Lucas Knight doesn’t have any shining armor. He’s the spoiled child of a wealthy white developer in Puerto Rico, and the most good he’s done is all in his head. He wishes things were different—that his father wasn’t a sneering aristocrat, that his Puerto Rican neighbors would actually accept him, that his mother hadn’t left—but …
1. Candy (Mian Mian) – This is one of my all-time favorite books. A weird memoir-esque take on growing up in the rebel youth culture of the 90s in China, Mian Mian catalogs drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll with both poetic grace and furious honesty. It’s an almost wistful look at the miseries of …
Our word disaster comes from the Greek meaning “bad star.” And if one bad star portends calamity, imagine a whole sky of them. Mayavati doesn’t have to. She is born with the most malignant horoscope the court has ever seen, and everyone from her father, the Raja, to the lowest girl in the harem knows …
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel is the definition of compulsively readable. I snuck peeks at work, I held it in one hand while holding my toothbrush in the other, and if it had not been on my kindle, I would have propped it up within eyeball-reach of the shower. It’s engrossing. It’s fantastic. It’s a …
Korean fiction is only just now coming into vogue, with Kyung-Sook Shin and Han Kang making waves in lit circles and bestseller lists. Here are some Korean novels to get you started. 1. Your Republic Is Calling You (Young-Ha Kim) – Though I prefer his earlier novel, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, this …
If you’ve read the first two books in this series, you already know that there’s no way you can’t read the third. It’s impossible to resist these books, and impossible not to devour them once you have them. I’m pleased to report that book three is no different. It’s also no different in its take …
Book geeks and Geeklies who love books often want to branch out, so I’ll be doing a few lists of works in translation, starting with Japanese novels. Japanese fiction is fairly well established in English translation, so I’m going to avoid such obvious talents as the Murakamis—Haruki and Ryu—who have achieved international fame, or Kawabata …
Sometimes children go to fairyland. Sometimes they fight monsters, and save kingdoms, and do a bit of growing on the way. And then sometimes, they come back. Eleanor West’s “school” is a place where they can go when their families think them deranged or badly in denial. It’s run by a reject of fairyland, and …
Hope’s brother is a meth addict. He once had a promising future as a hockey player, but now he’s a meth addict, and she’s leaving for boarding school to get away from him, even though all she really wants is to help him. All Eric, her brother, really wants is to stay high. That’s the …
Having survived his ordeals, Nathan is now trying to survive his own success: he found his father and received his Three Gifts, and found his special talent as a witch, but that power is not so easily controlled. Nathan is a shapeshifter, but he can barely control the creature within him, let alone what’s going …