Category: Read This Book

At the end of the Vietnam War, siblings Anh, Thanh, and Minh flee their home in South Central Vietnam, getting on a boat and sailing for Hong Kong. Their parents and other siblings were supposed to follow behind them, but after three months of silence, the officials at the Hong Kong refugee camp tell them their parents have drowned.

This begins a new stage of their lives as they wait for a country to take them in, finally being accepted into the UK. There, they start from scratch. Anh cares for her two younger brothers the best she can, but she’s barely more than a child herself. Thanh and Minh struggle to find a career, a way for them to make something of themselves, but their options are scarce.

Wandering Souls was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK, and no wonder. This slim debut novel has so much heart. Pin’s characters are vibrant, complex, and ever-evolving throughout the story. Dozens of countries accepted Vietnamese refugees, but this is the first story about Vietnamese refugees that I’ve read that’s set outside of the U.S. It gives readers a new look at the never-ending hoops Vietnamese people had to jump through just to find a new home.

Pin always has short sections and chapters featuring unique character perspectives. I don’t want to say too much about them because of spoilers, but let’s just say I think they add such a beautiful note to the narrative, rounding out the three siblings’ story.

The audiobook is performed by Aoife Hinds, Ioanna Kimbook, and Ainsleigh Barber. They all do such an excellent job of bringing the story to life in a new way. So if you’re looking for a multigenerational story from a perspective you may have never considered before, then this novel is for you.

The first chapter starts with the time of day and a date: November 17, 1929. Seattle, Washington. Each subsequent chapter of the book starts with a date in relation to that first date of November 17th, for example, “October 6, 1929, six weeks before” or “November 14, 1929, three days before.” The chapters are not in chronological order which makes this puzzle a very exciting one to piece together.

So we have Seattle, prohibition, and magic. There are different types of magic such as plant magics and elemental magics. There are also shapeshifters, like werewolves but some people shift into animals other than wolves.

Ambrose Earnshaw is Seattle’s Commissioner of Magi. They are not the Seattle police department though unsurprisingly, they work closely together. The Magi Commission purportedly keeps magic-users in line. Ambrose is a very wealthy man and when we meet him, he is interviewing a handler for his adult daughter, Fiona. The woman he is interviewing is Dolly White, who doesn’t have any magical abilities but she knows her way around potions and she went to a nice finishing school. Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter Fiona frequents a speakeasy owned by a Black woman. Fiona drinks way more than her father would like and she is also addicted to a drug she adds to her alcohol they call “shimmer-shim,” “shim” for short. Fiona is supposed to be married to a fine upstanding young man and she is off galavanting, jazz and gin and so on, so Mr. Earnshaw hires Dolly to keep Fiona in line, off drugs and booze, and definitely away from that speakeasy.

Ambrose Earnshaw has a son as well, Francis. Francis is incredibly creepy and he’s known for assaulting women. The family knows it and pays to keep the victims and the victims’ families quiet. Meanwhile, we have Violet Solomon, who owns Violet’s Hat Shop, the speakeasy that Fiona frequents. Violet’s brother is a shapeshifter and shapeshifters are looked down upon usually but now it seems like shapeshifters in the area are in a lot of danger.

I legitimately had a wonderful time reading this book and it’s a fairly fast read, too!

Lydia Class is a Good Girl, from a Nice Family in her small town of Henley, Ohio. Bristol Jamison is her opposite in every way. But when they’re both screwed over by their guidance counselor and left short one history credit in order to graduate, Lydia senses an opportunity. She recruits Bristol and convinces the administration to give them a credit in exchange for doing a podcast on their town’s local history. By exploring the Long Stretch of Bad Days — a three-day period in the 90’s when the town was decimated by a tornado, a flash flood killed every dog at the shelter, and the town’s only murder victim was discovered — Lydia is hoping to impress the Ivy Leagues with her reporting chops. And Bristol will add just the right amount of grit and local color to her podcast to get them listens. But Bristol has no interest in being anyone’s pawn, and when they uncover a discrepancy in the tornado coverage, it leads to a decades-only cold case that no one is looking into.

Mindy McGinnis is really good at writing worn-down small towns with dark crevices, but she doesn’t vilify small towns either. As someone who grew up in a small Midwestern town, I appreciate the complicated mix of emotions she brings to a story like this — the yearning to get out, the stifling feeling that everyone is watching you, the entrapment of small town expectations, and also the grudging affection for the place you call home. Lydia and Bristol must confront all this and more, especially as Lydia reckons with how her position differs from Bristol’s as someone who isn’t rich, but considerably more privileged as a founding family member. The mystery in this book is a bit of slow burn, but that’s okay. There’s plenty of local color, interesting tension, and weird small town vibes to keep readers hooked until a darker story emerges. And once the girls see a mystery that has been overlooked, they can’t un-see it, and they’re compelled to investigate, even when forces seem to be pushing against them. Even when it seems like the case might dead end into nothing. McGinnis does a great job of making every element of their investigation matter, and the way everything comes together is extremely clever. If you’re a fan of gritty mysteries, but also reluctant friends, small towns, and unexpected twists, pick this one up!

Julia Lee grew up as a working class Korean American kid in L.A. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. and owned a couple different businesses. When Lee was younger, she distinctly remembers the riots in L.A. after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King. This moment in her life sparked the many questions about her place in America as an Asian American woman. She wasn’t white, but her race still came with a certain amount of privilege. So where does she fit in?

Lee went on to Princeton University on scholarship, working in one of the dining halls. As she worked towards her degree, she watched the more privileged students (mostly wealthy and white) around her. She gawked at the degree to which these young adults had little to no ideas about the realities of Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

Lee’s essays take you through her experience, following along as she processes the role of identity as a Korean American in, as she describes it, “a Black and white America.” I appreciated how she clearly lays out her thought process, weaving back and forth, as comes to better understand her field of study.

As Lee continues her studies in African American and Asian American Literature, she gains a more well-rounded perspective. She engages with other academics, many of whom are academics in Black or Indigenous studies who challenge her perspective and help her grow both professionally and personally. For the audio edition, Lee performs her essays, communicating every emotion from the text. She’s angry, frustrated, and exhausted by America’s racism, and that all comes through as she reads her collection. 

Biting the Hand reads like a natural companion to books like Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong and Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion by Nishta J. Mehra

This book is an immersive fantasy with a lot of violence that I just couldn’t put down. It’s told in the first person by Deka, a 16 year old girl who lost her mother to a disease three months prior to the beginning of this book. She lives in a small village with her father. It’s important to note that Deka’s mother was not from the village and had deep brown skin. Deka too, has brown skin while her father has light skin, blond hair, and gray eyes and because of this, the town hasn’t been incredibly kind to Deka. The town is also very religious, pulling their rules and morality from a book called the Infinite Wisdoms and a god they refer to as the Infinite Father, Oyomo. Surprising no one, the vibe is ultra-patriarchal and misogynistic.

The book begins on the day of the Ritual of Purity. All 16 year old girls in the village need to go through the Ritual of Purity. Once a girl is proven pure, she is considered a full citizen of the village and is eligible to marry and have a family of her own. The Ritual of Purity itself involves a priest non-fatally slicing each girl’s skin with a blade. If her blood runs red, she is considered pure and passes the ritual; however, if her blood runs gold, that is an entirely different thing altogether.

Before it is her turn in the temple, Deka feels a few moments of foreboding before the village is attacked by large murderous beasts that could kill a person with a single scream. A huge bloody fight ensues and in a moment of terror and desperation, Deka yells for the monsters to stop and they do, before leaving entirely. The people of the town are freaked out by this, her own father calls her a demon, and someone tries to run her through with a sword. She does not bleed red and they lock her up.

After weeks of torture, a foreign woman shows up to offer Deka a choice: to either finally die, or to join the Emperor’s elite force of fighters he is creating. This woman has all kinds of information about what Deka is and she would be taking Deka to a combat school where she would meet other girls like herself. At the end of her military service, she would gain purity.

This was such an exciting read that kept me on my toes and definitely caught me by surprise more than once.

Eilis is a young Irish woman living in a small town with her mother and her older sister Rose. Her father is dead, her brothers have gone to England to find work, and she has no future in her hometown. When Rose arranges for Eilis to go to Brooklyn, where she’ll have a job and a chance to study to become a bookkeeper, Eilis feels that she can’t say no to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, even though she wishes she could stay. Once in America, she’s horrifically lonely and homesick, but slowly she begins to build a life for herself, and then she meets Tony, an Italian American. But just as her future feels certain, tragedy calls her back home to Ireland.

I’m not always a fan of literary fiction because I like plot and can get bogged down in too much description, but this book reminded me of why I find literary fiction compelling when I discover a book with apremise that really hooks me. The writing is gorgeous and moves fluidly from one moment to the next, not always lingering where you expect it might. I enjoyed that uncertainty and surprise, and even as I got to know Eilis, I always felt like there were new and interesting layers to her personality to discover. The descriptions about what life was like in the 1950s in both Ireland and Brooklyn were totally engrossing, and I appreciated how the author was able to paint a distinct picture of the various characters through dialogue and spare scenes. I found the relationship between Eilis and Tony compelling, in part because for much of their courtship you’re never quite certain how Eilis truly feels about him. The decisions she makes shortly before leaving Brooklyn and when she returns home to Ireland had me on the edge of my seat. It’s not quite the romance that the marketing of the book and subsequent movie adaptation promises, but the tension the author builds as you wonder which life Eilis will choose was truly excellent—so much so that I am still thinking about this book two weeks later.

Bonus: The movie adaptation is really lovely, with a few small but key changes from the book. Definitely don’t miss out on either.

There are few living nonfiction writers that I adore more than Nicole Chung. She used to be the editor of Catapult Magazine before going freelance and now has a newsletter with The Atlantic. Her insights are always so well thought out and perfectly articulated. Every time I open up her latest newsletter, I know I’m going to be encouraged to think about the world in a new way.

Her previous memoir, All You Can Ever Know, focused around her experience looking for her biological family. Chung is a Korean American adopted by white parents. She was always told that she was born early and her biological parents didn’t have the means to care for her. But, of course, that’s not exactly what happened.

In A Living Remedy, Chung focuses on her parents, the couple that adopted her, and her relationships with them. She loves her parents deeply. Even though they never had a lot of money, her parents did everything they could to give Chung every advantage. They never quite understood why Chung wanted to be a writer, but they supported her anyway. Much of the book centers around how both of her parents died a handful of years apart. Her mother had been in recovery from cancer for years when Chung’s father passed away. And then, her mother’s cancer returned. The pandemic began right after the doctor told them there was nothing more he could do.

Chung’s prose is often sparse, but you feel with her as she tells you the story of her love for the two people who raised her and made her who she is today. After finishing A Living Remedy, I can’t help but think that this is one of the memoirs I will recommend to young people who might not remember the complicated chaos that was the pandemic. She has captured that time perfectly. As she describes her frustration and sadness of not being with her mother during the pandemic, you cry with her. Her writing is so open and honest about the experience of losing a loved one in a time when she couldn’t even visit her mother because of social distancing.

This book specifically takes place on the Virgin Islands when they were occupied by Denmark and the islanders were enslaved. It’s told through not only the present time of the book, but also through flashbacks and dreams and hallucinations.

It begins when our main character, Sigourney Rose, was a child. She is an islander and her family is the only, or one of the only, Black families that owns a plantation and has enslaved people. Her mother has promised that she will free people and many of the islanders held her in some kind of esteem. Since she was Black, of course, all the other kongelieg (which translates to “royalty” and basically means the slave-holders) hate her. In fact, the very beginning of this book is a flashback. As I mentioned, Sigourney is a child. Her mother, brother, and sister are ambushed at their own home during a party and murdered. Sigourney manages to escape, as all the enslaved and even other kongelieg at the party were also murdered.

After her escape, Sigourney was rescued by a servant who was basically on standby and waiting for something like this. Sigourney falls under the care of a relative who is also kongelieg. She changes her last name to her relative’s, and is no longer Sigourney Rose but Sigourney Lund. She spends the next many years planning her revenge on her fellow kongelieg and she finally gets an invitation to the King’s island to spend the storm season with the other kongelieg. The king is supposed to choose his successor at the end of this storm season and the kongelieg are not above killing each other. There is a lot of murder that happens in this book. At first I thought it was going to be a bit of a Hunger Games vibe but it is well beyond that.

The other very important thing you have to know about this world is that some people have supernatural powers, referred to as having craft or possessing craft. If an islander is found to have craft, they are executed. If the fjern, that is, any white people, have craft, they say it is a divine gift. Sigourney, an islander but also kongelieg, is not executed for her craft and she most definitely has craft. She can read minds and not only that, but she can control minds as well.

This book was such a wild ride and is the first in a complete duology. Content warnings for anti-Black racism and many types of violence.

Imagine a stage with a trap door. Beneath the trap door is a dark room, and in that room you’ll find all of the dead women and girls in Shakespeare’s tragedies. They are silent and alone in their grief and misery, until one day, Juliet begins to speak and Ophelia, Cordelia, and Lavinia all listen. Once Juliet shares her story, the others begin to open up, too. And once they’ve shared their stories, they begin to talk to each other — and challenge the Bard.

This is a stunning book that you almost have to go into knowing very little about it, because I admit when I first picked it up, I thought, How is this going to work? But I promise, just go with the flow. It’s part prose, part play, and mostly verse, and McCullough is a real master in how she not only retells three plays from the women’s perspective, but in how she composes three very different poetic styles to match the characters of Juliet, Ophelia, and Cordelia. I loved seeing their personalities come to life on the page, and when they start talking with each other they explore some hefty questions about the role of women in the tragedies, women’s suffering, agency, and what it means to tell a good story. I truly didn’t know where the book was going to go from there, and it was surprising, funny, maddening, insightful, and even — at times — joyful.

If you’ve read or seen Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Titus Andronicus, you might be able to see the connections and understand the references a bit more easily, but I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to enjoy this book. Shakespeare has permeated so many layers of our popular culture, and this book really stands on its own. It’s easily one of my favorites that I’ve in 2023 so far!

Erica Berry’s debut nonfiction title can’t easily be shoved into one genre or another. Berry combines threads of memoir, the study of wolves, wolves in humanity’s current cultural context, and wolves in fairytales and folklore. But as we meander through Berry’s thoughts, we quickly understand that this book isn’t as much about wolves as it is about what wolves often symbolize to humanity: fear.

Each chapter focuses on a different way that wolves embody ideas around fear, including chapter titles like “Girl vs Wolf,” “Town vs Wolf,” and “Self vs Wolf.” If you replace the word “wolf” in these chapter titles with the word “fear,” you begin to see the bigger picture that Berry weaves together. Through her personal anecdotes, Berry describes her own experiences with fear, whether that’s meeting an intrusive stranger on a cross-country train journey or accidentally eating large quantities of mandrakes in Sicily.

Berry uses wolves as the vehicle to describe fears that we build up in our minds that may or may not be warranted. She returns to the example of wolves being reintroduced to Idaho, some of whom crossed the border into Oregon. The people from the area carried their fear of wolves around with them, needlessly stressing about the small number of wolves that rarely attack humans. They insisted their fear was real and needed to be addressed, and it was often the wolves that suffered the most at the hands of men.

Wolfish is a tangled web of thoughts and ideas that asks the reader to engage with the text and mull over each chapter. It’s a prime example of a multi-model book that defies genre, showing its readers that it’s unafraid of breaking literary norms. We, the readers, just have to keep an open mind and be brave enough to dive right in.