Get ready: E. Lockhart's latest is apparently the young adult read of the summer. That John Green cover endorsement alone should sell endless copies. So when everyone is chattering about what happened, you're going to want to join in. An aging, wealthy, widowed patriarch spends his summers on a private...
As epigraphs go, Chris Bohjalian couldn't have chosen better (as if we would expect any less), not only for the words, but for the poet who originated the verses: "Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things, / feel the future...
When her father dies, a girl and her mother's futures are forever altered. As a 14-year-old living in a 17th-century Persian village, she expected to be contentedly married, looking forward to starting her own family, not unlike her best friend who is already heavy with...
I read the eponymous first chapter almost a year ago and then stopped. I listened to the same story – the absolute highlight in the disappointingly uneven collection Haiti Noir – so smoothly, lullingly read by Robin Miles, and again stopped. The book stayed on my desk...
After years of keeping secrets, Rakhee Singh's "demons" have finally "clawed their way free." Without confronting what happened to her family that summer in India when she turned 11, she finds herself unable to embrace her future – her impending architecture degree, her promising design job, and most importantly,...
Okay, I confess the cover put me off from opening the book for months (well, actually, years); I recently compromised by choosing to go aural and was surprisingly delighted to spend almost eight hours with narrators Laural Merlington and Emily Durante (who take turns reading as mother and...
I really, really don't want to tell you what this book is about because I don't want to ruin your delight of discovery. I knew nothing at all of its premise ...
First thing first: although every volume offers possibly standalone chapters, to get the full narrative arc, you really need to read them all in order. [Click here to check out the rest of Ikigami.] If you're not yet familiar with this chillingly effective, utterly addictive series, the most important...
Here's lucky #7 of the bilingual I See the Sun series from internationally-minded boutique press Satya House – lucky because India celebrates the series' gravitas by being the first to be offered in lasting hardcover. This summer, the rest of the series also reappears in solid incarnation;...
Amin Ahmad not only writes mysteries – The Caretaker and The Last Taxi Ride make up two-thirds of his Ranjit Singh thriller trilogy – I confess he remains quite a personal mystery.] While he’ll answer almost any question from a distance, he’s been quite agile avoiding our carefully...
"2010 late July. A record of the biggest, hottest summer of my life." High school student Kenji is 17, and mourning the fact that he "failed to become Japan's rep in the Math Olympics." At the suggestion of his best friend Sakuma, he's agreed to...
While Ranjit Singh’s trimming days as The Caretaker might have been left behind on Martha's Vineyard, he can't escape for long from the corruption and intrigue in the murderous lives of the power-elite. In the second installment of A.X. Ahmad's label-defying trilogy, Ranjit reinvents himself as a seasoned New York City cabbie, now divorced...
While production doesn't seem to have started just yet, news that Marie Lu's bestselling dystopic trilogy is coming to a theater near you keeps resurfacing since CBS Films bought rights to Legend in 2011. That Lu has a much-hyped new series, The Young Elites, hitting shelves this fall, will surely add pressure to...
Before you open this tasty title, ask your stomach if it's full. Any hint of hunger and you just might embarrass yourself salivating. The cover is already a toothsome teaser: salmon-and-burdock seasoned mixed rice, boiled bamboo shoots with konjac and wakame seaweed, eggplants and tomatoes with Chinese-style...
In 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education desegregated all public schools throughout the United States, the Mendez family of Westminster, California, finally won a three-year fight for an equitable education for their children – and all children like them. In an era...
Sometimes my timing is so serendipitous, I wonder if I have a book angel whispering to me in my sleep. Somehow, I hit 'play' on this irreverent, potty-mouthed, guffaw-inducing, jaw-dropping memoir last week, only to see it pop up this week in my virtual world...
*STARRED REVIEW Celeste Ng’s debut is one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters, even as each yearns for the unknowable truth. “Lydia is dead,” the novel opens – blunt, unnerving, devastating. She’s only 16, the middle of three...
You might consider duct-taping your jaw shut because Manhattan-based Singaporean author Kevin Kwan insists on the veracity of the excesses in his outrageous, hilarious, train-wreck tragic debut novel: "So many aspects of and stories in the book I actually had to tone down!" he told...
Argh! Here where I'm stuck for another month, three or four inches of snow greeted me this morning (so much for almost May!). But if anyone can convince me summer is coming, that would be the inimitable Shaun Tan. This, his latest title, immediately pulls...
The title here is your first warning: Oxford Dictionaries describes 'double bind' as "[a] situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action." Think on that, then brace yourself as you open the cover...
