This one is just delicious – and delightfully plotted as to how it plays with time and place and people. The beginning: a man, a woman,...
Welcome to the fabulous world of the Bindi Babes, otherwise known as the dynamic Dhillon sisters, Amber, Jazz, and Geena. In the first installment of the trilogy, Bindi Babes, they manage to...
A loving tribute, memoir-style, to the author’s father, a South Vietnamese pilot shot down during the Vietnam War and assumed dead. Pham and his mother begin a new life in the United...
Perfect beach read: A father arrives in NYC to visit his estranged daughter and stumbles onto a murder for which his daughter is arrested as the prime suspect. Little by little, he must not...
First reaction: WOW! Second reaction: Read it! The story revolves around the Harmony Silk Factory, a textiles shop in rural Malaysia run by Johnny Lim, part crook, part untouchable legend.
Three narrators...
A gorgeously rendered tale about yet another evil stepmother who turns the good and beautiful stepdaughter into the Loathsome Dragon, awaiting three kisses from her beloved but missing brother. Of course, since Bruno Bettelheim...
The Best Wake-Up Call of All: Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira Wins 2005 Newbery
Calls coming in at 4:26 a.m. don’t usually make people jump up and down and scream for joy. But Cynthia Kadohata, still half-asleep in her...
Somebody's Daughter
Ten Thousand Sorrows by Elizabeth Kim, A Single Square Picture by Katy Robinson, and The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka are just some of the available memoirs...
The discovery of an illicit link between the murder of a middle-aged salaryman and a college student is just the beginning. What the police find is a fantasy family the murdered man formed online,...
In rural Pakistan, little Rani is sure that her mother loves Bibi, the pet chicken, more than she loves Rani. Rani even secretly threatens to eat the chicken. But when Bibi disappears, and Rani...
An energetic little girl spends a delightful day with her father, frolicking through the neighborhood playground, landing softly in the safe embrace of Daddy’s hug.
Review: "New and Notable Books," AsianWeek, March 31, 2005
Readers: Children
Published:...
Undoubtedly, this 29-year-old author can write. His story is a little too convoluted, but it’s well worth the read. Gabriel Guttman (in German, ‘Gutmann’ is literally “good man”), a grisled Korean War veteran...
The Best Wake-up Call of All
Calls coming in at 4:26 a.m. don’t usually make most people just jump up and down and scream for joy. But Cynthia Kadohata, still half-asleep in her Los Angeles home, had...
With all the endless shelves of parenting titles, why not tout one that champions Asian influences? One major diversion, however, from traditional discipline tactics attributed to Confucius: While...
Talk about bad first impression: Reading the jacket cover description with the glaring spelling error, “Shitimachi” (what does that sound like?!) instead of the correct “Shitamachi” (which literally means ‘below-town’ or more...
From the author of Red Sorghum comes a monumental novel that follows 20th-century China through the lives of the eponymous woman and her nine children, none of them...
Through three generations of strong, independent women, Ariyoshi captures and conveys the tumultuous period of Japan from the stratified, socially constrictive end of the 19th century to the modern postwar era of the 20th.
Review:...
Genius Han Ong: The Outsider American
Han Ong, who made international headlines as one of the MacArthur Foundation’s elite Genius Grant recipients of 1997, refers to his second novel, The Disinherited, as his “imagined homecoming”...
Joyce Carol Oates’ Scariest People: The world premiere of The Tattooed Girl at Theater J
“People think I’m prolific,” laughs Joyce Carol Oates, “but actually I work long hours and I’m very patient and fastidious.”...
A haunting, lovingly illustrated story, told from the point of view of a basket that serves three generations of a Nepali family. As the basket's frail, aged owner is about to be left on...
