Patty Takeda moves in with her mother for the two weeks before her wedding. On the third day in her old room, she's woken by the sound of the doorbell, and is alarmed to hear her mother Lucy use the word "Inspector." Just a few blocks...
Anne Frank, the world's most famous hidden child during the Holocaust, was one of 28,000 Jews in the Netherlands alone who went into hiding. She was one of 12,000 who were betrayed and didn't survive. Among the 16,000 who lived, was award-winning filmmaker and cameraman...
As in my post for Beirut’s preceding, award-winning companion title, A Game for Swallows, I find I need to start at book's end. "I remember Georges Perec!" the final image announces. Initially seeming to be unrelated to the rest of the book, the unexpected homage to the experimental...
Although Fridays are predominantly reserved for manga, I thought July Fourth trumped the usual today. Kirby Larson’s Hattie Big Sky, a 2007 Newbery Honor title, examines American patriotism from a perspective I can't remember encountering before in fiction. While the target audience is younger readers, surely adults...
Not quite a teenager, Poni loses her 12-year-old best friend in violent increments: to too-early forced marriage, three failed suicide attempts, and finally to childbirth long before her natural time. Poni – and her fiercely supportive mother – are determined that Poni will somehow stay in school...
Some time in the recent past, a video link came through that began with birthday wishes for Anne Frank, as if she had miraculously survived the Holocaust and lived many fulfilling decades. [I can't seem to find the link again, so if anyone recognizes the description...
Canadian lawyer/author Jennifer Gold’s debut novel starts with such promise: a contemporary teenager's discovery of the eponymous "soldier doll" is interwoven with the doll's near-century-long journey from Europe to the U.S. to Vietnam, landing in a garage sale in Toronto to be bargained for a mere...
Okay, I confess the cover put me off from opening the book for months (well, actually, years); I recently compromised by choosing to go aural and was surprisingly delighted to spend almost eight hours with narrators Laural Merlington and Emily Durante (who take turns reading as mother and...
As sensational as Hollow City is, Ransom Riggs' latest novel most definitely is not a standalone. Take that "The second novel of ...
Please correct me if I'm wrong here: The Japanese American imprisonment has been the focus of many, many titles for audiences of all ages, via fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, plays, graphic titles, picture books, and more, but I believe Mariko Nagai's Dust of Eden...
Almost two years after Vaddey Ratner made her New York Times bestselling debut with In the Shadow of the Banyan – her fictionalized account of her survival, as a young child, of the Khmer Rouge genocide that took most of her family along with some two million others...
"To transform suffering into art": Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan While the Vietnam War ended for the United States with the April 1975 military withdrawal, death and destruction continued, moving into neighboring Cambodia and Laos. With the evacuation of U.S. troops, the Communist...
Confession first: I took almost two years to finish this debut novel. Not until an interview deadline loomed (stay tuned!) could I force myself to keep turning the pages until I reached the end. Because I just couldn't let the book go. As wrenching and...
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"'Who is Malala?'" the gunman demanded on that fateful day, October 9, 2012, before he shot three bullets into a bus carrying teenage girls to school. Unable to answer then, Malala answers now in her new memoir for all the world to read: "I am...
Every once in a while, only the very best schmaltz will do. Earnest and endearing, this just-arriving-in-translation sequel to the international mega-bestseller, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, is a through-the-night read that will leave you sighing and swooning. Okay, so we're not talking Nobel-quality: "'I speak of a...
*STARRED REVIEW What is most haunting in Kupersmith's nine multi-layered pieces are not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured by the still living. With an American father and a Vietnamese "former boat refugee" mother, the...
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...
'Sprawling' barely begins to describe journalist/editor Leslie Helm's ambitious family history that spans nearly a century-and-a-half, three continents, and the titular five generations of a German Japanese American family with current branches spread throughout the rest of the world. Prompted by the death of his difficult...
Well, I seem to be totally out of order here: so I read The City of Death (Book 2) first because I had a judging deadline, then backpedaled to catch up by sticking this Fortress (Book 1) in the ears (Bruce Mann narrates well enough, although I...
