Making and selling dorayaki – a pancake-like pastry filled with the eponymous "sweet bean paste" – was not supposed to define Sentaro's life. His someday-dreams of becoming a writer got waylaid by bad decisions that resulted in a two-year prison sentence. Since getting out, he's...
Once upon a time, Cuba was an enigmatic, faraway place that conjured up images of I Love Lucy, history lessons about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and recurring headlines about Guantánamo. As far as books go, two loomed large: Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, a multi-generational...
Nina Riggs died February 26, 2017. Cassandra Campbell gently narrates most of the work, until Kirby Heyborne takes over to read the afterword by Riggs’s husband, John, and shatters your heart. For a book about fatal diseases – Riggs was diagnosed at 37 with breast cancer;...
As Sarah Jessica Parker’s inaugural selection for the American Library Association’s Book Club Central, Stephanie Powell Watts’s (We Are Only Taking What We Need) first novel is getting well-earned attention. Initially inspired by The Great Gatsby, Watts wanted to give voice to the mostly silent...
*STARRED REVIEW Most of Anne Lamott’s nonfiction titles are generally variations on a theme: be kind – to yourself, to others – and you’ll make the world a better place. Somehow, though, each book arrives sounding fresh and new – and effective. That Lamott narrates almost all...
“This was a long time ago,” Jennifer Finney Boylan (She’s Not There) begins – August 1980, more specifically. “[N]one of us now are the people we were then.” Thirty-five years later, the college friends who trespassed into the boarded-up Eastern State Penitentiary are now “ghosts:...
Japan’s defeat in WWII not only meant decimation at home but also resulted in the postwar repatriation of Japan’s colonial diaspora of more than four million citizens from throughout Asia. Among the dispossessed in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, China’s Manchuria, is Kuki Kyūzō,...
Being part of the "sandwich generation" caught between aging parents and almost-adult children means that mortality begins to loom heavier as the years pass. Sharing the burden of tragedy with thoughtful, wise, and gentle others through books is certainly one of the most readily-available balms....
'Home Fire' is an exquisite modern tragedy about families caught between religion, politics That Home Fire is among the recently announced 2017 Man Booker Dozen means it arrives stateside with quite the notable stamp of approval. The novel is considerably more affecting than that other longlist...
Debut novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi's protagonist, like the author herself, is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee father and Israeli Jewish mother. Ahlam comes of age in the Arizona desert, physically safe from war but damaged by the bitter fighting between her parents that too...
*STARRED REVIEW Zinzi Clemmons’ spectacular debut is written in bursts, from single-sentence pages to sparse paragraphs, and combines photographs, diagrams, charts, articles, and blog posts to amplify an intimate story of personal loss into a larger narrative of identity, family, race, and socioeconomic access. Thandi is the...
Sheila Kohler’s crisp, clipped voice is ideal for her memoir, which begins with references to Nelson Mandela, Afrikaners, and various family members that all announce her South African heritage. Although she left her birth country at 17, Kohler (Cracks; Crossways) has retained her clear, concise...
When Oghi wakes in a hospital room, his world doesn’t align with his last memories. He’s been in a coma after surviving a car accident, but his wife is dead, and he’s completely paralyzed. At 47, Oghi is parentless and childless, with few friends and colleagues...
Despite Maureen Corrigan’s rather nasty NPR review of Korean author Kyung-sook Shin’s 2011 Stateside debut, Please Look After Mom – her phrase “cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction” caused particular affront – Mom became a major bestseller. In a stroke of well-deserved vindication, Shin became the first woman...
"Oh, Lester, you're going to love it so much," Lucy Musselbaum promises her 10-year-old son about entering Quarry Elementary. Homeschooled until now, Lester is understandably wary – change is always tough for him – but Lucy gently explains she's "100 percent sure" she needs to...
'Adua' explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized Before Igiaba Scego’s novel, Adua, even begins, what’s instantly striking is the “Contents” page, which reveals a trio of chapter titles – “Adua,” “Talking-To,” “Zoppe” – that repeat over 30 chapters. Adua is the daughter, Zoppe the father,...
Q&A with Thi Bui: Writer, Illustrator, Teacher On the cover of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir is a perfect quote: “A book to break our heart and heal it,” blurbs fellow Vietnamese American refugee and 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction...
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...
Death brings “excitement ...
Tom Grendel can divide his 17-year-old life in "exactly three phases: before Mom, after Mom but before Dad/Iraq, and my current post-Dad/Iraq period." Tom's mother died suddenly when he was 9. His father deployed to Iraq, leaving Tom and his sister, Zipora, with their grandmother....
