"'I've always imagined paradise as something like a library,'" the titular March expounds. Is that not a perfect thought? Alas, while March is Geraldine Brooks' most award-winning – that yellow circle on the cover announces its 2006 Pulitzer Prize – I must confess it was my least favorite; if I had...
The legendary 1993 Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison begins her latest novel with a jarring disconnect of warning: the title is Home, and yet the first pages open with an unannotated verse – "Whose house is this? / ...
Remember that gorgeous film, Red Violin, which tells the story (backwards) of the creation and fantastical 300-plus-year-history of the eponymous instrument? People of the Book uses a similar structure to reveal the story of a 500-year-old illuminated manuscript known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. That haggadah is very real;...
I haven't picked up a Geraldine Brooks title since her 2001 debut novel, Year of Wonders, which promptly became an international bestseller. I definitely had that sense of 'wow' when I finished, but then I inexplicably ignored the rest of her titles ...
A full decade has passed since Yann Martel won the coveted Booker Prize for his Life of Pi. I confess I had to force myself to finish that book when it first appeared; I admit to being befuddled to learn of its Booker win and the...
Kodoku is one of those rare titles that immediately makes you want to learn more about what you just read. The slim kiddie book chronicles the extraordinary voyage of a young man – "Kenichi the brace, Kenichi the adventurer" for whom "the wind blows forever / across...
In a short introductory paragraph on the copyright page, author Alan Schroeder begins with a summary of what’s real and what’s been embellished “for storytelling purposes” in this vibrant title, because “[r]eliable information about [Baby Flo's] early years is limited.” Schroeder is definitely speaking to...
Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu shared the same yellow bedroom as young children, just not at the same time. While Aki and her family were imprisoned in Poston, Arizona during World War II for no other reason than their Japanese heritage, Sylvia and her family leased...
I don't know if this is linguistically correct, but I'm going with it: my recent discovery of indie comic-book legend Harvey Pekar is posthumous – that is, Pekar passed away two years ago (although I'm still kicking), and I'm just reading his work for the first...
What an ideal post for today ...
The 2,500-page, 18th-century classic, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, is regarded as China’s most important work of fiction. Pauline A. Chen (Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas, for middle-grade readers) tackles the daunting task of adapting the revered original text, and her literary...
If Youme's Sélavi, That is Life: A Haitian Story of Hope is a picture book for the youngest readers, then Taste of Salt is surely its companion title for older children and parents alike. The real-life Lanfami Sélavi – Jean-Bertrand Aristide's refuge for homeless children founded in 1986 – is...
First of all, please do not confuse this spectacular title with that OTHER Shades of Grey. Not that any comparison is even merited, but gray – notice spelling difference – hit shelves more than a year before Grey (March 2011 vs. April 2012), and gray is indisputably...
Mixed in with the many death-and-destruction titles I've been reading the last few months, my most recent choices inadvertently seem to have an added layer of death-and-destruction-in-the-name-of-God. Too many books, regardless of genre or target audience, seem to offer irrefutable proof that the rules and...
What began as a visual marvel in volume 1, surely does not disappoint in the continuing two volumes. 'Exquisite' still hardly does the panels justice, but just know that every page will make you want to linger to discover and enjoy the glorious details – the...
The PR materials that arrived with this remarkable title contains one of the most effective descriptions of the Japanese American imprisonment during World War II I've ever read: " ...
Being always a dozen or so titles behind, a confluence of certain events seem to need to happen for some posts to finally get from my brain to the ...
I've been working through numerous 'should-have-read-earlier'-titles lately, and Salman Rushdie's books always loom large as objects of fascination. After four attempts to read his The Enchantress of Florence (twice on the page, twice stuck in the ears narrated by Firdous Bamji whose recordings can make me choose a book...
After two books on the horrors of North Korea, two memoirs about the Palestinian occupation, another about a Lost Boy of Sudan, still another highlighting Hindu/Muslim massacres in Kashmir – all one after the other (what was I thinking??!!) – I picked up Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief,...
"When I was a child, our beautiful land was made ugly by racism," writes longtime author Beverley Naidoo in an introductory note. "Black, brown and white people were forced apart by apartheid (separateness) laws, and children of different colours weren't allowed to go to the same schools...
