Out when and where they shouldn't be on a chilly October night, Stella and her brother Jojo witness "[n]ine robed figures dressed all in white," gathered around a single wooden cross ablaze. In 1932, Bumblebee, North Carolina is small enough that most of the townspeople know one another,...
"They're his roots, not mine," Mia insists as she seethes on a flight bound to Vietnam with her father. "I'm a Laguna Beach girl who can paddleboard one-legged and live on fish tacos and mango smoothies. My parents should be thanking the Buddha for a...
"Spencer loved books." And because he loves them so much, he makes sure to always put his books where they belong so he knows exactly where to find them next time. But one morning, he looks on his shelf and shouts in horror, "WHERE IS...
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao explores grief that lingers long after the bombing of an airliner Two weeks short of the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 – which disintegrated off the Irish coast on June 23,1985 – psychologist Ashwin Rao...
"On Sunday night, after we put on our nightgowns, Grandma and I go shopping." Armed with scissors and tape, and a black purse filled with "shopping dollars [that] are easy to tell apart because they're all different colors," Evie and her grandmother open the newspaper and...
If you look up Gary Clement’s Twitter, you'll see just two labels he reveals about himself: "Cartoonist, swimmer." His talent and passion for both are clearly evident here. Artist that he is, Clements' illustrations, of course, speak volumes – the endpapers back and front even include a 'how-to'...
Some strong suggestions first: 1. Don't read this hungry (just the phrase "Asian street food" will have many of you salivating); 2. Don't read this all alone at night. And, if you decide to 'read' by listening to narrator Feodor Chin, be further warned: he...
On the book's front cover, mega-bestselling Bone-creator Jeff Smith uses the word "wonderful." On the back, French Milk’s award-winning Lucy Knisley talks about "the wit and pen of someone well beyond her years." Inside, those blurbs get further expanded, followed by many more phrases of praise, including...
The Meursault Investigation cleverly builds on The Stranger by Camus In a New Yorker interview this March, Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud spoke of reading the iconic 1942 classic, The Stranger by Albert Camus – in which a man arbitrarily commits murder and is tried and sentenced...
Having lived most of my life in cities, being temporarily stuck in a small ski resort town in the Wild West has been quite the challenge. Whenever I leave Dodge, I seem to take a good percentage of the diversity with me. When – shall...
Aatish Taseer's latest opens with a mother's call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father's body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, "Toby" G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu – half-actually Scottish, half-Indian – was more a foreign "novelty" in his...
