While I do enjoy a clever mystery now and then, I confess the real reason I randomly picked up the Vish Puri – "India's Most Private Investigator" series – is because I was so taken with the title for #3: The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, which hit...
For a couple of days, I went back and forth with The Snow Child stuck in my ears (which the inimitable Debra Monk – one of my favorite stage actors ever! – happens to narrate, oh wow!) and reading Ruta Sepetys' between shades of gray on the page...
The first thing you need to know is that this story is real. And although it was first published eight years ago – and six years before the tragic January 12, 2010 Haitian earthquake – Sélavi is an even more urgent call for help for Haiti's children. A...
I probably shouldn't have been so surprised when a wonderful literary friend (who is also a children's literature expert, professor, and recent judge for one of those major book awards) remarked that in Markus Zusak's native Australia, this and his unforgettable The Book Thief were initially not...
A shape-shifting teapot which releases a mischievous tanuki when heated. A fatherless hapa Japanese American boy headed to Japan to stay with his mother's father whom he barely knows. Two stories, two cultures, two vastly different worlds, all intertwine to create a fantastical adventure in Ryan Inzana's surprising,...
While most of us all know our birthdays, not all of us know when we might pass from this life. "The only one who knows, / the one who decides the day / is me, the Reaper." Out in the forest, the Reaper points out a...
First things first: Let's try to clear up some of the oxymoronic labels. Although this title is classified as a novel written by Dave Eggers (he of bad boy-genius fame for his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and, of course, the mini-empire that is McSweeney's),...
Escape from Camp 14 is the most devastating book I have ever read. Perhaps the resilience of youth got me through the aftermath of learning about slavery, the Holocaust, even Iris Chang’s now-classic The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, the title I previously held...
After two books on the horrors of North Korea, two memoirs about the Palestinian occupation, another about a Lost Boy of Sudan, still another highlighting Hindu/Muslim massacres in Kashmir – all one after the other (what was I thinking??!!) – I picked up Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief,...
Culling together every spare moment I had over a single day (amazing how much more enlightening mindless chores, endless driving, and running can be with a book stuck in your ears!), I managed to listen to all 9.5 hours of Lorraine Toussaint's honeyed narration of...
This is a book I bought twice: first to stick in my ears on long runs (chillingly read by a Korean American triumvirate of Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee, and James Kyson Lee), and when I couldn't soak in the story quickly enough, I ordered...
Flesh, a turn-of-the-20th-century debut novel set mostly in Hanoi, begins and ends with gruesome beheadings. Bearing witness to both executions is Tài, a poor teenage village boy quickly forced into manhood. In an effort to reclaim his father’s severed head and finance an auspicious burial, Tài...
The body count quickly mounts in this engrossing sequel to the thrilling faux Victorian confessional novel, The Meaning of Night. Another well-deserved WOW is in order, even more so because careful readers will undoubtedly solve several (many, even?) of the whodunit-who's-really-who clues early on, but that...
At 13, Beatrice is sure of her dreams: " ...
Kanna, Otcho, and Manjome are all in the same room – you could say even on the same side. The final words from Manjome leave everyone speechless: "Please ...
At 91, Ptolemy Grey is "waiting to finally be a man." as he writes in his last letter, addressed to his young charge and heir Robyn. The novel begins backwards with an "Afterward" that summarizes the whole of Ptolemy's nine-decades-plus, but to understand why he's...
Nanfuka wants nothing more than to finish her education and become a nurse – the first in her village. While still a child herself, the teenager is suddenly forced to leave school and thrust into adult responsibilities when she is called home as her father...
Here's a dilemma: If you knew how much a book series might deteriorate by its final title, would you read all the way through to the bitter end? As contrary as I am, I probably would ...
Still a young teenager, Alinda knows only too well the potential horrors of war ...
