“This was a long time ago,” Jennifer Finney Boylan (She’s Not There) begins – August 1980, more specifically. “[N]one of us now are the people we were then.” Thirty-five years later, the college friends who trespassed into the boarded-up Eastern State Penitentiary are now “ghosts:...
ABSTRACT These books feature diverse characters who – in a multiplicity of ways – suffer, learn, and generally triumph in their differences. Varying in genre from picture book to poetry, in setting from Kenya to California, and in ethnic focus from Muslim Bangladeshi to Ojibway/Anishinaaabe (Canadian...
"[D]ecidedly catholic" tastes aside, The Manga Critic is oh so right: I DOOOOOOOOOOOO "religiously" review every issue of this toothsome series! How could I ever ignore such delicious delights, I tell you! So what's the latest for our favorite Tokyo lovebirds? While Shiro takes his parents...
In thrice voicing Linda Wallheim, the Mormon bishop’s murder-solving wife, Kirsten Potter has settled comfortably into a quixotic emotional range that can move from stiff politeness to philosophical musing to overwrought shrillness without much warning. Confronted with a third dead body – “How does this always...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Sartaj Garewal’s energy couldn’t be more rousingly infectious as he voices the unforgettable characters in Adiga’s (The White Tiger) latest. Raised in a Mumbai slum by a fiercely demanding father, the two Kumar brothers are destined to become cricket champions by the sheer...
*STARRED REVIEW Laurie Frankel’s third novel is her most personal: as the mother of a transgender daughter, she writes what she knows with clarity, truth, and heart. Rosie and Penn already have four sons when Claude arrives. A remarkable child by all accounts, by age 3,...
“Throughout my life I’ve looked to books for all sorts of reasons,” Will Schwalbe reveals, “to comfort me, to amuse me, to distract me, and to educate me.” Reading, discussing, and exalting books eased him and his late mother through the final months of her...
In this debut novel (following Quarantine), western New York in 1985 and western India in 1998 are introduced as prologue, with both time and place connected by the 12-going-on-13-year-old and 26-year-old versions of Kiran Shah, whose coming-of-age as a bicultural gay Indian American is...
News about the transgender community – including banned books, bathroom laws, hockey, wrestlers, models, parades, Jackie and Juliet Evancho, and, most tragically, a horrifying murder caught on cellphone video – have all made recent headlines. Books can be helpful, entertaining, illuminating portals into the trans*/gender nonconforming (GNC)...
Oh, how I've missed my favorite Tokyo lovebirds! Not to mention the chance to salivate over their too-toothsome meals. If only they'd invite me over! If you're just tuning in to this tasty domestic drama, make sure to click here to catch up. Shiro's already well-stocked...
Equal parts romance, fairy tale, horror, history, travelog, and treatise on the transformative power of storytelling, Indra Das’s debut combines a dual narrative about the developing relationship between two strangers with a fantastical tale set seemingly long ago. One December evening in Kolkata, Alok, a history...
*STARRED REVIEW Mary, Caroline, and Katie are three very different generations in the same family; finding themselves unexpectedly under the same roof forces them to confront a complicated past that has kept them estranged for decades. Mary is the grandmother, newly widowed, fighting the dementia that...
Sixteen years ago, a pregnant woman walking the hospital halls found a lottery ticket on the floor. The ticket proved quite the winner, enabling the new mother – and her three co-parents – to "buy a big house to fill with lots more kids, and...
*STARRED REVIEW The latest from Newbery Medal-winning author Richard Peck takes on important and timely topics – marriage, sexuality, manhood, nontraditional families –and alchemizes them into an affecting story full of warmth, acceptance, and understanding. Sixth grader Archer Magill narrates what he calls "A Tale of...
A young boy, curious about his “Ammi’s dot … a bright and pretty spot,” innocently asks, “Why do you wear that dot?/What’s so special about that spot?” His mother crouches to eye level so he can touch her forehead as she explains, “It’s not a...
While Pamela Erens might not yet be a household-name author, she’s hardly a stranger to literary recognition. Her 2007 debut, The Understory – about a solitary, unemployed lawyer who’s about to lose his home – was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the...
As today’s most prominent transgender teen, Jennings stepped into the national spotlight in 2007 at the age of 6 in a televised interview with Barbara Walters. In the almost-decade since, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – psychology/psychiatry’s bible for identifying mental disorders...
For the seriously literary, his name and work will be familiar. His short story, “Substitutes,” earned him an O. Henry Prize in 2009. Other short works have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Threepenny Review, Five Points, Fence, to name a few. He has a page...
Out on a January walk in Berlin, the unnamed Korean narrator falls into a river. As she struggles to breathe, her experience gives way to both "conventional memories" of what has led her to this icy trap dovetailed with tenuous endeavors to comprehend and explicate...
*STARRED REVIEW "The first thing you're going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?" Keep wondering: Riley Cavanaugh isn't answering. Riley is gender-fluid, information only Riley's psychiatrist is privy to, while Riley's conservative congressman father and teacher mother...
