“I’m still getting used to the idea of being a writer”: Q&A with Angie Kim True confession: A few years ago, our mutual friend, the writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee (not a Bloomer – Marie had a first-ever YA fiction multi-book deal with a major publisher in...
May is Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. Why May? The first Japanese people immigrated to the United States on May 7, 1843, and the transcontinental railroad – built mostly with immigrant Chinese labor – was completed on May 10, 1869. In 1977, Congressional legislation...
Of Dangarembga’s award-winning, semi-autobiographical Tambudzai Sigauke trilogy, only this finale gets an audio adaptation. Tambu struggled to be educated amid Zimbabwe’s decades-long civil war in Nervous Conditions (winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and survived a convent education in The Book of Not (2006). Here, Tambu is a not-so-young...
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma With the 2015 debut of The Fisherman, The New York Times rejoiced: “Chigozie Obioma truly is the heir to Chinua Achebe.” Almost four years later, his sophomore title – hitting shelves today – doesn’t disappoint. The story seems familiarly simple: a man...
*STARRED REVIEW “My mom is an immigrant so she speaks English with an accent,” Yiyun Li’s son introduces her to his kindergarten class. “Thank you my dear,” she responds, “but I still make a living by writing in English.” Despite significant literary accolades, hers is not...
Venus Black gets straight As, has never gotten drunk, smoked pot, or skipped a class. She’s also a 13-year-old murderer, sent to juvenile lock-up for shooting her stepfather. Within days, her younger half-brother Leo – “[he] has what [their mother] Inez calls ‘developmental issues’” –...
In one of those “dorky old composition notebooks,” seventh-grader Natalie is “supposed to observe something that interests us and spend all year applying the scientific process to our capital-Q Question.” While she struggles to formulate that ideal Q, Natalie fills the pages with much more...
Blood ties spanning almost a century connect Emma, an Indian Residential School runaway, to her great-granddaughter, Ella, a struggling actor. In 1890 Maine, Emma – born to a Passamaquoddy Native father and an African American mother, is violently uprooted and trapped in a tortuous school...
In one of the most inexcusable examples of careless casting or lazy producing or both, David Peace (Red or Dead) gets utterly short-changed by Ric Jerrom's exasperating performance, from grievous mispronunciations of the majority of the Japanese names and words – including even Peace's protagonist...
*STARRED REVIEW “[B]eing able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories” could be goals for any community – but the words are especially resonant for debut novelist Tommy Orange’s sprawling Native American cast: “the world is...
Meet the Allbrights: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-afflicted Vietnam War returnee Ernt, his perennially in-denial wife Cora, and mature-beyond-her-years teenager Leni. Bequeathed a remote homestead in 1974 by a fallen army buddy, Ernt relocates his family to wild, remote Alaska, chasing dreams of self-sufficiency and simple...
The opening sentence – “The smell of blood woke me” – gives way to a young man discovering his mother’s freshly murdered corpse. He’s gone off his epilepsy medications again, and has trouble remembering, but he’s determined to figure out what happened. Initially, the whodunit and...
Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes found each other at age 4 in the middle of the nursery school playground, but their glorious best friendship crumbles when they're middle schoolers. Julia, with her supportive parents and a stable home, watches as Cassie, the only child of...
At 16, Twinkle Mehra is the youngest junior at her Colorado Springs charter high school. She doesn't have a cell phone and she can't drive because she doesn't have her license (nor a car). Twinkle knows "[s]ome might call people like [her] losers," but Twinkle...
"Indian girls can be forgotten so well they can forget themselves." After reading Terese Marie Mailhot’s 160 pages or listening to not-quite-four hours narrated by Rainy Fields, forgetting is not an option. Presented as an essay collection, Mailhot's work lays bare her experiences as a...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Henry Goodman self-righteously sputters, resignedly accepts, viciously plots, frantically searches, and plays especially well the Fool – all in the service of expertly, effortlessly voicing the latest in the Bard-updated-by-famous-contemporary-authors "Hogarth Shakespeare" series. In Edward St. Aubyn's (Patrick Melrose series) wickedly compelling, guiltily provocative...
Nigerian-born Akwaeke Emezi makes a double debut as both author and narrator of her autobiographical first novel. As creator, she knows precisely how her story should flow, where emphasis is required, when to draw back, push forward, add breathing space. Her stand-in is Ada who, from...
A Poet’s Novel: Jon Pineda talks LET’S NO ONE GET HURT Even a poetry dullard like me recognizes poet/memoirist/novelist Jon Pineda’s ability to do something spectacular with language. His lean sentences are surprisingly dense, as if to defy their brevity. Surely publishing three award-winning books of...
Mira T. Lee’s impressive debut – both a celebration and mourning of the bond between two sisters, the younger afflicted with mental illness, the elder desperate to save her – deserves better aural interpretation. The full cast (in rare recognition, a who-was-who is added at...
Until she found her agent in 2015, Mira T. Lee thought of her writing as a “dirty little secret.” Although she started publishing short stories almost a decade ago, she didn’t start writing “seriously” until 2012, buoyed by an Artist Fellowship from Mass Cultural Council: “I...
