Coming-of-age Archives - Page 27 of 55

The Sleeping Dictionary by Sujata Massey

24 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Indian, Indian African, South Asian, South Asian American

After 10 installments of her award-winning Rei Shimura mysteries, DC-area-based Sujata Massey goes historical with her latest Dictionary, published this summer after six years in the making. Dictionary marks the debut of a new series Massey intends, The Daughters of Bengal, each set in India. Given a choice...

Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick

22 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Audio, Cambodian, Cambodian American, Fiction, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Nonethnic-specific, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American, Young Adult Readers

I admit I had a few false starts before I finally settled into Patricia McCormick's latest, which was a 2012 National Book Award finalist for Young People's Literature. Based on the horrifying experiences of Cambodian activist/humanitarian Arn Chorn-Pond’s childhood survival during the brutal Khmer Rouge control...

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

13 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, European, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific

So here's the last of my recent unintentional assemblage of end-of-World-War-II novels that began with Elizabeth Wein’s wrenching Rose Under Fire, and progressed with Chris Bohjalian's desperate Skeletons at the Feast and continued with his latest, the vengeful The Light in the Ruins. Of this week's quartet, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (how about that...

Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

09 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Armenian American, Audio, European, Fiction, Jewish

Every so often, I seem to get on a specific reading spree on a topic not exactly of my choosing – that is, the books seem to serendipitously line up on their own. The latest batch of they-chose-me-titles have been set during the final brutal months...

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

08 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, European, Fiction

Confession: If I didn't have to read Elizabeth Wein's follow-up to her breath-wringing adventure, Code Name Verity, I would have kept Rose Under Fire under wraps, hidden somewhere amidst my must-read pile, and just be content with basking in the potential promise of a satisfying 'gawwww' sometime...

A Handbook to Luck by Cristina García

07 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Caribbean American, Cuban, Cuban American, Fiction, Iranian, Latin American, Latina/o/x

Tell me if you've heard this one before: a Cuban, an El Salvadorean, and an Iranian land on the page and spend decades trying to find their place in the world. Yes? Then, you must have read Cristina García’s A Handbook to Luck. No? Then read...

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

06 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, British, Canadian, Fiction

Raised as a Roman Catholic convinced of at least one past life as a Jewish grandmother, I find myself in my old age utterly wary of institutionalized religions, repeatedly alarmed at what we human beings commit upon one another in the name of various (one-and-only)...

A Bride’s Story (vol. 5) by Kaoru Mori, translated by William Flanagan

04 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Central Asian, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Get ready to linger: every panel – and I do mean every! – is a wonder to behold, inducing that slack-jawed 'gawwww, how does she dooooo that?'-sort of reaction! If you've picked up this volume without first reading the previous others, I would definitely recommend going back. Following the...

Mira in the Present Tense by Sita Brahmachari

02 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in British, British Asian, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Middle Grade Readers, Young Adult Readers

On the evening of her 12th birthday, Mira Levenson receives three life-changing (death-defying) gifts: a diary, a charm, and her period. As one-quarter of a school writing class (led by an author named Miss Print!), Mira finds her voice – silently at first through the diary...

Black Flower by Young-ha Kim, translated by Charles La Shure

25 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Korean, Latin American, Translation

Earlier this year, I received an email from a Chinese Canadian author, May Q. Wong, inquiring about "a shipload of Koreans who sailed to Mexico to find a better life." Clueless, I forwarded her request to a few of my scholar friends and colleagues ...

Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang, color by Lark Pien

20 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Young Adult Readers

In 2006, Gene Luen Yang made major literary headlines when his then-debut, American Born Chinese, became (not without controversy, ahem!) the first-ever graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award. [Click here for my 2007 post-NBA interview with Yang.] Released earlier this month, Yang's two-volume Boxers &...

Author Profile: Kim Thúy [in Bloom]

16 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Fiction, Memoir, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American, Translation, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

Kim Thúy’s Ru: An Apple for the Reader Ah, well . . . better start with true confessions: my words appear on the back cover of the U.S. edition (at least the first printing) of Vietnamese Canadian author Kim Thúy’s debut novel, Ru. The blurb is...

If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan

12 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Fiction, Iranian, Iranian American, Middle Grade Readers

Let me know if you've heard this one before ...

A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif [in Library Journal]

01 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation

A Japanese writer, also named Minae Mizumura, recalls her privileged expatriate New York childhood, then witnesses her family devolve in adulthood. A Tokyo-based editor takes a countryside vacation and meets an older woman who shares fantastical memories of some of the inhabitants. A village girl...

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

28 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction

"We are on our way to Budapest," 10-year-old Darling announces as NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2013 Booker longlisted debut novel opens. 'We' includes "Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina," banded together with plans to steal guavas as they sneak out of Paradise, the ironically named...

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron

21 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific

Even before Naomi Benaron's debut novel hit shelves last year, it earned a substantial literary gold sticker as the winner of the biennial 2010 Bellwether Prize – the largest monetary award for unpublished fiction in North America, which was rebranded in 2011 as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially...

Out of This Place by Emma Cameron

19 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Australian, Fiction, Young Adult Readers

Oooh, am I sucker for novels in verse, even though I'm embarrassingly inept with poetry. Who knows why ...

An Infidel in Paradise by S.J. Laidlaw

13 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Canadian, Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Pakistani, Young Adult Readers

Emma is hardly the typical Canadian teenager. At 16, she's lived all over the world, thanks to her career diplomat mother, who Emma currently blames for all the latest terrible events in her life: she's in yet another new country – this time Pakistan with some...

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell

03 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, British, Fiction, Irish, Nonethnic-specific

On a summer afternoon in mid-1950s rural England on the border between Devon and Cornwall, journalist Innes Kent, already 34, happens upon angry Alexandra Sinclair, not yet 22. During their brief exchange in her parents' yard after he hits car trouble, he manages to inadvertently...

The Watcher in the Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves

29 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in European, Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Spanish, Translation, Young Adult Readers

The offer of a new job in a small resort town on the coast of Normandy allows the recently widowed Simone Sauvelle the chance for her and her two children to escape a poverty-stricken life in Paris. As the assistant to brilliant toymaker Lazarus Jann,...

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