For Jeni McFarland, who survived childhood sexual assault, talking about her trauma "was like a dam burst," she reveals in an interview with her publisher. "It was so cathartic writing about it that I couldn't stop." That horrific survival, further aggravated by being one of...
*STARRED REVIEW The family is Cuban. The son, 18, is fulfilling his military conscription, enduring mind-numbing sentry duty any way he can until his release. The mother, once a schoolteacher, is housebound with a violently debilitating illness. The father, who manages a four-star tourist hotel, is...
The publishing industry has been hard hit by COVID-19: festival and conference cancelations, library and bookstore shutterings, disappearing book tours, publishers’ office closings, production delays – especially with international printers – and, alas, probably more obstacles to come. But digital audiobooks can be the ideal,...
Although Chinua Achebe's pivotal Things Fall Apart is a staple on most Western students' reading lists as representative of modern African literature, Cyprian Ekwensi predates Achebe by four years as one of Nigeria's first writers publishing in English. Introduced in the U.K. in 1954, Ekwensi's debut...
They dubbed themselves the Minghua 123: 114 students and nine professors (plus 16 uncounted servants-laborers). In 1937, to escape the Japanese onslaught, they flee their university in Nanking to seek refuge a thousand miles westward. Saving their lives includes safeguarding 147 volumes of the Library...
*STARRED REVIEW Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures – and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents – Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing power of indigenous plants, and the American Claire, a would-be...
“Just because you have a testosterone prescription and a new sense of exhilaration doesn’t mean you have to go around setting down your life story,” Daniel Mallory Ortberg writes (and thankfully narrates), disguised as “Paul and Second Timothy: The Transmasculine Epistles.” His response to his...
He’s “something like a six-legged beast made of pure darkness,” but come morning, he’s back to being “too serious” middle-schooler Adachi. More observer than participant among his peers, he keeps silent as the class pariah, Yano, is bullied almost daily. When a few boys, claiming...
*STARRED REVIEW Ali Araghi begins his prodigious debut novel with a literal bang: once upon a time in an apple orchard, a returning soldier urges his rifle into his son's hands, forcing the boy to shoot him. The shocking tragedy renders 10-year-old Ahmad mute, and has...
*STARRED REVIEW A woman goes out for her regular evening walk on the beach, contemplating her relationship with her husband, until she sees a mermaid washed up on the shore. And here text and graphics suddenly diverge: the words reveal a recent affair, while the frames...
Regardless of skin color, net worth, socioeconomic background, you will cringe here – as well as laugh (possibly guffaw), roll your eyes, shake your head, perhaps even cry. Narrator Nicole Lewis has quite the diverse cast to perform – which she does with energetic aplomb and...
*STARRED REVIEW How fitting that what might be Isabel Allende’s best work gets aurally elevated by one of audio’s most gifted narrators. For nearly 10 hours, Edoardo Ballerini embodies the extended Dalmau family, flowing through six decades, multiple countries, two continents, recounting the Spanish Civil War...
*STARRED REVIEW Novels featuring neurodiverse protagonists are claiming more space on both adult and children’s shelves. The most common underlying message encourages kindness and empathy, despite obvious, sometimes impenetrable, differences. In what might be the first novel to feature a protagonist with alexithymia – an inability...
*STARRED REVIEW For the first time in her young life, Jivan has her own cellphone, which she bought with money earned by working as a shopgirl, having left high school after barely passing her tenth-form exams. After witnessing a gruesome train-station attack during her 15-minute walk...
Members Only, the first novel by Sameer Pandya (author of the story collection The Blind Writer), is as provocative as it is comedic. In a horribly misguided attempt to bond with the first people of color since his own admission into a suburban Los Angeles tennis...
Despite Daisy's carefully prepared "Things to do with Yeh-yeh" list, her goal during the week of her grandfather's visit is something far more challenging: "I have to make him smile before he leaves!" In creating Daisy and her Grandpa Grumps, Katrina Moore (One Hug) explores multi-generational,...
*STARRED REVIEW The rest of that subtitle goes “A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning,” with the keyword being Remix, thanks to Jason Reynolds’ (Long Way Down) remarkable synthesizing of Ibram X. Kendi’s 600-page, 19-plus-hour original. Kendi reads his introduction, lauding Reynolds’ superb...
Despite living in glorious Paris, Juliette's daily life is mundane. Her real estate job isn't fulfilling, her closest friend is flighty coworker Chloe, and her love life currently nonexistent. The day's highlight is her Métro commute, when she can commune with books – both the...
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo and translated by Jamie Chang Cho’s narrative is part bildungsroman and part Wikipedia entry. She opens with “August, 2015,” immediately divulging the fragile mental state of her titular Kim Jiyoung, who now as a wife and mother has...
In her provocative, intense debut novel, The Royal Abduls, Ramiza Shamoun Koya introduces the extended members of a fractured family four years after the horrors of 9/11. Each is attempting to deal with ongoing anti-Muslim challenges, from microaggressions to outright civil rights abuses. Despite a shared...
