*STARRED REVIEW On the opening page, debut author Erin E. Adams affectingly invokes Alice Walker – the Black writer of a banned book exposing racist hate – although here, this Alice is just a girl playing in the woods of 1985 Johnstown, Pennsylvania ...
David Mas Masumoto has built a remarkable career as a third-generation organic peach and grape farmer, which has inspired his award-winning books, including Epitaph for a Peach (1995). What began as "bad poetry" in college after a difficult breakup eventually led to writing a dozen books. Secret...
*STARRED REVIEW An outstanding trio delivers another fabulous performance. This is international-prize-winning Chilean poet/writer Alejandro Zambra’s 2006 debut novel, English-enabled by lauded Megan McDowell and distinctly embodied by actor Gisela Chípe (who also narrated Zambra’s 2022 novel, Chilean Poet). With a mere 1:16 runtime, a single listen...
Billie was the outlier in 1979 when she was recruited by the Museum to become one of four elite Sphinxes: hired assassins who do good. Now as newly retired sexagenarians, she, Helen, Natalie, and Mary Alice board a luxury cruise, a thank-you-for-your-service gift that turns...
Denny died at the Lucky 8 restaurant after his high school formal, his “Most Likely to Succeed”-sash still tucked into his borrowed suit. In 1996 small-town Cabramatta, populated by children of Southeast Asian refugees coming of age amidst drug-related violence, Denny was that perfect kid:...
"I knew there was something I needed to understand, and perhaps share, about my brief, intense, joyful, devastating parenting experience," writes Rick Louis in the author's note to Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars. Louis's heartbreaking experience of crushing loss is poignantly, lovingly illustrated by...
Egyptian American actor Amin El Gamal and Palestinian American actor/writer/director Lameece Issaq reunite here as hopeful lovers: 15-year-old Subhi, a prodigious mechanic, and 13-year-old village girl Shams. Palestinian writer/architect Suad Amiry, acclaimed for her memoirs and other nonfiction, debuts her first novel, inspired by the...
Beyond the countless corpses, Japanese manga auteur Junji Ito’s latest import deftly – and, of course, ever so gruesomely – highlights the liminal spaces between life and death, good and evil, waking and sleep. An engaged couple’s innocent decision to “stop somewhere on a whim” during...
*STARRED REVIEW Egyptian artist and writer Deena Mohamed deservedly won the Best Graphic Novel and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comix Festival for Shubeik Lubeik, the title explained as “a fairy tale rhyme that means ‘your wish is my command’ in Arabic.” Mohamed herself...
Four strangers – Taburo, Pii-tan, Baracchi, Maruso – gather for the first time and embark on their “journey to paradise”: “We met on the suicide site Black Paradox, and now we’re each other’s final companions.” The quartet’s reasons for seeking death suggest strange parallels: “So the...
In the third installment of the internationally best-selling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, some of the familiar crew from Tokyo’s Café Funiculi Funicula move to Hakodate’s Café Donna Donna on Hokkaido after its proprietor, Yukari Tokita, leaves indefinitely for the U.S. to help a young...
Will Betke-Brunswick alchemizes their beloved mother’s death into an affecting tribute to emotional resilience and everlasting love. For reasons not quite clear, Betke-Brunswick transforms their immediate quartet (two parents, two kids) into an adorable waddle of penguins, with extended family, friends, and acquaintances presented as...
Multiple shes and cats populate this gratifying, slim novel-in-stories, which arrives with a decades-long history that undoubtedly underscores its timeless appeal. Makoto Shinkai launched his career as one of Japan’s most lauded animation and manga artists with the five-minute film, She and Her Cat (1999), later expanded...
*STARRED REVIEW Town was once a fish-farm village, but it’s now internationally known for the corporation that aggressively expanded it into a bustling city-state. Here, class stratification is impermeable. Su is a Citizen. Do-kyung is a Saha, an inconsequential resident of the crumbling Saha Estates who...
Kotaro Isaka has written dozens of award-winning, internationally bestselling novels and story collections. This, his third Anglophoned title, is notably narrated by versatile actor Adam Sims, who earnestly embodies former math teacher Suzuki, transformed by the senseless murder of his beloved wife. Her killer remains...
*STARRED REVIEW French comics creator Fabien Toulmé’s stupendous trilogy concludes Hakim’s epic three-year odyssey from war-torn Syria to finally reaching safety in France. Hannah Chute returns to deftly translate the third volume. To remind audiences of previous events – though reading in order is a gratifying must...
*STARRED REVIEW Kimberly Farr is clearly Elizabeth Strout’s chosen voice, now reading the fourth of the Amgash series featuring Lucy Barton. It’s March 2020. Lucy’s first husband William convinces her to leave New York City for Maine. “I did not know that one of my friends...
Once upon a time, they seemed to be an ideal family: parents Hank and Karen Liu Brighton; their biracial daughters Morgan and Riley. They owned a small organic grocery store in Eugene, Oregon, then expanded into a globally sourced luxury goods empire called Kaleidoscope. First, Morgan...
Jennifer J. Chow inaugurates her L.A. Night Market Mysteries (after the Winston Wong and Sassy Cat/Mimi Lee series), which turns two cousins into unlikely sleuths. Yale Yee is still mourning her mother’s death. She quit her family’s dim sum restaurant and found solace in a...
Former actor turned award-winning writer Kevin Chen's Ghost Town is certainly cinematic, populated with unforgettable characters – living, dead, and in between. Welcome to Yongjing, "a rural backwater in central Taiwan," just as Ghost Month looms. The Chen clan is about to experience an unexpected reunion,...
