For Jeni McFarland, who survived childhood sexual assault, talking about her trauma "was like a dam burst," she reveals in an interview with her publisher. "It was so cathartic writing about it that I couldn't stop." That horrific survival, further aggravated by being one of...
In her provocative, intense debut novel, The Royal Abduls, Ramiza Shamoun Koya introduces the extended members of a fractured family four years after the horrors of 9/11. Each is attempting to deal with ongoing anti-Muslim challenges, from microaggressions to outright civil rights abuses. Despite a shared...
After a decade together, Oscar and Mina married, but on their wedding night, Mina downed all the pills she could find, yet somehow lived. Six months later, she’s walking across George Washington Bridge. She’s already sent one of her purple flip-flops into the dark below...
Fan Fiction, 50 Years Later Almost two decades have passed since Linda Sue Park became the first Korean American – and only the second Asian American – to win the Newbery Medal, in 2002 for A Single Shard. She's since published dozens of titles (Gondra's Treasure; Forest of...
For Allie Abraham, "hiding is easy: reddish-blond hair, pale skin, hazel eyes," in other words – white. That she looks "textbook Circassian…from the Caucasus region. (Hey, they don't call it Caucasian for nothing)," is her ethnic inheritance from her immigrant Circassian Jordanian history professor father....
Everything here sounds off-kilter – on purpose. Discomfort pervades the reading, whether conversations are awkwardly not-quite-synched between speakers, or sentences spoken in an (unnamed) Caribbean island patois are made purposefully wooden and German words and phrases become virtually unintelligible. That jagged performance, however, seems integral...
The town of Africville exists, designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1996. The small coastal community on the edge of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was home to black residents since the early 1800s, the majority with southern U.S. and Caribbean origins. Narrative magazine assistant editor Jeffrey...
“I cared more about making the reader uncomfortable than happy, because … discomfort makes you question and think” She began her American life as a six-year-old immigrant from the Philippines. She entered adulthood with a Princeton pedigree which well-served her lofty finance career. She was a...
Two brothers. Two narrators. Two type fonts: serif for "The Older Brother" chapters; sans serif for "The Younger Brother." Their family has shrunk as Mahir Guven's debut, Older Brother, begins: "...
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...
“I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman: looping into myself, interrupting,” announces Catherine Chung’s protagonist Katherine. “Things have never seemed straightforward to me; the path has never been clear.” As the child of a WWII veteran father and...
*STARRED REVIEW With a mere handful of solo credits, Ewan Chung is a relative newbie to audiobooks, but his remarkable versatility proves the ideal fit to showcase Daniel Nieh’s outstanding thriller. The DC-born Chung is a talented polyglot, fluent in Mandarin (he translated the DVD audio...
*STARRED REVIEW Until his cousin Jun was murdered, Jay thought little of his Filipino heritage. A Michigan senior headed to university in the fall, Jay’s been on auto-pilot for most of his 17 years. Similar in age, Jun and Jay stayed avid pen pals after childhood...
*STARRED REVIEW New mother Jane is a struggling Filipina immigrant desperate to do the best for her daughter. Jane’s older cousin Ate has worked tirelessly for decades to provide for her children on the other side of the world. Mae, born to a Chinese immigrant father...
By 2142, “generations of interracial partnerships from the twenty-first century onward [have] rendered [names] meaningless” as markers of ethnicity. Time-traveling Agent Kin is named after quinoa; his fellow agent Markus Fernandez is a pale Brit/northern Californian. Author Mike Chen is Chinese American and channels Idris Elba...
Soneela Nankani instills a just-under-the-surface rage in Kat, a biracial Oakland teen who barely escaped being raped by another student, and whose mother sends her to Boston to finish junior year home-schooled by a family friend’s great-aunt. For Robin Thornton, who’s struggling with his transracial...
As the oldest daughter of a German mother and Nigerian father in a small Nigerian town where everybody knows everybody, Olivia has valued books as windows to a life beyond. While anticipating boarding school in big-city Lagos, Olivia dreams of “all kinds of adventures,” Enid...
Malaka Gharib’s Catholic mother regretted leaving her upper-middle-class Manila life, but unrest fueled by the 1970s Marcos regime sent her stateside. Meanwhile, her Egyptian Muslim father “had been scheming to get to America since high school” and finally enrolled at UCLA’s School of Management. They...
Book ’Em Now: Sing, Unburied, Sing’s Audacious Trio Imagine choosing three first-time narrators to voice the next novel from a National Book Award winner. Takes faith! Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones won the 2011 NBA for fiction; six years later, she won her second NBA for...
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...
