A memoir about Japanese-American author Mori’s visit to her hometown of Kobe and other parts of Japan many years after her family was shattered by her mother’s suicide. Mori spends time with her dysfunctional family, tries to understand her long-dead mother, and grapples with her own cultural identity ( Read more... )

#11.  Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
2007, Drawn & Quarterly

I keep trying to like Adrian Tomine, and he kind of just keeps leaving me cold.  Cool, anyway.  I'm not really sure what else to say about it.

I read Shortcomings in the space of about an hour; and thought about it; and then I reread it, trying to be sure to catch whatever I might have missed ( Read more... )

Apologies for the brevity of these reviews, but they're from my Twitter book-review project (@booktweeting, for those of you who Tweet).

Life is Short but Wide, by J. California CooperNew York: Doubleday, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0385511346 ( Read more... )

She’s an amnesiac swordfighter with stigmata! He’s a scar-faced soldier fanatically devoted to Charles II! Together, they fight an evil sorcerer and his vaguely described monstrous minions ( Read more... )

1) Eve of Destruction, S.J. Day

In one of my other online "lives," I'm a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.net. I had the chance to read an ARC of S.J. Day's first Marked novel, Eve of Darkness a few months ago, before I was counting. You can read my review of Eve of Darkness here.

Eve of Destruction is book 2, and there is a third book in the ( Read more... )

This book was selected for the county wide community reading program here last year ( Read more... )

Takaki brings together a multitude of voices to tell the rich, complex story of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States: African Americans, Asian Americans, Indians, Jews, Latinos, and more. He begins with the colonization of North America by the Europeans and "the racialization of savagery", whereby the Europeans came to believe that the ( Read more... )

I was desperately searching for something more upbeat after Beloved and Baseball Saved Us, and let's face it, the title Dixieland Sushi would get anyone's attention. A little research on the author revealed that her background is similar, though hardly identical, to my own -- child of one third-generation Japanese-American parent and one caucasian ( Read more... )

"Weren't you just here?" "Yes! But now I have a children's book..."

I just finished the 32-page kids' book Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki, a book I would like a lot better had it been named something less over-the-top. However, OTT title aside, this is a book about the Japanese-American internment camps of WW2, a subject that most Americans ( Read more... )

This is Kadohata's first novel; it draws on her own experiences as the daughter of a working-class Japanese-American family who together spent a good deal of time travelling in search of work.

Unfortunately, I just can't get into this book. I first read (or ( Read more... )