"I hope Sea Change makes readers feel a little bit less alone, if that’s something they’re struggling with...but also that hope, resilience, and community are stronger than our despair."
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"Nothing is Ever Really Lost:" A Deep Dive Into Grief, Love, and Writing With Debut Author Gina Chung
3.28.2023
2.01.2022
"In this day and age, the definition of “family” is so different. Embrace whatever family you have, whether it is by blood, adoption, or found family."
Red Thread of Fate charts Tam Kwan's journey to find community following a tragedy. After her husband, Tony, and his cousin, Mia, are suddenly killed in a car accident, Tam struggles with survivor's guilt and grief. To complicate matters, she becomes the official guardian of Mia's five-year-old daughter, Angela, and an adopted son from China whom she intended to raise with her husband, within weeks of the accident. As she navigates her new responsibilities as a mother, she must also grapple with family secrets that threaten to upend her relationships with the living and her memory of the dead. Red Thread of Fate releases to the public on February 8, 2022.
1.23.2022
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“I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?”
1.13.2022
“She’d spend her time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.”
Mary H. K. Choi, Emergency Contact
As we settle into the new year, I continue to find comfort and inspiration in books. While looking back on my reads from the year past, I identified five books that stood out to me for their insight, daring, or entertainment. As promised, here are my top five books of 2021.
1.01.2021
To look back on the last year in books, I've invited over 50 pbaassionate readers, including bloggers, booktubers, and bookstagrammers, to share the stories that captivated them most this year. These are the 50 best books of 2020:Looking for backlist book recommendations for your 2021 reading list? Look no further.
12.28.2020
“There’ll be happiness after you, but there was happiness because of you. Both of these things can be true. There is happiness, past the blood and bruise, past the curses and the cries.”
from Taylor Swift’s “Happiness”
12.14.2020
Notwithstanding its success, The Goldfinch relied on clichés rooted in racial and ethnic stereotypes to realize its settings and elevate the protagonist.
I picked up The Goldfinch on a whim during my last visit to the library. While surveying the shelves for books that would inspire me to read again after an intense academic semester, Tartt’s name caught my eye. Previously, I read and enjoyed her novel The Secret History, a fascinating and disturbing exploration of what drives a group of elite college students to murder a fellow classmate. I borrowed The Goldfinch on the promise of The Secret History; at the time, I knew nothing of its plot or its critical acclaim. I was later surprised to find that, despite the dissent of a few literary critics who dismissed the writing as childish, The Goldfinch is a popular and generally well-respected book that I’d simply missed out on. (Granted, I was 12 years old at the time of its release, but as a book blogger I would have expected it to at least cross my periphery). In fact, Tartt’s almost 800-page tome sold over 1.5 million copies within the first months of its release, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review, among others, as “a rarity” and “a smartly written literary novel”, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. While reading, I was thus even more surprised to discover how, notwithstanding its success, The Goldfinch relied on clichés rooted in racial and ethnic stereotypes to realize its settings and elevate the protagonist.
4.14.2020
"I want to say the exact right thing, the thing that will take away all her pain and her grief and her guilt, but I know those words don't exist."
In The Lucky Ones, teenagers May and Zach struggle with the aftermath of a school shooting. For May, attending a new high school not even a year after her twin brother Jordan was killed in the band classroom where she hid from the perpetrator feels impossible. For Zach, social isolation and family problems abound when his mother, a lawyer, decides to defend the school shooter. A chance meeting unites the two, and together they grieve, learn, and heal. Liz Lawson's debut novel explores the consequences of school shootings on young survivors.
7.07.2018
