When I was fifteen, my parents returned to South Korea and left me behind with my brother in America. My mother started writing me letters in Korean, a language I could not fully understand at the time. Over a decade after she wrote me, I translated her letters into English. In one letter, she writes: …
Clap When You Land was the favorite book from the LatinX Book Club at Rediscovered Books for 2020. Each page opens multiple doors and invites to to see things differently. The language feels easy and simple as you read, and at the end you are reminded that a genius is one who can take complex …
Hands down one of the most lyrical novels I’ve read this year. What grows out of Antonia’s grief after a series of sudden familial losses is: resiliency, tenacity, and a deep, inhabitable wisdom. I can’t recommend this one enough. -Elise, Browsers Bookshop, Olympia, WA Read books you’ll want to tell your friends about. Find great …
Despite my natural pessimism, this book broke down my defenses and set me up to root for a well-earned, conventional kind of happy ending. But then it took a turn and became an altogether different story, leaving me to sputter along with the characters, “Unfair—this is not what I was expecting.” I was crushed. And …
“If we lose one another, wait for me on the steps. Just here, by the door.” Champion is a 217-year-old dog who has sat in the same spot for a century, waiting for Valentyne to return…but waiting is hard. Adventures ensue as the dog searches 1600-1800s Europe for Valentyne. He traverses battlefields, meets alchemists, sniffs …
NWbooklovers congratulates Tina Ontiveros, bookseller and book buyer at Klindt’s Booksellers in the Dalles and President of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, on the publication of her memoir, rough house. rough house will be available at independent bookstores everywhere this month. Waucoma Books in Hood River, OR is hosting a virtual book launch event with …
I loved this smart, funny peek inside the high stakes world of San Francisco private schools. It has everything: social satire, family drama, friendship, a lot of laughs, a touch of romance, and lots to think about after. If you’ve been looking for that Where’d You Go, Bernadette feeling, try this. Bonus: The co-authors live in …
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, is out in paperback. . . The Nickel Boys follows Elwood Curtis as he is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy. Curtis falls in with a fellow “delinquent” named Turner, and the novel explores the very different reactions to the terrible system that …
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments contains some of the most imaginative, inventive, and radical history writing I’ve ever encountered. Taking as her subjects the black women excluded from the US historical archive, Hartman challenges and unsettles dominant understandings of who “makes” history. In vibrant and ecstatic prose, Hartman tells the story of how the wayward, the …
Compelling narrative. Fantastic pre-teen middle reader that does an excellent job of exploring race and race-related issues via the clever mechanism of a young Black student who begins her middle school journey with some color-blind ideas and anti-Black biases that prevent her from forming meaningful relationships with other Black students. Great book to approach students …
