Sixteen years ago, a pregnant woman walking the hospital halls found a lottery ticket on the floor. The ticket proved quite the winner, enabling the new mother – and her three co-parents – to "buy a big house to fill with lots more kids, and...
River Dean, 17, is not a bad kid: he's got warm relationships with his family (except his runaway dad), does well at school, and has good friends. But when Penny, the love of his life, dumps him, River starts making awful decisions, starting with stumbling...
Twelve-year-old Reena's outburst during a family conversation about parental careers, geography, and the future "ten years from now" catapults the family from a city of monuments, subways, and museums and lands them in rural Maine. Her expectations of her new home include lobsters, blueberries, beaches,...
*STARRED REVIEW A mother, Soledad, flees Cuba, abandoning her revolutionary husband Uxmal and absconding with their 12-year-old twins Ulises and Isabel. She bypasses Miami for Hartford, CT, finding work as a court stenographer, making her the transcriber of other people's words. Although Uxmal’s presence never seems to...
*STARRED REVIEW A decade after her international best-selling debut, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Min Jin Lee’s follow-up is an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared...
*STARRED REVIEW August, an Ivy League-pedigreed, peripatetic anthropologist who studies death in the farthest reaches of the world, returns home to Brooklyn to bury her father. A chance subway meeting with a childhood friend plunges August back into memories of another Brooklyn of the 1970s, when...
The Avalon Family Residence might sound nice, but it's not: "peeling paint, cockroaches…our tiny room." Dèja, her parents, and her two younger siblings are homeless, currently staying in a Brooklyn shelter. Her father can't work, and her exhausted mother is menially employed. As Dèja starts fifth...
*STARRED REVIEW Yan Lianke's latest translated-into-English title offers multiple rewarding options. As straightforward narrative, it follows the astounding transformation of Explosion, a rural mountain village, into a "megalopolis" through the entangled lives of the Kong family's four sons – a teacher, a politician, a soldier, and...
As explosive growth transforms 1970s South Korea into an international powerhouse, sociopolitical upheaval becomes unavoidable in daily life. Into the maelstrom of such spectacular change, first-novelist Grace Yoojin Wuertz – Seoul-born, U.S.-raised, Yale- and NYU-degreed – drops two women onto the elite campus of Seoul...
Talking about families can sometimes be daunting for kids, especially when you can't check off those expected, so-called "traditional" boxes on who's who of your bestest loved ones. Sitting in her classroom discussing "what we thought made our family special," one little girl is not...
When Rashomon won the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion in September 1950, the world embraced its director, Akira Kurosawa (1910–98), who quickly gained unrivaled prominence – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are a few of his self-declared disciples. Convinced “that Westerners...
*STARRED REVIEW Jason Reynolds makes his middle-grade debut with a multigenerational story featuring two Brooklyn brothers sent to stay temporarily with grandparents in rural Virginia. While their parents take some time to salvage their fraying relationship, 11-year-old Genie and his almost 14-year-old brother, Ernie, are expected...
Some time, somewhere, Little Town and Old Country are separated by borders and bombs. If Little Town is said to be filthy, broke, and run by ragtag criminals, Old Country is conformist, rich, and militaristic. Almost 15, cautious Little Towner Charlie Law stays relatively safe...
As today’s most prominent transgender teen, Jennings stepped into the national spotlight in 2007 at the age of 6 in a televised interview with Barbara Walters. In the almost-decade since, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – psychology/psychiatry’s bible for identifying mental disorders...
*STARRED REVIEW Samuel, almost 13, and his younger brother Joshua are orphans but born free and growing up educated. During the Civil War’s final year, Samuel takes the blame for mischief that he’s convinced that Joshua committed, and finds himself betrayed by the priest who has...
Benny’s father endures long-lasting effects when he suffers a brain aneurysm. Benny’s life was already tough: his brother George, who has autism, requires special attention; Benny’s best friend moved away, and making new friends hasn’t been easy. Now with his father’s recovery uncertain, the whole...
At 4, Mawi Asgedom fled the civil war cleaving Eritrea and Ethiopia, spending three years in a Sudanese refugee camp. In 1983, assisted by World Relief, the family settled in a Chicago suburb. Their new life wasn't easy: Asgedom's father, once a respected community leader and...
In a tiny Indian village, Anil and Leena are constant childhood companions in spite of their vastly different backgrounds. Anil, a member of the farming community's most important family, is destined for a prestigious medical residency in Dallas. Leena, the only daughter of a modest...
