Category: Diverse Reads

Review: Pod by Laline Paull

If you loved Paull’s The Bees, you’ll probably love this one too. It’s not an easy read, for a couple of reasons.  One is that, like The Bees, you have to really get into the mindset of the ocean creatures in this book. There’s a fair amount of unfamiliar terminology, sometimes related to the biological functioning…

Review: What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez

I don’t think this is a perfect book, but I loved this story about a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island, New York. I found it a fantastic and moving first novel. The story revolves around the disappearance of Ruthy Ramirez, age 13, who never comes home after track practice. Ruthy’s mother, her older sister…

Review: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I’m so glad that Moreno-Garcia’s publisher is going back and reissuing her earliest books, because both this and Certain Dark Things were fantastic. I wasn’t sure I’d like this one – the backdrop of 80’s music didn’t appeal to me much. I wasn’t expecting this book to bring me right back to what it felt like…

Review: The Last Girl by Nadia Murad

This isn’t really a review because this is the kind of book that’s nearly impossible to review. It was impressive, inspiring, devastating, and informative. Nadia Murad grew up in the village of Kocho in Northern Iraq, in a small community of Yazidi, an ancient religion and ethnic minority. She describes the persecution of the Yazidi…

Review: Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

I picked up this book on the recommendation of Modern Mrs. Darcy, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a moving story of a young black nurse in the 1970s, about a real-life class action suit to address the coerced or forced sterilizations of young women of color in hospitals and institutions across the United States. Civil…

Review: The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh

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…

Review: The Scent of Burnt Flowers by Blitz Bazawule

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…

Review: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory

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…

Review: Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

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…