solving her gruesome murder is up to local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend who watched Hattie grow up. Her English teacher Peter Lund...
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...
ABSTRACT These books feature diverse characters who – in a multiplicity of ways – suffer, learn, and generally triumph in their differences. Varying in genre from picture book to poetry, in setting from Kenya to California, and in ethnic focus from Muslim Bangladeshi to Ojibway/Anishinaaabe (Canadian...
Batuman makes her fiction debut already a literary darling: a New Yorker staff writer since 2010 and the author of a much-adored essay collection, The Possessed, about the pleasurable intricacies of reading Russian literature. The year is 1995, and Turkish American 18-year-old Selin enters Harvard. She...
In 2017, Cammie O'Reilly is an elderly grandmother visiting her childhood home with her 12-year-old granddaughter after half a century away. While the outside still looks like the same "fortress from the Middle Ages," the inside now houses birds, butterflies, and turtles rather than the...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Sartaj Garewal’s energy couldn’t be more rousingly infectious as he voices the unforgettable characters in Adiga’s (The White Tiger) latest. Raised in a Mumbai slum by a fiercely demanding father, the two Kumar brothers are destined to become cricket champions by the sheer...
