Indie Girl by Kavita Daswani [in Bloomsbury Review]
Ethnic chick-lit favorite Kavita Daswani makes her young adult debut with a fun, breezy read starring one Indie Konkipuddi, a 15-year-old style-queen-in-the-making. While her neurosurgeon father can't understand why she would take a weekend...
High school senior Patti Yoon, the perfect Korean American daughter studying for her perfect SAT scores, perfectly playing the violin, aiming for HYP (KorEnglish for HarvardYalePrinceton), and (of course!) never talking to boys, discovers her feisty...
Thank goodness the Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri went back to her short story roots: The Namesake was okay, but disappointing after The Interpreter of Maladies which was such a shockingly remarkable debut.
Holy moly, now comes this unforgettable...
"When I got to college I said I was adopted, right off the bat,” says Todd Knowlton, a 33-year-old Korean-American adoptee. “It doesn’t bother me, but once they hear my last name, people always ask uncomfortable...
You can't believe how scary this book can be, especially if you have children of your own. The eponymous boy of many names in

Rosie has a near-perfect life, even an adorable little sister. But as Buttercup gets older, Rosie sometimes finds it challenging to get along with her. One day she takes her sister to their neighbor, offering her...
Here’s the best news up front:
India in the 1940s is a time of tumultuous violence – the British troops are subduing independence efforts, citizens of different religious backgrounds are fighting each other, World War II is raging in Europe, and the...
When the brutal dictator Idi Amin violently grabbed power over Uganda, he declared in August 1972, that within 90 days all Indians would have to leave the country. Part of Uganda’s population since the 16th century,...
Ironically named “Wealthy One,” Dhané is a poor farmer who can’t get a lucky break in the small village his family has called home for many generations. Originally published in the 1950s, this new edition offers...
Best known for her highly entertaining picture books (The Runaway Rice Cake, The Real Story of Stone Soup), Compestine enters the young adult market with a story that draws on her own childhood during the crushing...
Based on more than 80-year-old actual immigration interviews, Laurence Yep imagines the conversation he never had with his father about his father’s experiences as a nervous young boy who arrived on Angel Island, the West Coast...
Indian-born, U.S.-, UK-, and now Denmark-domiciled Malladi is a literary chameleon, thanks in part to her changing addresses. Language, which features a young Afghan refugee woman escaping unnamable horrors under the Taliban, is almost like reading a sister text of Khaled Hosseini’s...
Sameera Righton, who first appeared in First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover, now calls the White House “home.” Sparrow, as her parents call her, is the adopted Pakistani-born daughter of the new U.S. President and his First...
The Cultural Revolution was a harrowing decade of Chinese history. Moying Li recalls her life from ages 12 to 22, when she bore witness to brutal atrocities against her family, friends, and entire community – and...
Young Nanami shares an afternoon with her two grandmothers: her Baachan who lives with her family in Japan, and her Gram, who is visiting from the coast of Maine. Together the three share an ancient tradition...
The long-awaited follow-up to
If literary awards are any measure of prowess, then native Chinese speaker Ha Jin has most certainly mastered the English language. As a writer of poems, short stories, and fiction, he has been showered...
Originally published in six volumes in the author's native France, the full English compilation is a remarkable feat of creativity. Rendered in heavy-inked black-and-white panels that seem to physically convey the overwhelming burdens of a difficult...