This is a humorous and emotional saga of a Vietnamese family in America. Though not a perfect book for me, I expect this book will resonate quite a bit with those who are mothers and who are Vietnamese-American. Generations ago, the family is cursed because a woman runs off with a man who isn’t her…
I appreciate books that are hard to categorize because they cross genres. Not surprisingly, this debut novel by Blitz Bazawule, a musician, artist, and filmmaker, does exactly that. The Scent of Burnt Flowers tells the story of a young Black couple, Melvin and Bernadette, who flee the United States in 1966, after a violent altercation with…
This year I’m joining in the fun at Wyrd & Wonder, a month long celebration of all things fantasy. Part of this event is that every Sunday, the hosts at There’s Always Room For One More, A Dance With Books , Dear Geek Place, The Book Nook, and Jorie Loves A Story post a Fantastic Five list. This…
This book combined a lot of things I love about Jasmine Guillory, and a few things I didn’t love so much. Isabelle is a likeable character, sympathetic and fairly well-developed. She works as an assistant in a publishing house, and I found the description of the work fascinating. Izzy actually gets to coach, prod, and…
This is the kind of historical novel I love – it’s a decades-spanning family saga that builds on the author’s own family history. In this debut novel, Fu tells a story that parallels that of her father, who is born in China during the Japanese War of Aggression in the 1940s and the Chinese Civil…
Mediocre is a book about racism and sexism in America, and like Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, it’s written in an accessible, personal manner. This one is more a discussion of U.S. history, similar to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, though I found the book most powerful when she was talking about her own…
Before the Ever After is a beautifully written middle-grade novel about a 12-year-old boy whose father, a professional football player, is suffering from CTE. The book occurs in a time before anything was widely known about CTE and its effects on many athletes. Zachariah, or ZJ, is in the dark about what’s happening to his father, and…
This is my second novel by Lisa See, and I felt they were similar in a lot of ways. Both Island of Sea Women and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane are slow-paced multigenerational family dramas, that cover a primary character from childhood to old age. Both concentrate a great deal on history and culture. Both involve…
I don’t always read as many books from other countries as I’d like, and I often find reading translated works challenging. This summer and fall I read quite a few books set in other countries, so I wanted to share these mini-reviews. I try to read books that are by authors that are from those…
O Beautiful is a story about America – a specific part of America, but it reflects attitudes and issues found nationwide. So it’s fitting that there’s a lot going on in this novel. Maybe a bit too much at times, but it definitely held my interest. Elinor is a Korean-American in her early forties, previously a…
I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I almost didn’t finish it. But my book club had so many good things to say about it, I persevered — though I ended up with mixed feelings. The story is about Nahr, a woman living in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. She…
This book is Pan’s memoir of a year when she decided to challenge herself to live like an extrovert. She explains that there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, only she’s an excessively shy one (a “shintrovert” as she calls herself), which means she’s probably missing out on friendships and career opportunities by not engaging…
The Book Stop 