*STARRED REVIEW “In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho’s mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho’s father, a...
*STARRED REVIEW Elizabeth Miki Brina claims her voice with resounding clarity in her memoir, Speak, Okinawa. As the daughter of a U.S. soldier with Jamestown ancestry and an Okinawan immigrant mother, Brina's identity was always a negotiation of race, class, privilege. By opening her stupendous book...
*STARRED REVIEW Marin Ireland has a mere couple dozen audio credits – the majority of them in the last few years – yet she’s undoubtedly one of the industry’s most versatile, consistently stupendous narrators. Returning for her third Fredrick Backman pairing, Ireland superbly brings to life...
*STARRED REVIEW Penn State University Press, already a publisher of award-winning graphic titles, launches a new imprint, Graphic Mundi, showcasing comics intent on “drawing our worlds together.” Among its inaugural line-up is French comics artist Espé’s spectacular, autobiographically inspired homage to a childhood haunted by mental...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, the Galvin family seemed perfect. Father Don's work with the Air Force brought the family to (coincidentally, presciently named) Hidden Valley Road in Colorado. There, mother Mary oversaw the raising and nurturing of their dozen children – 10 boys and...
In her enormously affecting comics debut, Invisible Differences, French activist Julie Dachez introduces her autobiographical stand-in, 27-year-old Marguerite. Marguerite's daily life is most comfortable when she abides by her familiar rituals: wear soft clothes, depart for work at 7:30 a.m., grab her daily spelt roll...
The opening is undoubtedly jarring: in a father/son conversation about an upcoming work trip, author Aurélien Ducoudray explains he’s going “[t]o a place where crazy people live.” Despite the initially shocking language (most likely not lost in translation by Penn State University Press’s editor-in-chief Kendra Boileau), the...
"The people in this book are people from your lives," Kao Kalia Yang writes to her three sleeping children in the final chapter of her affecting hybrid nonfiction collection, Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir. Minnesota – where Yang has lived for...
*STARRED REVIEW Ultimately, Inferno is a love story: raw, unfiltered, wrenching, lifesaving. Catherine Cho, a Korean American literary agent living in London, makes her debut with a scorching memoir about the postpartum psychosis that nearly destroyed her – but didn't. On November 4, 2017, Cho and husband, James,...
Following her spectacularly lauded, bestselling historical and ancestral debut, Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi turns to the contemporary, tracing the dissolution of a Ghanaian immigrant family. By the time Gifty leaves Alabama for Harvard, she’s resolved to “build a new Gifty from scratch” by shedding the...
For Parisian nurse Valérie Villieu, the proverbial City of Lights is “filled with solitude, isolation, and confinement” – especially for the elderly. Villieu meets soon-to-be-84 Josephine, trapped in her tiny apartment with a stuffed dog and bear as her only constant companions. For months, Josephine...
Missing children loom in Yiyun Li’s latest novel, her second since her teenage son’s tragic 2017 suicide, which inspired Where Reasons End (2019). MacArthur “genius” Li is herself a suicide survivor, as revealed in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). In her...
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...
Afaf Rahman, the principal of suburban Chicago’s Nurrideen School for Girls, takes a few minutes alone for prayers, until gunshots shatter her peace. Palestinian American Sahar Mustafah’s first novel opens with the terror of a school shooter and concludes with Afaf’s eventual return to her...
Navigating ages, gender, backgrounds, and race, Imani Parks encompasses the peripatetic Kirkland family of four who relocate from Baltimore to Albuquerque. As bonded as the quartet – two musician parents, teen daughter Eve, and tween daughter Keda – might seem to the outside world, one...
For those looking for alternate therapies, the Miracle Submarine in Miracle Creek, Virginia, provides HBOT – hyperbaric oxygen therapy – believed to treat such conditions as autism and infertility. Despite the many ‘miracles,’ the venture is anything but: a mysterious explosion kills two patients and...
Amy Sarig King’s (Me and Marvin Gardens) second middle-grade title explores especially mature subjects – infidelity, parental missteps, mental illness, genetic inheritance, violent triggers – with effective, age-appropriate awareness. On January 18, 2019, "everything changed" in the Johanson home. While 12-year-old Liberty and her nine-year-old...
Grace was unaware of her sister’s existence until their mother’s death revealed the family’s three-decades-plus secret. Grace returns to her native Madras from America, where she’s been living since college, working in customer service and watching her marriage implode over progeny disagreements. She’s jet-lagged but...
This is the first of a two-part series. Part II will publish on Friday, August 30, 2019. Before I can name even a single author or title, I must express my constantly regenerating, overflowing gratitude to translators who enable readers anywhere and everywhere to literally experience the...
*STARRED REVIEW Growing up in 1980s suburban Utah, Tunde, his younger brother and their immigrant Nigerian parents hardly resemble the local Mormon majority. Tunde's father blames his accented English for his inability – despite his U.S. engineering degree – to find meaningful employment, eventually attempting a...
