Above all else, Janie is a survivor. She escaped the horrifying deaths that took her entire family in her native Cambodia. She's outlived her adoptive Canadian mother who passed away just last year. She's built a fulfilling career as a scientist specializing in brain research. She's...
Introduced to U.S. readers by award-winning Canadian author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch in last year's Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War, Son Thi Ahn Tuyet's story continues – literally one step at a time. Now that Tuyet has a real home with her own real family – Dad, Mom, sisters Beth and...
Small-town Maine, where Elizabeth Strout was born and raised, has been home to her four novels. In her first title since she won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for her novel-in-13-stories, Olive Kitteridge, Strout returns to tiny Shirley Falls where she set her acclaimed, chilling debut, Amy and Isabelle. This time, in The Burgess...
In Susan Conley's debut novel defined by deep relationships, the most intriguing alliances get neglected and overlooked for the more commonplace and predictable. Willow – called Willie – moves to Paris to be closer to her peripatetic brother Luke who was most recently in China bringing safe...
I admit I had a few false starts before I finally settled into Patricia McCormick's latest, which was a 2012 National Book Award finalist for Young People's Literature. Based on the horrifying experiences of Cambodian activist/humanitarian Arn Chorn-Pond’s childhood survival during the brutal Khmer Rouge control...
Raised as a Roman Catholic convinced of at least one past life as a Jewish grandmother, I find myself in my old age utterly wary of institutionalized religions, repeatedly alarmed at what we human beings commit upon one another in the name of various (one-and-only)...
Although published a quarter century apart, these are two books that tell a single tears-of-joy-inducing family story. If chronology is important, you might read Patricia Polacco's multi-generational family epic out of publication order – that is, Blessing Cup (out this year) first, and then Keeping Quilt (which debuted in...
Although the cover bears the designation, "A Novel," Enaiatollah Akbari – whose name also appears on said cover (who is not the book's author, Fabio Geda) – is a real person. A kid, really. In case you need a face to place with the name, the back...
Almost a quarter century has passed since two French brothers – in their early 20s at the time – decided to visit their Aunt Thérèse in Lebanon. In September 1990, the country is a 15-year-old war zone, but the brothers plan to deliver supplies, medicine, and a...
Kim Thúy is one tough writer to get to, although she declares in our first email exchange when I finally track her down, “I am not at all the kind who plays hard to get :-) .” Attempts to contact her included pleas to both her...
Kim Thúy’s Ru: An Apple for the Reader Ah, well . . . better start with true confessions: my words appear on the back cover of the U.S. edition (at least the first printing) of Vietnamese Canadian author Kim Thúy’s debut novel, Ru. The blurb is...
"We are on our way to Budapest," 10-year-old Darling announces as NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2013 Booker longlisted debut novel opens. 'We' includes "Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina," banded together with plans to steal guavas as they sneak out of Paradise, the ironically named...
Even before Naomi Benaron's debut novel hit shelves last year, it earned a substantial literary gold sticker as the winner of the biennial 2010 Bellwether Prize – the largest monetary award for unpublished fiction in North America, which was rebranded in 2011 as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially...
Please allow me to share a so-called North Korean political joke: “Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin ...
Bestselling Canadian anti-war activist Deborah Ellis’s four nonfiction titles (thus far) for younger readers should be bundled together and sent to every policymaker throughout the world. Two of those four, Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War and Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, give voice to children living...
Joel Pickford's titular journey took him through an 8,000-mile trek to some of the most remote villages in Laos, five years of interviewing Hmong refugees, and five years of reading Hmong history and ethnography. The result is a gorgeous, startling, intimate portrait of an ethnic...
Zoya was just a year old when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. By age 4, she made a Russian woman soldier cry when she refused to accept her proffered chocolate. She was raised mostly by her devout grandmother, while both parents worked to...
Mega-award-winning author Deborah Ellis’s active interest in Afghanistan began in 1996 when she heard about the Taliban takeover of that country "and the crimes they perpetrated against women and girls." She became involved with the Afghan communities in her native Canada, then traveled to meet...
* STARRED REVIEW The recipient of international accolades – including Canada’s coveted Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction (2010) for its original Canadian debut in French – this extraordinary first novel unfolds like ethereal poetry. The enigmatic title means “a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge—of...
April is National Poetry Month. Every once in a long while, even a poetry-dullard like me has a poetic WOW!-moment. Certainly I'm not alone ...
