"Ron was a part of almost every major event in my life, whether I liked it or not," writes Nate Fakes – syndicated cartoonist and creator of Break of Day – in A Fade of Light, his tender, intimate graphic memoir about his stepfather. Fakes's mother married...
*STARRED REVIEW Six of the eight stories in Ling Ma's debut short story collection, Bliss Montage, have already appeared in the usual prestigious publications (the New Yorker, Granta, the Atlantic). "They can just read them for free somewhere else?" a skeptical mother remarks to her about-to-be-published daughter over lunch in...
Kate Beaton: 'I Stopped Drawing ...
*STARRED REVIEW Kate Beaton’s many devotees revere her for the award-winning series Hark! A Vagrant. Perhaps lesser known is the provenance of those erudite, playful histories: they began as a webcomic while Beaton worked in the oil fields of Alberta, Canada. In Ducks: Two Years in the...
*STARRED REVIEW From Steven Salvatore’s warm dedication onward, Kirt Graves ignites the pages with kaleidoscopic talent and charm, fulfilling his self-described “passion ...
*STARRED REVIEW Lee Osorio bestows Daniel José Older’s newest series with an outstanding first volume – hopefully signaling further perfectly tuned duets. Once upon a time, the Caribbean island of San Madrigal was home to “that particularly wonderful mix of humanity ...
Emily X.R. Pan melds east and west in a hybrid fantasy/reality novel inspired by two sets of star-crossed lovers: China’s Houyi and Chang’e (the Archer and the Moon Goddess) and Romeo and Juliet. In 1991, Hunter Yee and Luna Chang are 17-year-old seniors at Fairbridge...
Lizz Huerta introduces a planned duology inspired by Mesoamerican myths, in which she alternates narratives with connections revealed near book’s end. Indir is a Dreamer in a family of multigenerational Dreamers whose visions serve Alcanzeh’s kings. The newest monarch openly disdains the Dreamers, causing imbalance...
*STARRED REVIEW Philip Pullman’s 1999 fairy-tale-adjacent, murine fable begets a delightful audio adaptation, gloriously dramatized by British actor Robert Glenister, who effortlessly showcases a dazzlingly vast cast. One moonlit night, a little boy in a torn uniform knocks on cobbler Bob and washerwoman Joan’s door announcing,...
Escaping the Dominican Republic’s murderous Trujillo regime is how Julian Randall’s own family arrived in the United States two generations ago. His debut novel seamlessly combines that history – political and personal – with Dominican mythology for his Pilar Ramirez duology (book two publishes February...
Any mention of glass slippers instantly conjures Cinderella. Here she’s Queen Ella, married six years to now-King Ciaran with two young royals of their own. Her two evil stepsisters were banished, but Ella kept her third stepsister, Tirza, close: “I’d hoped you were too young...
*STARRED REVIEW A sigh of relief is almost immediate as Kurt Kanazawa effortlessly pronounces “ryū” – with exacting attention to that diacritical – then “Hiroshima” just so. The Julliard-trained actor displays his Japanese fluency, adroitly enhancing Emi Watanabe Cohen’s poignant first novel in which dragons –...
Nghi Vo’s stupendous debut, The Chosen and the Beautiful, alchemized (and improved) The Great Gatsby by shifting narrative control to supporting character Jordan Baker. Vo dramatically gifts similarly transformative autonomy to her latest protagonist, Luli Wei, who is clearly a revisionist stand-in for legendary Asian American film...
*STARRED REVIEW Considered one of Korea’s greatest novelists, Pak Kyongni (1926-2008) is revered for her multi-volume epic Toji (The Land, 1969-1994), designated among the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. She began publishing autobiographical short stories, inspired by tragic post-Korean War experiences, exposing the high cost of survival,...
In her fifth adult title, Gabrielle Zevin (Young Jane Young, 2017) impressively interweaves multiple threads that twist and tangle around what is essentially a decades-long love story. Jennifer Kim ciphers most of the narration, deftly distinguishing the main three players, with a brief interlude voiced...
In the short opening paragraph introducing a young man watching his mother approach the LAX curb in her new Prius, debut novelist Ryan Lee Wong manages to pack in generation gaps, climate change, brutal colonialism, and “let[ting] go of that ancestral sh*t sooner or later.” Columbia...
Their collective story begins in McAllen, Texas, just seven miles from the U.S./Mexico border. For generations before, Octavio Izquierdo’s predecessors “used to come and go, crossing freely, still in their own country,” before an “imaginary line” delineated nations and separated families. In 1958, Octavio is claiming “a...
Yiyun Li’s fiction since her son’s tragic suicide seems to have catapulted her away from the Asian roots that define her earlier award-winning fiction. Her latest begins on a pastoral farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Agnès, known as the “French bride,” lives with her husband...
*STARRED REVIEW Novelist Reema Patel and narrator Lavanya Gandhi prove ideally paired, symbiotically making their debuts. Patel, a Toronto lawyer with experience in Mumbai’s human-rights legal sector, draws on her experiences to create Rakhi, a 23-year-old office assistant at Justice for All. Rakhi caught the attention of...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Belinda Huijuan Tang's immigrant father is a gregarious storyteller, especially about his rural Chinese upbringing, but he has one story he's never been able to finish, about his lost father. Tang empathically transforms that incomplete memory into her exquisite novel, A Map for...
