Nell Young, former New York Public Library cartography scholar, is summoned back to the hallowed Map Division when her director father is found dead in his office. Seven years ago, he ignominiously fired her over the Junk Box Incident and she’s hasn’t seen him since....
Welcome to Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. The year remains somber, as the APA community combats dramatically increasing anti-Asian violence around the country and continues to mourn the eight people, including six women of Asian descent, killed in a Georgia mass shooting. Despite a U.S....
The one thing in life that’s guaranteed is, well, death. But books are certainly a lasting legacy. And sometimes, when we get the books after their creator has passed on, an audiobook can breathe new life into the text, animating from beyond. A bittersweet legacy, indeed, but...
Helen Hoang transfers a minor character from her popular 2018 debut, The Kiss Quotient, into the spotlight in her engaging follow-up. Initially introduced as the younger brother of Quotient’s protagonist’s best friend, Khai assumes leading man status here – he’s single, movie-star handsome, successful. He’s...
The miracles were many: “born poor and blind in Vietnam on the losing side of a bloody civil war,” Julie Yip-Williams survived her grandmother’s demand to have her killed, escaped on a leaky boat with her family to Hong Kong, arrived as a refugee in...
From outright untruths to complex subterfuge, the titular lies proliferate throughout SJ Sindhu’s debut novel, especially targeting the institution of marriage among three generations of a conservative Sri Lankan American family. Lucky and Kris are both gay, but their convenient matrimonial union finally satisfies parental...
For five preteen Camp Forevermore girls, a simple overnight kayaking trip turns horrifying when their group leader dies mysteriously and the girls must find their way back alone. One insists on remaining with the corpse; the others leave and promise to send help. Interspersed with their...
Mira T. Lee’s impressive debut – both a celebration and mourning of the bond between two sisters, the younger afflicted with mental illness, the elder desperate to save her – deserves better aural interpretation. The full cast (in rare recognition, a who-was-who is added at...
Narrator Emily Woo Zeller went solo in The Silent Dead, which introduced Anglophone readers to Tokyo Metropolitan Police lieutenant Reiko Himekawa in her 2016 debut (smoothly rendered by Giles Murray who consistently translates again here); in Honda's sophomore series title, Zeller has company. Feodor Chin...
Ten years ago, Lee was married to her college boyfriend, living in Berkeley, and working as the human resources director at a small company. On New Year’s Eve 2006, Lee suffered a stroke. She was 33. She would spend the better part of a decade...
"[A]s a reporter, I was spending my life telling other people's stories and ignoring my own family's incredible one," Dawn Anahid MacKeen realized at 35. Her 78-year-old Armenian mother was aging, and MacKeen could no longer ignore her calls to "come home." In 2006, MacKeen left...
If you're tuned to celluloid pop culture, you probably heard about the Aloha casting controversy earlier this year, most specifically that casting Emma Stone as a hapa Chinese Hawaiian Swedish character named Allison Ng was probably not the smartest (accurate? effective? politically correct?) choice. Depicting...
"We have three souls, or so I'd been told. But only in death could I confirm this." Thus begins Canadian author Janie Chang’s debut novel, Three Souls, in which a dead woman will learn about a life that ended too quickly, and how she might...
Patty Takeda moves in with her mother for the two weeks before her wedding. On the third day in her old room, she's woken by the sound of the doorbell, and is alarmed to hear her mother Lucy use the word "Inspector." Just a few blocks...
