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FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl

A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

I Leave It Up to You

You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
FictionFamily DramaComing of Age

Red Dog Farm

A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
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FictionFamily Drama

Paper Names

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Tony Zhang has always been willing to do what is necessary in his pursuit of a better life. He left his fishing village in China, seeking education and opportunities in the big city of Dalian, and found love along the way. In the early 1990s, he and his wife, Kim, lived comfortably, supported by his successful engineering career and her medical practice. But they dreamed of more—a TV, a refrigerator, a house, possibilities—so they left China and their careers for New York City.

As Tony and Kim’s daughter, Tammy, grows up, she struggles to understand her father, whose expectations feel impossibly high. Tony calculates how quickly Tammy can graduate college and then law school. He wants her to have access to the level of wealth displayed in the Rosewood, the upscale co-op on the Upper West Side where Tony works as a door attendant. But Tammy doesn’t know why her father has invested so much in a future she isn’t sure she wants.

Oliver is a 26-year-old white attorney who lives in the Rosewood. Eager to be seen as a good guy, the kind of person who knows his door attendant’s name, Oliver strikes up a friendship with Tony. After a dramatic incident in which a man tries to steal a Rosewood tenant’s purse, Tony becomes a hero, and Oliver devotes even more attention to him, quickly intertwining himself with the Zhang family. Tammy becomes Oliver’s protégé, first taking piano lessons from him and eventually following in his professional footsteps. 

In chapters that shift between Tony, Tammy and Oliver, charting their past and present motivations over the course of several decades, Paper Names explores how we’re shaped at the points where we intersect with others. While Tammy’s sections account for slightly less than a third of the book, her chapters are the only ones told from a first-person perspective, subtly communicating that the young woman’s life is the novel’s center. And although Tammy spends decades learning from both her father and Oliver, she retains blind spots about their lives—spaces where their stories move outside her view.

Debut novelist Susie Luo executes the jumps between her characters’ perspectives well, allowing the shifts to feel as natural as revisiting one’s own memories. This is a well-woven tale about the legacies that are passed down through generations, even when family members upend their lives in search of distance from one another.

Susie Luo’s debut novel is a well-woven tale about the legacies that are passed down through generations, even when family members upend their lives in search of distance from one another.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Collected Regrets of Clover

Review by Stephenie Harrison

For most, the term doula is associated with the process of childbirth and bringing new life into the world. However, beginning in the early 2000s, the death doula began to gain attention within American popular knowledge. These individuals perform a similar function to their birthing counterparts but instead focus on ushering people through the dying process and providing end-of-life support. Mikki Brammer’s gentle and uplifting debut novel, The Collected Regrets of Clover, takes readers into the fascinating world of one particularly memorable death doula and serves as a potent reminder that the secret to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life.

Clover Brooks has always had an affinity for death, having lost both her parents at the age of 6 and later deciding to pursue a graduate degree in thanatology, the scientific study of death and dying. When her beloved grandfather dies, Clover decides to pay tribute to him by working as a death doula to provide companionship to others during their final days. 

Part of Clover’s job involves recording her clients’ final words, which she catalogs in one of three private notebooks: Regrets, Advice or Confessions. Most people’s dying revelations tend to fall into the Regrets category, and if Clover were honest with herself, she has more than enough regrets to fill an entire notebook on her own. Perhaps her biggest is that she has spent so much time honoring the lives of others that she has forgotten how to live her own life to the fullest.

All this changes when she forms an unexpected connection with her latest client, an indomitable woman named Claudia. Clover finds herself on a cross-country trip with Claudia’s grandson, searching for Claudia’s secret lost love. Along the way, Clover questions whether she has the courage to truly start living on her own terms and begin whittling down her stack of regrets while she still has the chance.

Like all the best fiction that centers on death, The Collected Regrets of Clover inspires its readers to ask, in the spirit of Mary Oliver, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Although not subtle in its messaging, Brammer’s novel is a comforting exploration of grief, love and human connection that is sure to appeal to fans of books that feel like a warm hug, like The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman and Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes.

Mikki Brammer’s gentle and uplifting debut novel takes readers into the fascinating world of a death doula and serves as a potent reminder that the secret to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

The Covenant of Water

Review by Arlene McKanic

The second novel from Abraham Verghese, author of the unforgettable Cutting for Stone (2009), is a masterpiece. Put it on your bookcase next to A Passage to India by E.M. Forster or anything by the brave and brilliant Salman Rushdie. Indeed, put it next to any great novel of your choice.

Sprawling, passionate, tragic and comedic at turns, The Covenant of Water follows a family from 1900 to 1977 in an Indian region that eventually becomes the beautiful state of Kerala. Among the interesting things about this family is that they’re Christians among Hindus and Muslims, and once a generation, a family member dies by drowning. This tragic recurrence isn’t all that weird when you consider that their home is surrounded by water, and every year the region is all but washed away by the monsoon. Yet for this family, the drownings have taken on a near-mystical significance. Big Ammachi, the family matriarch, calls it the “Condition.”

Speaking of Big Ammachi, her story begins a few hours before her wedding. Normally a character’s wedding day wouldn’t fill the reader with dread, but in this case the bride is 12 years old. At this age she is known as Mariamma, and she is to marry a 40-year-old widowed landowner whom she’s never met. Though Mariamma’s mother is closer to this gentleman in age, she’s not eligible to marry him because she’s a widow, and a widow in this society is considered less than useless. Such is the dread hand of patriarchy in action.

But Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations, not just this time but again and again. The marriage of Mariamma and the thamb’ran—the boss—turns out to be a happy one. He is a gentle, stoic giant who scrupulously avoids bodies of water, even though it may take him days to walk to a place he could have reached in a few hours by boat. Mariamma and the thamb’ran’s young son, JoJo, adore each other, and it is he who gives her the nickname of Big Ammachi, which translates to “Big Little Mama.” The name sticks throughout her life. 

Big Ammachi’s first child is born with a thyroid condition, but instead of tragedy, Baby Mol’s life is one of light, joy and innocence. The second child, Philipose, born many years later, becomes the father of Big Ammachi’s namesake. This second Mariamma becomes a doctor determined to get to the bottom of the family’s Condition.

Verghese surrounds the family with a world of unforgettable characters. There’s Shamuel, the thamb’ran’s factotum, faithful till his last day. There’s the tragic and brilliant Elsie, Philipose’s artist wife, and the Glasgow-born surgeon Digby Kilgour, who’s come to India to practice medicine and who’s taken in by the saintly Dr. Rune Orqvist after a ghastly accident. There are the residents of the lazaretto (leprosy hospital) tended to by Dr. Orqvist, and an abundance of saints, scoundrels and people who are a little bit of both. There’s even an elephant named Damodaran.

All are interconnected, like the braiding waterways of Kerala. The Covenant of Water, as they say, is a lot. You won’t want it to end.

Abraham Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations again and again in his long awaited follow-up to Cutting for Stone.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The East Indian

Review by Sydney Hankin

Intrigued by both the memorable “Indian boy” of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the historical records of the first-known person from India to arrive in Colonial America, Brinda Charry draws on her academic expertise to craft her profound debut, The East Indian. Far from a light read, this novel is one of heartache and persistence, centering on a boy named Tony who is kidnapped and brought to Virginia as an indentured servant.

When a fortune teller tells Tony that he will “cross all the seas in the world and go to the place where the sun sets,” he has no idea how dramatically this prediction will come to reflect his life. Born on India’s Coromandel Coast, Tony is transported to London and eventually reaches Jamestown, Virginia. The novel is structured like an adventure tale, but Tony’s journey has been forced upon him and is marked by death and rape, described with disturbing vividness. Charry moves between conflicting outlooks: the hope and enjoyment of a boy discovering the world, and the darkly educational reality that surrounds him. In one sense, The East Indian is a quintessential story of finding oneself; in another, it’s a deeply emotional depiction of colonization and the brutality of daily life for people of color in early to mid-1600s Jamestown. The plot is engaging but slow moving, as Charry seems most keen on producing a historically accurate account of the customs and behavioral norms of this period. 

Tony’s wide-ranging experiences are at the heart of the novel, but supporting characters also contain nuance and depth. His relationships with friends and foes change and deepen in realistic (and sometimes stomach-churning) ways. Characters are frequently pulled apart, modeling the painful separations of family and friends that were so common for enslaved people and indentured servants, but they continually find pathways back to one another. And while encounters can sometimes feel contrived, the novel delivers genuinely sharp pangs as people move in and out of Tony’s life.

Few fictional narratives explore this era of American history and indentured servitude in the Colonies; Charry addresses this notable absence head-on, and her writing has a sophisticated elegance that aligns perfectly with the gravity of the novel’s contents. The result is a necessary and ultimately triumphant addition to the chronicles of American colonialism.

Few fictional narratives explore indentured servitude in Colonial America; Brinda Charry addresses this notable absence head-on, and her writing has a sophisticated elegance that aligns perfectly with the gravity of the novel’s contents.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Gifts

Review by Matthew Jackson

Acclaimed children’s author Liz Hyder’s first novel for adults has a richness of prose that immediately hooks readers and allows deep immersion within its strange world. Set in England in 1840, The Gifts is a remarkable, unpredictable tale of ambition, faith and survival, a blend of historical fiction and fantasy from a deft storyteller.

Unexpected magical occurrences cause the lives of four women to intertwine: distressed wife and artist Annie, renegade naturalist Etta, drifting seeker Natalya and aspiring writer Mary. As the story opens, a woman’s corpse is pulled from the Thames River, and from its back sprout what appear to be wings. This immediately attracts the eye of Annie’s husband, Edward, an ambitious surgeon frustrated by the brighter spotlight shone on his flashier colleagues. In this “fallen angel,” Edward sees his entire future in the form of a gift from God, and now he wants to get his hands on a living specimen. But at what cost does success come for Edward, and how does his relentless pursuit of notoriety and fortune change the lives of each of the four women?

Hyder’s novel unfolds through a series of short chapters that function like a sequence of character studies, each of which displays such a tight grasp on detail and emotional range that it could function as a short story. We learn so much through a single visit to Annie’s ornate house or Etta’s ramshackle country cabin. We glean tremendous depth from Mary’s sense of duty and how it conflicts with her own ambitions. Each of the women is so finely drawn that we’re immediately invested not just in their lives but also in the ways they see the world, and how their perspectives shift as the events of the novel start to fall into place. Once the magical elements kick in and wings begin to unfurl, Hyder’s gift for narrative propulsion blends with this character depth to create a sumptuous reading experience.

The Gifts is a remarkable, unpredictable tale of ambition, faith and survival, a blend of historical fiction and fantasy from a deft storyteller.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Humble Lover

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Love may be universal, but no one writes about love quite like Edmund White. The veteran author returns with The Humble Lover, an outrageous, tender novel that complicates contemporary ideas of what traditional, “appropriate” desires and relationships look like. 

Aldwych West is an aging elite who spends his money trying to woo the latest object of his affection, a ballerino (that’s the male form of ballerina) named August Dupond. Very quickly, the two men become entangled—emotionally, financially and physically. But Aldwych isn’t the only one with ambitions; his inheritance-hungry niece-in-law, Ernestine, also wants to win August over, even as the young man moves in with Aldwych. In this complicated web of desire and wealth, everyone chases ecstasy, no matter the cost. 

White has been pushing the boundaries of what love can be since the beginning of his career. With The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977, White (with co-author Charles Silverstein) helped to codify the sexual, psychological and spiritual pleasures of gay life. This holistic concept of pleasure is present as White plumbs the depths of Aldwych’s desires, detailing the man’s insecurity and loneliness—though of course, there are still thrilling moments that brim with sexuality, both inhibited and explicit. When Aldwych first invites August to stay with him, he restrains himself, and even though they are half-naked in the same bed, all they do is lie next to each other and sleep. When sex does appear on the page, it is ecstatic—tinged with, or perhaps enhanced by, the pain and hunger of uneven power dynamics.

The Humble Lover could be categorized as a political satire, but that would imply a target. Rather than going on a tirade, White forces readers to become intimate with what they might otherwise denounce. At first blush, Aldwych’s desperation is repulsive, particularly considering his vast wealth and the age gap between him and August, but the closer we get to Aldwych, the more relatable his misery is. He is searching for something, maybe youth, maybe affection, maybe acceptance, and White keeps his journey engaging, hilarious and moving throughout. 

As Ernestine clashes with Aldwych, and August defies Aldwych’s wishes, we become more and more invested, wondering which of these characters will finally get what they want. Filled with sublime descriptions of ballet and Aldwych’s out-of-touch, affluent sensibility, this novel is as mischievous as it is thought-provoking. It is Edmund White at his very best.

Mischievous as it is thought-provoking, The Humble Lover is Edmund White at his very best.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

The Last Animal

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Genetic engineering and mutations are a staple of fiction; think The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World or, more recently, Jurassic Park. Ramona Ausubel’s sparkling novel The Last Animal focuses on a young scientist’s impulsive attempt to revive an extinct species and the impact this has on her children, who are traumatized by the accidental death of their father. 

Graduate student Jane is the only female member of a scientific team working in the Arctic Circle, searching for traces of the wooly mammoth and hoping to reignite an ecosystem that could possibly reverse the effects of global warming. She is accompanied (begrudgingly) by her two teenage daughters, the fiery, sarcastic Eve and sweetly obedient Vera. The girls crave routine and stability, and they are fiercely protective of their mother as well as each other. 

Eve and Vera’s accidental discovery of a perfectly preserved baby mammoth in the Siberian permafrost brings a flurry of excitement. But once back at the University of California, Berkeley, Jane is still washing pipettes in the lab while research grants are handed out to her male colleagues. At a departmental fundraiser, Jane has a chance encounter with a glamorous woman named Helen, who has a palatial estate and home zoo in Italy, complete with giraffes and an elephant. This leads to Jane implanting a genetically modified embryo, based on the baby mammoth’s DNA, into Helen’s elephant. The next thing you know, Jane and her daughters are flying to Lake Como to meet an animal that’s been extinct for hundreds of years. 

The Last Animal whizzes around the planet—from the steppes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to a remote alpine village—with a dizzying, almost madcap speed, but at the novel’s heart are the deep ties between mother and daughters, sister and sister, human and animal. Though Jane, Eve and Vera are grieving, they never lose their sense of adventure and love of scientific discovery. Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.

Ramona Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

Review by Thane Tierney

Remember when you were a little kid, and adults seemed to be imbued with powers you couldn’t even imagine? Robby Andersen felt that way when, in 1947, his uncle came to visit with glorious, gory stories of using his flamethrower against the enemy in World War II’s Pacific theater. 

Fast forward about a quarter century, and Robby is illustrating underground “comix” inspired by his uncle’s wartime experiences, starring a sort of super-antihero called Firefall. The comic, published during the thick of the Vietnam War, garners a mixed reaction, as American military personnel were not universally revered. After a flurry of sales and hate letters in response to his creation, Robby and the rest of the world move on to other things.

In the present day, movie director Bill Johnson is casting about for his next film, and when he envisions an adaptation of the union of Robby’s superheroes, Firefall and Knightshade, it’s a marriage made in, well, Lone Butte, California. The fictional Lone Butte is the kind of small town that has come to symbolize the “real America,” a trope that Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks used to great effect in his 1996 directorial and screenwriting debut, That Thing You Do! Much like that film follows the arc of a pop band from college talent-show winners to chart-topping sensation, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece pulls its audience behind the velvet rope and into the production offices and soundstages where magic happens. 

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece audiobook cover
Read our review of the audiobook, narrated by Tom Hanks and a full cast.

As an army of “talent,” craftspeople and other workers descends on the hamlet of Lone Butte, readers are offered an unparalleled glimpse into the hurry-up-and-wait nature of filmmaking. Hanks lavishes praise on the largely unsung heroes who keep the machine running, from the gaffers to the makeup artists to the myriad of problem-solvers whose names you miss as you exit the theater. In fact, the story is almost as much about the metamorphosis of young Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz from cabbie to associate producer as it is about the main characters’ journeys.

Hanks’ familiarity with the filmmaking process and keen eye for detail make his first novel (with comic book panels illustrated by R. Sikoryak) a joy for anyone who loves the art of cinema. Hanks retains a childlike sense of wonder even as he moves among adults whose powers, like movies themselves, are just illusions that we will ourselves to believe.

Tom Hanks’ familiarity with the filmmaking process and keen eye for detail make this novel a joy for anyone who loves the art of cinema.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

The Skin and Its Girl

Review by Laura Sackton

Sarah Cypher’s debut novel is as much about storytelling as it is about the characters who inhabit it. A swirling multigenerational family epic, it’s about the power that stories hold over families and whole nations, and the mysterious ways that certain indelible narratives can supplant real memories. Through an unusual structure that bucks narrative convention, Cypher explores the blurry lines between storytelling and history, memory and identity, exile and home.

Born with blue skin into a diasporic Palestinian family, Betty Rummani grows up awash in stories. During the first years of her life, she is passed between family members: her scientist mother, who often buries herself in work; her white father, desperate to remake the three of them into a functioning family unit; and her great aunt Nuha, the true keeper of the family’s stories. 

Betty recounts this turbulent childhood many years later as an adult faced with a difficult decision: to stay in the city she knows, or to follow the woman she loves to a new country. Searching for clarity, she hungrily turns to the notebooks left behind by Nuha when she died, and begins to piece together the surprising story of her aunt’s life.

Though Betty narrates the novel in the first person, she often feels like a peripheral character. She slips into Nuha’s voice and life as if she were Nuha herself. The book is full of vivid scenes from before Betty’s birth and memories of Nuha’s life in Palestine. This unusual structure can feel a bit clunky at times, as Betty recounts not only events she never witnessed but also the associated complex emotional realities. But readers who can relax into this kind of magical storytelling will find it both whimsical and powerful.

Cypher’s prose has a softness to it and a melodic cadence. It often feels as if Betty is speaking directly to the reader, though when she breaks the fourth wall, she does so slyly, so quietly you’ll miss it if you blink. The story feels like it’s being untangled as it’s told, and this—along with subtle glimpses of almost-magic—provides the sense of mystery that permeates the book.

The Skin and Its Girl is an intriguing debut, a story within a story within a story, and a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.

Sarah Cypher’s first novel is a story within a story within a story, a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Three of Us

Review by Melissa Brown

The adage “two’s company, but three’s a crowd” rings awkwardly and painfully true in Ore Agbaje-Williams’ debut novel, The Three of Us, which examines the inner workings of both a friendship and a marriage. There’s hardly any unselfish love to be found in this triangle formed by a prickly husband, a chameleonic wife and a manipulative best friend. Be aware that the proverbial third wheel may not be who you’d expect.

In three distinct parts, each character describes their perspective on both the past and present moment. Over the course of a single day, the wife, husband and best friend drink up and face off, each presenting the truth as they each see it. Agbaje-Williams’ dark wit and wry observations keep it all interesting. She slowly and slyly builds the tension between her three characters until it fairly sparks off the page. 

The novel’s trajectory is foreshadowed early on by the wife (who is never named) as she notes that a fight between her husband (also unnamed) and best friend Temi isn’t out of the ordinary: “Usually those moments occur when an exorbitant amount of alcohol has been consumed.” The wife and Temi share a complex history and intimacy, and they both roll their eyes and laugh at the husband in equal measure. But that afternoon, Temi’s discovery of a pregnancy test in a bathroom trash can causes her to overreact, first comically and then calculatedly. The novel unfolds almost like a play as Temi and the husband exchange passive-aggressive (or outright aggressive) barbs within the confines of a posh house in a posh neighborhood. Society and culture and their conventions get skewered right alongside the characters. 

At fewer than 200 pages, The Three of Us makes for a quick and thought-provoking read that can elicit a cringe one minute and rueful laughter the next. The tightly wound plot drops a few revelations along the way, calling into question what the characters—and the reader—think they know. When two people vie for the attention of a third, who will win? How far will each go? Agbaje-Williams keeps readers wondering until the end.

At fewer than 200 pages, The Three of Us makes for a quick and thought-provoking read that can elicit a cringe one minute and rueful laughter the next.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Weeds

Review by Freya Sachs

The Roman Colosseum is full of wonders and history and secrets—and plants. Observing, cataloging and communicating with these plants is the heart of Katy Simpson Smith’s impressive novel, as the narrative connects two women across time who are both performing these archival acts. Set in 1854 and 2018, The Weeds  moves between the voices of these two women, interlocking their lives as they document the presence of (or absence of) plants. 

In 1854, a woman was caught stealing, and her misbehavior has led to her being indentured to English botanist Richard Deakin; he sends her into the Colosseum to catalog the flora and their uses. She also tells her own story and meditates on the ways that society impinges upon her selfhood. She speaks to her missing love, a woman who is off on a boat, now married to a man. In 2018, a woman has run from the entrapment of her life, but she finds herself newly hemmed in as she seeks the plants on Deakin’s list, makes notes, begrudges the presence of tourists and wonders what her next step might be. What will science, and her male adviser, allow? 

The novel moves in quick (and often blurry) shifts between these centuries and women. They mirror parts of each other; they both encounter violence at many turns and scales, and each reacts to the ways their voices and choices are constrained in their societies. The plants around them produce their own forms of tension and elements of violence; they are undoubtedly characters in their own right.

Just as the plants in the Colosseum ask of the women, The Weeds requests the reader to observe and look for connections, to question structures and patterns, and to discover new ways of seeing. Each detail is carefully attuned and revealed, and each seed opens at the moment it needs to bloom and stretch. Patience is necessary, but close attention reveals infinite rewards.

Read Katy Simpson Smith’s Behind the Book feature on The Weeds: “Women and unwanted plants have an uncomfortable amount in common.”

The Weeds requests the reader to observe and look for connections, to question structures and patterns, and to discover new ways of seeing.
FictionSatire

Yellowface

Review by Maya Fleischmann

“I’d hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn’t write based on the color of their skin.” R.F. Kuang, the award-winning, bestselling author of Babel and the Poppy War series, fans the discourse on diversity, racism and the “right” to tell certain stories with her novel Yellowface, a thought-provoking first-person narrative of a plagiarist.

June Hayward is a struggling 27-year-old straight white author, and as the novel begins, she’s getting drinks with Athena Liu, her Asian American friend whom she’s known since college, to celebrate yet another of Athena’s huge literary successes. However, when the picture-perfect Athena ends up dead, envious June makes a decision that leads her to stardom—and damnation. June edits her dead friend’s manuscript, a cultural saga set in China, and presents it as her own work under a pseudonym that uses her middle name, Song, as her surname.

Despite a few readers’ protestations of possible cultural appropriation, the book is a huge success, and June Song embraces her soaring status in the publishing world. But the questions around June’s authenticity and ethnicity keep getting louder, as more and more anonymous social media accounts wonder if June has the right to pen a story about Chinese culture. June’s followers revolt, and her star plummets. 

Book jacket image for Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Read our starred review of the audiobook, narrated by Helen Laser.

Kuang hooks readers from the first chapter with June’s preoccupation with Athena and the life-altering choice to steal her frenemy’s manuscript. June’s theft makes her an immediate antagonist, and her delusional entitlement makes her a compelling unreliable narrator. But exactly how unreliable is June? Kuang casts a light on this question with her adroit representation of June’s disloyal social media following, which lurches from commendation to castigation, and of a publishing world committed only to financial success. 

“I know what you’re thinking. Thief. Plagiarizer. And perhaps, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist. Hear me out. It’s not so awful as it sounds,” June assures the reader. Poignant and provocative, Yellowface is an in-your-face satirical novel with layered commentary on discrimination, social media and creative freedom. Kuang allows for numerous sides of our society’s heated conversations about cultural (mis)appropriation and censorship, and examines how judgment is so often clouded by perception rather than shaped by truths. This is a riveting read for fans of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong and George Orwell’s 1984. 

Poignant and provocative, Yellowface is an in-your-face satirical novel with layered commentary on discrimination, social media and creative freedom.
NonfictionFictionChildren's & YAPoetryPicture BookMemoirLiterary FictionHistorical FictionChildren's

5 books to read for AAPI Heritage Month

Feature by BookPage staff

How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

At a reading in 2022, I heard poet Jane Wong describe her obsession with time-lapse videos of rotting fruit. Her poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is full of the physicality of food, informed by Wong’s research into the Great Leap Forward, which was a stage of Mao Zedong’s reforms that led to the starvation of 36 million Chinese people. Wong’s great-grandparents died during the Great Leap Forward, and several poems ring with their voices. In others, the speaker reckons with the contrast between the relative abundance in her life—the apples “rotting on the ground,” an egg thrown onto pavement just to hear the “sumptuous splat”—and the false promises of the American dream for herself and her parents. Lucky for me, and you, Wong has a memoir coming out this month, so you can pick up Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City when you finish her breathtaking book of poetry.

—Phoebe, Subscriptions

A Burning

Megha Majumdar’s debut was one of the most important social novels of 2020—highly political, furiously propulsive and ruthlessly unsparing—but if you, like so many readers, spent that year sticking to lighter fare, now is the time to go back and see what you missed, because A Burning still hits hard. In contemporary India, a young woman named Jivan unthinkingly voices criticism of the government in a Facebook post, and she is immediately labeled a terrorist and sent to prison, where she awaits her trial. Two other main characters provide additional perspectives on these events: the luminous wannabe Bollywood star Lovely, a transgender woman who was learning English from Jivan; and PT Sir, Jivan’s resentful former gym teacher who gets involved in nationalist politics. Each character is ambitious in their own way, but within this world marked by the tyrannies of rampant corruption, racism, poverty and inequality, their fates are often outside their control, and the few choices available to them are murky at best. This novel is a short shock that leaves a lasting burn.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Eyes That Kiss in the Corners

Author Joanna Ho and illustrator Dung Ho each made their publishing debut in the first week of 2021 with Eyes That Kiss in the Corners, a radiant picture book that became an instant bestseller and launched both creators’ successful careers. To read it is to immediately understand why. Its first-person narrator is a girl who explores, via gorgeous, lyrical prose, how her eyes connect her to her mother, grandmother and little sister and to their shared heritage. Meanwhile, the book’s digital illustrations positively glow as every spread seems suffused with sunshine. Read this aloud to savor similes such as “my lashes curve like the swords of warriors”; then read it again and pay special attention to how the characters in every spread look at one another. You’ll see one of the most moving renderings of love made visible on the page that I’ve ever encountered. 

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Speak, Okinawa

Elizabeth Miki Brina’s form-bending memoir starts with her personal history—contending with her mother’s alcoholism as a child, feeling ashamed of her Japanese heritage in her predominately white hometown, expanding her horizons on the West Coast as a young adult—and spirals out to engulf not only her parents’ story bu also the history of Okinawa, the island in Japan where her mother grew up before meeting Brina’s father, a white American stationed there during the Vietnam War. After years of conflict with her mother, Brina found compassion as an adult for the trauma her mother experienced when she left her homeland for a culturally and linguistically isolated life in a hostile new country. As Brina spells out Okinawa’s past, from an independent land to a pawn in Chinese-Japanese-American relations, readers get a sense of the generational trauma that has shaped her and her mother’s lives as well. It’s a story that encompasses both the broad horrors of colonialism and racism and the deeply personal details of forgiveness and familial love.

—Christy, Associate Editor

This Burns My Heart

Heartfelt and emotional, Samuel Park’s moving debut novel is a must-read for fans of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or the K-drama “Crash Landing on You.” Set in 1960s Korea, This Burns My Heart features a resourceful heroine torn between love and duty in the wake of partition. Soo-Ja meets Yul and immediately feels a connection to him—a confusing development, since she has just decided to marry another man. Unwilling to disgrace her family by going back on her promise, Soo-Ja rejects Yul to marry Min, a decision she will revisit and regret for the next 20 years. Yul and Soo-Ja see each other only periodically and usually by chance, but their fraught encounters are tense with the passion of unconsummated love. Full of poetic observations and memorable lines, This Burns My Heart will leave you pondering the “what ifs” in your own life.

—Trisha, Publisher

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! To celebrate, we’re shining a spotlight on some of our favorite stellar reads by Asian American authors.

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