*STARRED REVIEW The “Before” was when ZJ’s football-playing father was “everybody’s … next great hero,” but to ZJ, world-famous “Zachariah 44!” was “just my dad … which means / he’s my every single thing.” For most of 12-year-old ZJ’s life, Daddy was the very best parent,...
“I have two lives. / One that is Indian, / one that is not,” 13-year-old Reha introduces herself. During the week, she “swim[s] in a river of white skin” at school; “on weekends / [she] “float[s] in a sea of brown skin and black hair...
*STARRED REVIEW The titular phone booth is real: it stands at Bell Gardia in coastal Ōtsuchi, Japan, built in 2010 to communicate with a dead relative via an unconnected phone that carries conversations into the wind. Since the March 2011 Tōhoku disaster, 30,000 visitors have sought...
In the almost-quarter-century since his manga debut, Junji Ito has undoubtedly ascended to world-renown for his prolific tales of horror. Translated into English by Jocelyne Allen, who also translated his Eisner-winning Frankenstein, Ito’s latest imported collection opens with the five-part titular “Lovesickness.” In relentlessly foggy Nazumi,...
*STARRED REVIEW Perhaps what is most noticeable upon opening Pik-Shuen Fung’s elegiac debut is all the white space. Paragraphs, phrases, words, even detached letters float across the pages, undoubtedly an ethereal reflection of lost chances, missing time, stolen opportunities, and spaces impossible to fill. For most of...
*STARRED REVIEW Kyle Lukoff has already received acclaim for his picture books, including his #OwnVoices 2020 Stonewall Award-winning When Aidan Became a Brother. Lukoff's middle-grade debut, Too Bright to See, is another illuminating story that explores gender identity, featuring a trans tween who's finally ready to...
*STARRED REVIEW Veteran narrator Mozhan Marnò has one of those gratifyingly recognizable, sigh-inducing audiobook voices that immediately immerses readers. Here, for 12 hours, she commands Afghan American pediatrician-turned-novelist Nadia Hashimi’s (A House without Windows, 2018) latest, ciphering the multi-pronged epic over decades and across continents, cultures, and...
Here’s where veteran narrator Lisa Flanagan excels: unflaggingly individualizing myriad varied characters. Here’s where she disappoints: stumbling over non-English words and using a grating French accent. Quibbles aside, Flanagan consistently, remarkably maintains distinct voices for the peripatetic Preston family in Liese O'Halloran Schwarz’s (The Possible...
*STARRED REVIEW In Chilean author Bruno Lloret's inventively sly debut novel, Nancy, the narrative might seem relatively transparent: titular Nancy approaches death by cancer and recalls her happy childhood, her dangerous adolescence, her brother's disappearance, her mother's abandonment, her father's Mormon conversion, her husband's gruesome death....
With echoes of themes in his internationally lauded Never Let Me Go (2005) – that life can be manufactured, bartered, bought – Booker-ed, Nobel-ed, and knighted Kazuo Ishiguro presents a bittersweet fable about the human heart as “[s]omething that makes each of us special and...
Véronique Tadjo (Far from My Father) could not have known how prescient her novel, originally published in France in 2017, would be just a few years later when it was translated for English readers. In the Company of Men gives polyphonic voice to those affected by...
*STARRED REVIEW Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning Canadian Japanese novelist/poet Hiromi Goto (Half World, 2010) makes her stupendous graphic debut, in splendid artistic synchronization with Ignatz-nominated Ann Xu. “It never felt right here,” Kumiko thinks as she sneaks out of an assisted-living facility her daughters thought would be the...
That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths – much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to...
At 24, “in 1994, or maybe 1995 already,” French artist Élodie Durand first began experiencing symptoms – what her family would later call her “spells” – that included abrupt memory loss and erratic behavior, such as baseless rage and violent outbursts. Her diagnosis of epilepsy...
*STARRED REVIEW “They wanted to start a family, and now they’ve destroyed one,” Gabriel laments. When that family – including his closest friends – all gathered for a surprise party for his 75th birthday, Gabriel was still a grandfather to beloved Qinaya, adopted by his son,...
Youthful romance has made Mary H.K. Choi (Permanent Record; Emergency Contact) a bestselling #OwnVoices author. In Yolk, she effectively pivots toward the familial, focusing the most significant of the book's relationships on two Seoul-born, San Antonio-raised sisters. Devoted audiences need not worry here about missing a love...
While Asha Lemmie's debut – about the tribulations of an illegitimate, mixed-race granddaughter of a cousin to the royal Japanese family – might not be perfect, she certainly deserves better than this lazy aural travesty. Floundering, misrepresentative audiobook adaptations have been rerecorded and rereleased –...
Tony-nominated Broadway star Megan Hilty proves to be an ideal narrator, effortlessly assuming (almost-)always-in-control Dannie and her free-spirited best friend, Bella. In the evening after a near-perfect day – accepting the perfectly orchestrated marriage proposal after wowing her interviewers for her ideal job – Dannie...
A stepmother's unwanted visit, a mother's unexpected phone call, a lover's departure – all happening in a single month – precipitated the breakdown that eventually engendered Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu's penetrating debut memoir, Aftershocks. Owusu spent her youth navigating multiple continents, a half dozen countries,...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, when the father was a young boy – the same age as his young son now – he wanted to be a crossing guard. After that, he wanted to be a writer. “‘And now you are one!’” the son gleefully...
