Happy Cinco de Mayo from Perico and his human family! While everyone busily prepares for the big picnic and festivities on the rented barge that will float down the San Antonio River, Perico the parrot looks for ways he can help, too. But Grandmother and Aunt...
By the time I actually met Sonya Chung, debut novelist of Long for This World, which hit shelves in March, I was already a groupie. Long was one of those suddenly-surprising-out-of-nowhere books that make you gasp. A publicist sent it to me initially and it...
Having discovered manga late in life, I seem to be making up for lost time ...
Even though "Uncle" calls her Rosa Garcia, Tzunun Chumil knows her real Mayan name, and that in Spanish, Tzunun is 'colibrí,' which means "hummingbird." She knows somewhere that she has a mother and father that once loved her very much, that she lived a happy...
Inspired by two real children in Dhaka whom Ann Malaspina met on her travels through South Asia, Yasmin's Hammer is yet more proof for the need to educate girls throughout the world. When a cyclone destroys their home village "by a lazy river," two sisters – Mita and...
What a perfect companion text to Kip Fulbeck's part asian • 100% hapa, his previous title for Chronicle Books ...
Five years ago, Taipei-born Malaysian British Tash Aw landed in the media spotlight with The Harmony Silk Factory, complete with public speculations about an allegedly enormous debut advance. Decorated with multiple important prizes, including Commonwealth and Whitbread first novel awards, Aw’s Factory earned him both...
Warning: I can't find any promises of a volume 2 (or 3, 4, or more!) anywhere in, on, or around this book. Nothing in the publicist's note, either! Uh-oh ...
This weekend, I get to meet Kyoko Mori in livetime [I'm scheduled to moderate an Asian American literary panel on Sunday morning as part of the first-ever Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival, sponsored by the brand-new Asian American Literary Review). Anyone can join me,...
For anyone and everyone who has or knows a middle-grader with braces (or about to get braces), this is the book of choice to share. "I've been telling people about what happened to my teeth ever since I knocked them out in sixth grade," writes...
Min opens her latest with guilty sobs recalling her "brainwashed" teenaged self in 1970s China, when she was forced to denounce Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck to Madame Mao. That guilt clearly drove Min (Red Azalea) to write this "based on the...
With over 300 titles to her name, Jane Yolen simply couldn't be more prolific! Here she teams up with the whimsically fantastic illustrator Stéphane Jorisch who captures Yolen's delight-filled father/daughter adventures as they meet dogs walking their owner, paint a room seven shades of blue, get...
Last week, this article landed in my inbox: "Jewish Group Boycotts Canadian Kids' Book." The comments are also well worth reading. Then a friend sent me another related article which announced, "Controversial Mideast book stays in Toronto schools." The running quote box on the left side...
If the observations, memories, and pop culture references here weren't so obviously recognizable in our post-9/11 western world, you might have read this graphic memoir as a hack comedy. The black-and-white panels initially seem almost unfinished, as if still in rough-draft mode. The contents might...
Gene Luen Yang, who made publishing history as the author of the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award, returns with an irresistible, hilarious little book that takes sibling rivalry to whole new heights. First serialized in The New York...
David Almond has been repeatedly popping up in my inbox recently. Not him personally (don't I wish, as he is definitely one of my very favorite writers for young adult titles), but his mega-award-winning name is haunting my emails...
“Some of the things in this book happened a hundred years ago...
Already lauded for her exquisitely illustrated family stories – Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders, The Odyssey of a Manchurian, as well as numerous children’s titles – Yang debuts her first-ever graphic memoir, a multi-layered creation that details her own story of...
What ironic timing to discover Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the 2001 Cannes Film Festival Caméra d'Or Award winner about two Inuit brothers – one murdered, the other who escapes by running naked over vast ice – during the 2010 Snowpocalypse. One of Canada’s top 10...
Art director for an alternative city paper by day, comics artist whenever he has the time, SAM (Secret Asian Man, yes!) – not so unlike his own creator Tak Toyoshima – fights stereotypes when he can, makes biting commentaries when frustrated, and generally tries to...
