This Ramadan, neither Malak nor her Teta will be fasting—Malak’s too young, and Teta’s on a new medication. So they decide to find another way to make the holy month special. Malak asks her grandmother to show her how to prepare iftar, the meal eaten to break the fast each evening. But what to cook? […]
Chapman worked in cattle, oil, trucking, and mining before getting into the real estate finance business, rising to the top of that industry despite refusing to change his redneck persona (on his book’s cover, the author sports a trucker cap, braided beard, and camouflage) one iota. This volume is anything but the standard business guide; […]
Twelve-year-old Mei Mei is barred from attending public school with white children in San Francisco; instead, she attends a Chinese school. Her parents are indebted to brokers who paid for their passage to America, and now they’re threatening to take Mei Mei. For her safety, Ma Ma and Ba Ba reluctantly send her hundreds of […]
Ever since Emlyn accidentally opened connections between the spheres in the series opener, she’s known she’d have to be the one to put things back to rights. This is no easy task for her and her Novem because one of their members, Laramie, is missing in the storyworlds. Laramie is accompanied by Frank, an injured […]
The titular first essay is a perfect way into this almost dauntingly intelligent book, employing a few of the author’s signature gambits to winning effect. There are 13 numbered sections: How To Disappear, Ways To Disappear, What They Will Say, People Who Disappeared, Why You Are Not Famous, and so forth. Each of these is […]
No sooner does 10-year-old Tick spot the black sails of the offshore Drenish fleet than he knows it’s time to ride for King’s Keep, the mountain fortress that has always protected the people of Ellia from invaders. On a mission that turns extra urgent after he discovers evidence of a traitor at the Keep, he […]
People are ticked off these days, observe Culpepper and Lee, with “enormous wellsprings of pent-up democratic pressure just looking for a way to get out.” As their narrative opens, they examine a predecessor event that uncorked similar pressure: namely, the reaction against the meat industry when, in 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, documented the […]
After her boyfriend Carter’s funeral, art student Nieve Monroe drifts through a summer steeped in guilt and tinged with emotionally resonant colors. Raised by her superstitious maternal grandmother, Grandee, whose mystical sayings once felt foolish, Nieve now sees meaning in every hue: black for loss, red for love, indigo for goodbye. When she returns to […]
Following an instructional introduction about how to navigate the winding panels of this graphic novel, readers assume the perspective of an infant in 1798 Nagoya, Japan. The baby’s father tells him to decide between two objects; humorously, both lead to a life devoted to revenge. Years pass, and the young boy must choose whether to […]
The story begins, “Suddenly the lights went out”—and readers are plunged into the dark of night. The first-person narrator gathers the courage to ask their girl companion questions: “Don’t you think there’s something really beautiful about people?” “What do you think can fit in a person’s heart?” The conversation between the two ebbs and flows, […]