"A girl cannot be brave, or clever, or skilled as a boy can. If she is not good, she is nothing," an angry Reverend Erasmus Sunderly admonished his usually obedient 14-year-old-daughter, Faith. His words are harsh, but in Victorian England, not without societal support. He...
*STARRED REVIEW Richard Chapman – husband, father, businessman – hosts a bachelor party in his Westchester, NY, home for his younger brother. Two strippers are hired to provide the expected entertainment, until the debauchery ends abruptly when the girls murder their bodyguards and flee. Richard must...
Alternate histories have been "a thing" for decades. Lauded titles are many, but World War II-related novels in which the so-called good guys don't win seem to have yielded quite a few bestsellers through the decades, including The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, Fatherland...
Linda Wallheim, who debuted in YA author Mette Ivie Harrison’s first adult title, The Bishop's Wife, returns to solve her second murder. For Linda, being a devout Mormon isn't a barrier to speaking her mind and demanding justice in the men-centric community in which being...
*STARRED REVIEW "My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives," explains nine-year-old Benjamin. With Father's strict daily oversight missing and Mother busy with...
For those of us of a certain (old) age, we might remember an animated rabbit used to sell artificially colored, chemically flavored powder that altered milk into some sort of sweet goop: Quiky the Quik Bunny would quip "You can't drink it slow, if it's Quik."...
Jeanette Winterson inaugurates “The Hogarth Shakespeare” series – “a major international project [that] will see Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers” – with a contemporary reinvention of The Winter’s Tale. In Winterson’s version, the setting moves between post-2008 market-crashed London and a...
Sweden's Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004, but his internationally famed, mismatched hacker/journalist duo are proving to be immortal. Yes, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are back in a fourth installment of what is now the Millennium series (a 'trilogy' no more) with a new writer, Swedish journalist and...
Well, I've done it now – binge-read two volumes of my latest favorite manga obsession. I really was trying to space out the fabulous adventures of Taichi Hiraga Keaton, our British/Japanese hapa professor/insurance investigator (ha! of course, he's so much more than that!), but once begun...
Death by Water takes readers on a wild ride of epic proportions In addition to being noted for his prodigious literary accomplishments, 1994 Nobel Prize-winning Kenzaburō Ōe is known for being politically outspoken. He made international headlines again during this year’s 70th anniversary of the Nagasaki/Hiroshima...
Here in my temporary exile in the Beehive State, I remain fascinated by the religion that dominates my current location. In a moment of ironic timing, as I was wandering the many surrounding mountains with narrator Kirsten Potter stuck in the ears, this passage stuck: "Whenever friends from other...
*STARRED REVIEW Watanabe Yuichi sits behind bars in Japan’s infamous Fukuoka Prison. After World War II, the former “soldier-guard” is now an incarcerated “low-level war criminal” under U.S. control. His written confession, which highlights two people — “one prisoner and one guard; one poet and one...
After more than two-and-a-half years since volume 13 hit Stateside shelves in December 2012, the Kurosagi quintet-plus-puppet (I mean alien) are FINALLY back. And then some. Because in this latest volume, it's Kurosagi x 3, as in three distinct Kurosagi versions fighting for page time. Guess they...
Given that gang violence, unfortunately, makes for all-too-familiar headlines, the story of a gang truce is truly noteworthy news to be lauded and emulated. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, New York's Bronx was both a haven for poor ethnic communities pushed out of Manhattan, and...
"The way our communities were set up was like a circle," an Elder explains to a group of imprisoned men. "In the middle of that circle were children. Around those children were the Elders, who would teach them. Around the Elders were the women. Keeping the...
OH. MY. MY. MY. Dare I say ...
Being the new kid (again) in high school is hard enough, but for Nick Pearson, he also has to get used to a new name and a whole new identity that comes with his latest 'fake ID.' Every time Nick (nope, not his real name) and...
When Samantha Young swoops out of her father's dry goods store still angry from the news that they will soon be leaving Missouri for California – the exact opposite direction from New York – she couldn't possibly have realized that her life would literally be...
