Seventeen-and-a-half-hours is a long, lonnnnnng commitment, and Scottish actor Angus King takes on his fellow Glaswegian Douglas Stuart’s resonating debut with meticulous devotion. While the title belongs to young Shuggie Bain, who comes of age in the poorest neighborhoods around Glasgow in the 1980s, the narrative...
*STARRED REVIEW Yes, indubitably, you’ll need to first read/listen to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (2018) to fully appreciate April’s resurrection, why/how we’re not alone, the need to save humanity despite, well, humans. While Kristen Sieh helmed Hank Green’s bestselling debut almost solo – Green himself did a...
Introduced in author/illustrator Jessica Love’s 2018 Julián Is a Mermaid, self-expressive Julián returns for a command performance in Julián at the Wedding, this time with a fabulous partner-in-play, Marisol. Repeating her memorably affecting formula of minimal text/maximum art, Love again offers another sparkling gift to...
*STARRED REVIEW British-born to a Greek Cypriot mother and Jamaican father, Dean Atta established himself as a poet and performer in 2012. Here he gorgeously debuts as both author and narrator of his novel-in-verse in which his fictional stand-in, Michael Angeli, matures from an end-of-the-millennium baby...
Emily Lawrence narrates Hannah Capin's contemporized adaptation of Macbeth, featuring overprivileged L.A. teens with a #MeToo narrative overlay. Out at a party with her three best friends, Elizabeth Jade Khanjara is gang-raped by a group of prep school lacrosse stars. She refuses to be labeled...
Eleanor and Leena meet in 2004 in a Boston college-dorm elevator. Eleanor is a hapa Californian – her mother is white, her father Japanese American. Leena’s traditionally immigrant Indian American family is a few towns over in Lowell. That fall semester is spent intensely falling,...
*STARRED REVIEW The magic happens here on every page, the perfection personified by debut author/artist Trung Le Nguyen’s autobiographical homage to the infinite power of storytelling. The opening page ingeniously distinguishes three interwoven narratives with three color palettes: red is the urgent now, about young Tiến...
Earlier this year, Bishakh Som debuted her dazzling graphic collection, Apsara Engine, the genesis of which is found here – inseparably entwined with Som’s own unique origin story. Som introduces herself in a narrative frame, bordering the memoir’s beginning and end: “I wanted to clue...
*STARRED REVIEW In their joint introduction, four The College of New Jersey colleagues – three African American women, one gay white man, all PhD-ed – declare, “Toni Morrison is our greatest living historian about love, race, nation, and just about everything else of consequence.” The Nobel...
For Meredith Talusan, transformation looks like this: "Sun Child," "Harvard Man," "Lady Wedgwood." In the nimbly titled Fairest, award-winning journalist Talusan shares an unflinching exploration of identity. "Mirrors were not just mirrors to me," she writes in her prologue, "but bridges made of light to fantastic...
The “demarcation” begins over a wardrobe malfunction: a 12-year-old girl, improperly, according to the local men, dressed in shorts, arrives at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with her mother and uncle. Exchanging the forbidden shorts for her uncle’s “baggy trousers” gives her a...
Helmed by director Nahnatchka Khan (Netflix's Always Be My Maybe), an HBO Max adaptation of Lyla Lee’s I'll Be the One was announced six months prior to the book's publication date. Before Hollywood hijacks your imagination, though, get to know Skye off-screen in this delectable...
*STARRED REVIEW Producers/directors, take note: this is how to effectively record an audiobook with more than a single narrator. Here, Melania-Luisa Marte reads Camino’s chapters, while author Elizabeth Acevedo picks up Yahaira’s. For chapters featuring both girls, Marte and Acevedo take turns in dialogue. When their...
Indonesian-born, Singaporean-domiciled Clarissa Goenawan (Rainbirds) takes her sophomore title back to a death in remote Japan. This time, death arrives via suicide, claiming the titular Miwako, an enigmatic university sophomore who disappears without notice, and is found only after death. Desperate to comprehend her fatal...
The novel’s narrator answers, under certain circumstances, to Alani, Al, Allie, Annie, Sofia, even Hedwig or Hedy, although the latter two are names belonging to the narrator’s mother. For the last 27 years, parent and child have been estranged, since a 17-year-old Alani ran away...
We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning Corinne Manning’s author statement couldn’t be clearer: “I had no idea how to write authentically until the day when I typed the sentence ‘Oh, f*ck it. I’m writing lesbian fiction.’” That declaration became “Gay Tale,” one of 11 stories...
“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...
*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...
*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...
*STARRED REVIEW Corinne Manning’s author statement couldn’t be clearer. “I had no idea how to write authentically until the day when I typed the sentence ‘Oh, f*ck it. I’m writing lesbian fiction.’” That declaration became “Gay Tale,” one of 11 stories in this collection, her first,...
