British actor Seema Bowri makes her narrating debut, her crisp, youthful voice an ideal match for 11-year-old Tamarind, a Bristol, England-raised girl meeting her late mother’s family for the first time. Her father, recently remarried and on his way to his honeymoon, arranges to leave...
*STARRED REVIEW A solemn drumbeat welcomes listeners to discover the Kapaemahu, four ancient Tahitian healers of Hawaii. Neither male nor female, “they were mahu—a mixture of both in mind, heart, and spirit.” The people built a monument in gratitude, but the “four great boulders” were eventually...
*STARRED REVIEW Relationships between women – familial, beloved, strange, imagined – dominate queer Taiwanese American K-Ming Chang’s (Bestiary, 2020) explosive and bizarre first story collection. Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections – “Mothers,” “Myths,” “Moths” – which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and...
Welcome to one of the more hope-filled, albeit cautious, Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Months in recent history. Plenty remains unsettled, challenging, and tragic, but a glass-half-full outlook extols the news that the world is finally, excitedly opening up from the last two-plus years of...
*STARRED REVIEW Kapaemahu began as an animated short film that garnered international recognition. The award-winning production team of Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, and Joe Wilson now sets their script onto the page, resulting in a spectacular picture book featuring stills from animation director Daniel Sousa's moving images....
*STARRED REVIEW Three ancient, traditional Japanese myths get fabulously, subversively transformed in Tokyo-based, Spanish Japanese graphic creator Ken Niimura’s (Henshin, 2014) irresistible latest. “Never Open It” was, once upon a time, “Urashima Tarō,” a “Rip Van Winkle”-like tale about a fisherman who saves a turtle from...
An 1892 "emancipated duel" between two women is about to take place as the overseeing (female) doctor drolly remarks, "we will never be emancipated from the stupidity of men." That too-true theme lingers throughout Gwen E. Kirby's remarkable 21-story debut, Shit Cassandra Saw, as women love,...
“If I could put it into words, I wouldn’t be drawing it,” the cartoonist insists. In mostly black-and-white panels laden with exquisite details, Zuo Ma intertwines autobiography with fantasy, their relationship revealed some 200 pages into the unpredictable narrative. A young man returns home from city...
The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...
*STARRED REVIEW Bestselling Korean author Bora Chung is a genre-defying polyglot. She’s a Yale MA-ed, Indiana University PhD-ed translator of Russian and Polish modern literature into Korean who writes an amalgam of speculative, ghostly, literary horror fiction. Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur,...
Nothing is quite what it seems – of course – in prodigious Helen Oyeyemi’s latest. The “starry-eyed young couple,” Otto and Xavier Shin, have committed to sharing the same last name without marrying. They’re embarking on a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” on a train trip gifted by...
*STARRED REVIEW The late Shigeru Mizuki's most recent posthumous import, Tono Monogatari – in English, Tales of Tono – is as multi-layered as the eminent manga creator himself. Venerated for his magnificently detailed histories – Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, for example – and cherished for his charming supernatural...
Following the success of her lauded “We Set the Dark on Fire” duology, Tehlor Kay Mejia makes her middle grade debut, proving mothers are always right, ghosts exist, and La Llorona is legit. From 12 to eternal, desperate parent to dismissive cop, madwoman to murderer,...
The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Tales is the fourth installment in Iron Circus Comics' geographically specific Cautionary Fables & Fairytales series: African tales in The Girl Who Married a Skull, Asian stories in Tamamo the Fox Maiden, and European fare in The Nixie of the Mill-Pond. Volume four...
Best known for the 1991 Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, Nigerian author Ben Okri has maintained a prolific output of lauded fiction, poetry, and essays. His provocative collection, Prayer for the Living, presents 24 stories and a single poem that include previously published pieces from...
SIXTY-EIGHT narrators get credited with creating the aural spectacle of Neil Gaiman’s legendary graphic epic. Debuting officially in 1989, the original comic series concluded in 1996, although reprints, compilations, adaptations, and spin-offs have as never ceased. Among the vast cast – quite possibly the largest...
Argentine writer José Hernández’s 1872 epic poem, Martín Fierro, became both an historical and literary classic for preserving and celebrating the gaucho, equal parts horseman, rebel, and legend. In Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest, shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, she transforms a few lines from...
*STARRED REVIEW Preface any storytelling format with “traditional,” and audiences will have no expectations of feminist agency. Thankfully, prizewinning Japanese writer Aoko Matsuda imagines reclamation and brilliantly transforms fairy tales and folk legends into empowering exposés, adventures, manifestos. The 17 stories – adroitly translated by UK-based Polly Barton...
Readers might need the opening sentence repeated here: “Somewhere in the Américas, many years after once-upon-a-time and long before happily-ever-after, a boy climbed the cobbled steps of an arched bridge in the tiny village of Santa Maria in the country of the same name.” The...
At almost 19, Ama already has a dead soldier husband and three daughters. She marries two-decades-older Agong, another soldier with whom she has two more daughters. The youngest becomes Mother, who moves with Ama, Agong, and Jie (older sister), from Taiwan to Arkansas, only to be displaced...
