Eighteen days is all it takes for the (d)evolution of a marriage in YZ Chin’s debut novel. Edwina and Marlin are green-card-seeking Malaysian transplants to New York City. She’s a quality-assurance analyst (and only woman) at AInstein, where she works on joke-telling robots. He’s a...
Sociology scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs double debuts as author and narrator in her empowering examination of three mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little, who “have been almost entirely ignored throughout history,” although their sons are renowned: Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and...
Maxine Beneba Clarke: Uplifting Black Lives Matter Around the World Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Afro-Caribbean Australian author/artist who creates across genres and audiences: adult fiction, nonfiction, memoir and children's books. Her award-winning titles are steadily migrating to the United States, including her second picture book...
"Little one," two Black parents address the baby in their arms, "when we say Black Lives Matter, we're saying Black people are wonderful-strong." Award-winning Australian author/illustrator Maxine Beneba Clarke's opening sentence visually accentuates the phrase "wonderful-strong," distinguishing the lettering with yellow-orange color and gradually increasing...
Introduced in Jasmin Kaur’s debut, When You Ask Me Where I’m Going, mother Kiran and daughter Sahaara return in this timely hybrid prose/verse novel that deftly addresses the perils of being undocumented and surviving sexual assault. Kiran enters Canada from India on a student visa, already...
Making her solo audiobook debut, Richa Moorjani affectingly channels Zara Hossain, a Corpus Christi, TX, high school senior who stands up to Tyler Benson, the school’s football star who’s also a racist bully. After Zara refuses to stay silent while Tyler and his cronies hassle...
Former UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli's startling Disquiet requires multi-layered engagement: to appreciate it as a penetrating novel about a Turkish family confronting murder and to acknowledge it as intense sociopolitical testimony of contemporary, too-little-known, ISIL-led (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) genocide of the...
The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...
Dhaka-born, Harvard PhD-ed, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam has won prestigious accolades for her Bengal trilogy into which she’s lyrically woven Bangladeshi history with personal inspiration. She turns utterly contemporary in her newest novel, which reads rather like an elevated, fictional version of Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley...
*STARRED REVIEW The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang's magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC's 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire's 2020 Books of the Year). Wang's seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing...
Everyone and every place remain assuredly familiar here: Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Jordan, Myrtle and George drink, dance, manipulate and die throughout East Egg, West Egg, Nick's cottage, Gatsby's mansion, the Plaza suite, and the green-lit dock. But Nghi Vo's first novel (after novellas The...
*STARRED REVIEW That the protagonist's name is Francisco Goldberg – an amalgam of maternal Guatemalan immigrant and paternal Jewish parentage – presents an irresistible invitation to explore autobiographical overlaps with award-winning creator Francisco Goldman. The parallels are immediate: both are peripatetic journalist/writers with connections to Boston,...
On June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Chinese American Vincent Chin was bludgeoned with a baseball bat by Ronald Ebens and stepson Michael Nitz. The two white men, like too many others, were driven by anti-Asian resentment over Detroit's declining auto industry due to Japanese competition. "It's...
Warning: the number of corpses could actually exceed the page count in Tom Lin's addictively gruesome debut, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Set between the Utah Territories and California in the late 1800s, Lin's novel manages to enhance a wild, wild western with Odyssean devotion, magic...
*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prized NYT editor/journalist Jia Lynn Yang makes history intimately personal: “This book is an attempt to fuse my family’s history to the history of the country that found a place for us ...
Let’s just agree that Casandra Campbell is not fluent in any Asian languages – which makes her an odd (mis)casting choice for a title set mostly in Tibet, populated by mostly Tibetan characters. That said, lauded journalist Barbara Demick’s extraordinary latest is a book to...
April is National Poetry Month. Of course, reading, writing, and performing poetry can and should be done any time of the year, but April encourages newbies and doubters to give verses a try. Audiobooks are a particularly effective medium for poetry, with well-chosen narrators enhancing and...
"I Write for Black Women" Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, won the 2017 Whiting Award and was among the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts...
*STARRED REVIEW Kaitlyn Greenidge wowed the literary world with her disturbingly delightful debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman; her follow-up, Libertie, shows no hints of sophomore slump. Inspired by Susan Smith McKinney Steward, New York's first Black female doctor (and the third U.S. Black woman...
Narrators Roxana Ortega and Christian Barillas resume the high-octane energy of the Zapata siblings introduced in Francisco X. Stork’s heart-thumping Disappeared. Separated after surviving the treacherous crossing over the U.S. border, former journalist Sara remains imprisoned in the Fort Stockton Detention Center, while teen Emiliano...
