Historical works about Korea in English – especially during the tragic years of the Japanese occupation (officially 1910-1945) – seem few and far between. So I really wanted to fall madly in love with this debut novel by fellow Korean American Eugenia Kim. While I was grateful for...
The "traffic" in Chen's collection revolves around broken love, made even more jarring by a literal jaggedness on the page with the layout of her words. The protagonist, Xiaomei, loses love too many times. In childhood, her first loss is her father who "disappeared into...
Welcome to an alternative premodern Edo Japan where women do everything – including rule! Girl power all the way! Without a cure, the mysterious Redface Pox has ravaged the country's male population until it finally "stabilized at about one-fourth that of the female." Men have become...
The Booklist review blurb on the stark black back cover (with a heart-breaking pink balloon floating away) should serve as quite the warning: "Not for gentle readers." Probably best known as a playwright, Adam Rapp has certainly created a busy, award-winning career by exploring the darker characteristics...
The already well-established X-Men franchise of books (and films) gets a somewhat peculiar makeover in the first of a new series designed for the middle grade/13+ crowd. "Don't fix what ain't broke," comes to mind. But that might be an old-age reaction ...
So indulge me for a reductive semantic moment: 'serious' comic books are graphic novels (say, Archie vs. Will Eisner's A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories); in Japanese terms, 'serious' manga is also known as gekiga. If you're interested (otherwise skip to next paragraph), here's...
September 26 through October 3 this year is "Banned Books Week"! Good thing someone one told me! So how fitting that I was lucky enough to receive Border Town, the pre-Communist Revolution masterpiece by Shen Congwen (1902-1988), who although virtually unknown in the West, is...
The final installment in the three-volume manwha that began with The Color of Earth and The Color of Water, follows Ewha, now a lovely young woman, and her still-young mother, as both wait for their respective missing lovers. Ewha's Duksam flees the wrath of his...
If you see a book cover with the name Dai Sijie on it, read the book. Dai's delightful 2001 debut, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, about two young boys who discover a love for literature while sequestered in a re-education camp during Mao's Cultural Revolution,...
I have to confess that had my teenaged daughter not handed me the book and said, "it's great, I loved it," I probably wouldn't have finished this latest title from Justina Chen Headley whose debut, Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies), remains...
Referred to on the front flap as "highly autobiographical," this slim story proves to be an addictive quick read. The protagonist Amélie (who is not so unlike the author Amélie) returns to Japan where she was born to Belgian parents and spent part of her...
With a father in jail and a mother trying hard to keep her family together, San Lee's peripatetic home life is anything but zen. He's entering yet another new school as an outside eighth-grader – and moving from big town Houston to small-town Pennsylvania isn't...
In her reader's guide at book's end, Naseem Rakha explains how in 1996 she was assigned to cover Oregon's first excecution in over three decades. Once finished with the assignment, she continued to ask questions and "by far the most compelling [stories] were those told...
Seven stories capture the disconnected restless wanderings of modern urban youth. The eponymous opening story is a moody reflection on the loneliness of every day life personified by a stranger named Mijeong [the back cover notes, "In Chinese, 'Mijeong' means 'pure beauty,'" which is true, but...
Being a so-called 'normal' teenager for hapa Pakistani Londoner Bilqis SanGreal has never been an option. With an overbearing father who happens to be the Templar Master – even if many believe he murdered his beloved wife – Billi's destiny as the newest, youngest Knight is...
Excessive behavior has always provided seemingly unlimited literary fodder, but few writers have succeeded in creating great books from such source material. Alas, while Trinh's debut effort has a few brow-raising hairpin page-turns, her characters' bender-binges (drinking, drugs, bad relationships) soon grow too tedious to sustain a reader's interest. Eydie...
The eponymous Housekeeper's birthdate is February 20, or written out, 220. The said Professor wears a prize watch inscribed with "President's Prize No. 284." Together, 220 and 284 are amicable numbers. And with that coincidence, the Housekeeper and the Professor begin their amicable relationship ...
Just to see what I might find, I went through the books I've included thus far and among almost 400 entries, I couldn't find more than a handful of titles that have an older protagonist. As the over-65 population in the U.S. has been the...
I'm getting on the Shamsie-bandwagon a little late ...
Renée, a 54-year-old widow, serves as the overlooked concierge of a luxurious Parisian apartment building. She lives with a cat named after Tolstoy, weeps over Bonnie Butler's death in Gone With the Wind, has no patience for errant commas even as she dismisses the finer...
