“The buildings of the Sea are made of time,” Lina’s father, Wui Shin, says. “I knew that he was pulling my leg and also that he was being truthful,” she tells readers from a vantage point 50 years on. Time is mutable in Thien’s adventurous fourth novel: Helpful neighbors Bento, Blucher, and Jupiter have names […]
The author suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Mr. Jay, a next-door neighbor and trusted family friend. The assaults began before the Hettes started kindergarten and continued for years. The psychological fallout from such “capital-T Trauma” was profound—as an adult, the author became a relentless workaholic, precluding genuine intimacy or authentic friendship with others. […]
The author returns to the world of anthropomorphic animals, this time in a transcontinental adventure that explores what it means to be human—even for members of other species. The story opens in an unnamed African village on the banks of the Sillibilli River, where a family of crocodiles, led by the very large Mr. Crocodile, […]
Canales spotlights 10 distinct historical events or periods, among them the Greek Olympics, Tang-era China, the Inca state, and the French Revolution. Each spread depicts a crowd of people; at the bottom of the spread, the author lists four groups of people (for the Edo era, for instance, samurai, geishas, kabuki actors, and firefighters; for […]
Thirty years ago, Dani Duprie, having spotted an unknown woman giving her the once-over, persuaded her husband, Bill, to pack up their 10-year-old daughter and pull up stakes yet again for an undisclosed but very urgent reason. The mysterious circumstances of their departure from the Cliff House still have the locals buzzing, but the buzz […]
Aulkendale City, known as “the Sore of the Southern Continent,” is home to drinking establishments, wealthy nobles, and a red tent community of vagrants and outcasts. Phyllis, who later goes by Phillip, has an uncanny, unexplained ability to snatch people’s body parts without killing them. The angsty 17-year-old usually runs around with Lucent, a nearly-400-year-old […]
Poor Sloth! Blown about by rough winds, she tumbles from her leafy home and hurts her toe. Luckily, a helpful, brown-skinned human comes to her aid. The story is told entirely in three-word rhyming sentences. The sloth’s dramatic descent is summed up with a “Blow, sloth, blow” and “Whoa, sloth, whoa!” “Oh, sloth, oh! Your […]
“Medicine is increasingly a retail prospect.” Health journalist Larocca realizes as much when visiting a New York doctor whose clinic now “looks like somewhere you’d go with a group of girlfriends for brunch.” Underscore “girlfriends,” for Larocca focuses on the health and wellness experiences of women—not just “today’s ideal woman…hopped up on her plant-based diet […]
Delicate watercolor and colored pencil illustrations depict a view of an initially quiet Korean town, while clever second-person text directly addresses readers and the protagonist: “Wake up, Eunny! It’s a beautiful, blue sky morning.” With a gentleness that matches her soft yet precise artwork, Kim invites readers to participate in Eunny’s activities (“Can you hear […]
As the book opens, the brown-skinned, dark-haired youngsters explain that “in the summer, the sun rises between buildings on our block to greet us at breakfast and it beats warmer and brighter when we venture out across steamy city sidewalks.” At noon, relief arrives as the children gleefully run through the water sprayed by a […]