A Song for Cambodia by Michelle Lord, illustrated by Shino Arihara [in Bloomsbury Review]
01 May, by in Biography, Cambodian, Cambodian American, Children/Picture Books, Nonfiction, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American
Arn Chorn-Pond was just 8 years old when he was torn from his family in 1975 as the Khmer Rouge invaded Cambodia. He survives years of unimaginable atrocities with only rare moments of music to soothe...
A spectacular book-without-words that traces one family’s immigration story with brilliant imagination. In an unnamed troubled land, a man leaves his wife and young daughter behind in search of freedom in a new country. His adjustments...
Two young urchins, Black and White, run the streets of Treasure Town, a decaying urban playground of violence and destruction. Because they have superhuman abilities, even the local police and the yakuza (Japan’s criminal underworld) can’t...
A deserved Booker 2007 shortlister, Hamid’s slim, powerful title is a deconstruction of the failure of the American Dream for those who look like the enemy. Changez is a young, accomplished Pakistani transplant with a Princeton...
Already a runaway bestseller in Vietnam, this diary will break your heart – but offer you hope that in the worst of times, we human beings can be miraculously humane.
As a young doctor working for communist...
Here’s an inventive new manga series, this one by a woman. It's set in the future when humans have all but destroyed planet Earth. Those who have survived the collapse have created the era of...
Considered to be one of the great writers of 20th-century China since she hit the literary scene in the 1940s with a mighty bang, Chang died in obscurity in Los Angeles in 1995. Recently rediscovered thanks...
This single-story novella, to be released simultaneously with the eponymous film by Ang Lee, was undoubtedly inspired by Chang’s own relationship with a Japanese collaborator during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and Hong Kong. As part...
An expansive, statistics-filled look at why 600,000 to a million North Koreans died in the mid-1990s during one of the worst famines of the 20th-century. In spite of so-called government reforms and the push for growing...
Marjane Satrapi on the "Axis of Evil," Cheese, and Exploring Family History
Marjane Satrapi changed my reading life. Before I picked up 
War – the worst of man-made disasters – throughout the ages is captured in verse from the young child’s point of view. A wake-up call for the safety of children everywhere.
Review: "TBR's Contributing Editors' Favorite Reads...
While her husband Da Chen writes sweeping literary historical sagas, newcomer Sunny offers a contemporary entertaining tale of young Mona Lisa who discovers she has latent super-powers. Turns out our heroine is actually half-Monère, an ancient...
A few cheesy, overwritten scenes aside, this is one stunning debut novel that will make you weak in the knees. Sam Hamada, U.S.-born but raised in Japan, arrives at age 9 in Hawai‘i in 1930 to...
Clara Breed, a children’s librarian at the San Diego Public Library, proved to be a staunch supporter and enduring friend to a group of young Japanese American students who were forced to leave their homes and...
With their loved ones incarcerated behind barbed wire in internment camps, the segregated, all-Japanese American 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, led by Korean American Col. Young Oak Kim who recently passed away, became the most decorated...
Originally published in 1951, the final novel from Hayashi – undoubtedly one of Japan’s most important women writers of the 20th century – traces a tormented, destructive love affair. When they meet, Yukiko and Tomioka are...
After Pearl Harbor is bombed, every little thing changes for 12-year-old Sumiko, who lives on her aunt and uncle’s flower farm in California with her brother and cousins. Even though she’s an American, Sumiko and her...
The return in a new paperback edition of the second of a resonating historical trilogy that follows the young life of Adam Pelko. In A Boy at War, Adam is a high school student who experiences...
