NCBR review of The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian

Tin House Books

Armen Davoudian is in touch with the poetic past, both in form—for example, his ingenious, subtle rhyme schemes, but also with the eternal—a poetry that reaches straight into often dismissed tradition and brings the best back with it. Form and rigorous line structure are active in all the poems, and the series of twenty sonnets in the title poem, "The Palace of Forty Pillars," reinvents the sonnet for the twenty-first century. Davoudian's sonnets both elegize, celebrate, and activate complicated histories and sexual identity. Named after a palace in Isfahan, Iran, in which reflective pools double the existing twenty columns into forty, The Palace of Forty Pillars also amplifies its resonance, reflecting back onto history, language, traditions, and historic failings. Davoudian combines modern linguistic cadences with formal poetry, blends languages as only the diasporic can do, and offers a fresh new voice to the diversity of American poetry.

NCBR review of Coachella Elegy by Christian Gullette

Trio House Press

The poems in Coachella Elegy are spare and unsettling. Moving, always moving, through hotels, pools, highways, and stunning vistas, the book is Californian in so many ways. How does one even begin to think of serious illness, aging parents, or the loss of a sibling while floating in a kidney-shaped pool nestled behind a mid-century modern hotel, a tasty cocktail arms-length away? In placing trouble and beauty, urgency and languor side-by-side, the poet questions the notions of paradise. The speaker travels to Palm Springs, wine country, the Getty—but the carefreeness of it all competes with his husband's cancer treatment, memories of a troubled brother, his parents' oblivion to their advancing age. Here, the fruit is impossibly lovely and abundant, meals are presented as art objects, the bodies are gorgeous and, for now, the earthquakes remain imperceptible. But still, the speaker reckons with the "dream world" of California. In "California Spring," the limits of a "safe" geography are acknowledged: "We live on this side of the country. / On the other side, / a court hands down a decision // and there is more suffering / reaching from there / to here." Gullette is an expert in contrasts, proving that the glint of the sun on our beautiful Pacific, and trouble, can and must coexist.

NCBR review of Septet for the Luminous Ones by fahima ife

Wesleyan University Press

In Septet for the Luminous Ones, fahime ife's remarkable second collection, she uses multiple registers of language and storytelling as she navigates between speaking to an intimate "you" and a larger, equally intimate community. The sonic resonance is such that you can hear these poems as you read them, and connect to ife's address of the Black Arts Movement, African diaspora, and Caribbean culture. Images and actions compressed into short lines invoke the pressure of historical weight, while the sonic cadences of pleasure ensure that endurance, joy, and beauty breathe a common wind.

NCBR review of woke up no light by Leila Mottley

Knopf

Leila Mottley's woke up no light traces the speaker unearthing who she is in relation to her family, the world she was born to, and its regard/disregard of her Black, female body. Former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, and author of the award-winning novel Nightcrawling, Mottley writes about Blackness and womanhood with such fullness that we feel the weight as well as the celebration. The prelude poem, "a case for/against reparations" sets up one of the main questions of the book, and announces the book as a truly Californian story: "the first thing i learned about the land i spawned from / was pick a poppy and the orange thrash will send you / straight to the hollows of hell (…) can you afford what we are worth / namely Everything." The text moves forward in sections: girlhood, neighborhood, falsehood, womanhood—the speaker confronting the violence and glory of living. From "what a Black girl wants" the young speaker begs to be known, "…of all the things i could have been / never once did you think / i might not want to be small." By the book's end, we see who has fully come into her power. In "Respect," the lowercase "i" is now replaced by the capital as the speaker takes account, "tell me you are afraid of my gait without ever acknowledging I have walked here."

NCBR review of Percussing the Thinking Jar by Maw Shein Win

Omnidawn

In her arresting Percussing the Thinking Jar, Win dwells on the nature of thinking and how it can it be manifested in language. What emerges from these questions is a new process for making poems called the “thought log,” an experimental short lyric in which Win seems to trickle her observations, feelings, and memories onto the page. These poems resist rhetoric. They depend instead on a logic of movement that feels true to human nature. Win’s accretions of language resolve into many organic shapes, though some seem to absorb the formal energies of haiku, tanka, and haibun. One of Win’s “Thought Log” poems begins, “We communicate via semaphore. // The neighbor boy stuck a wad of chewing gum in my hair. My / mother rubbed butter on the clump to dissolve it. // A coalition of farmers in Central California. // The napes of our necks. // Red Clover, Ruda, Amarantus.” That last line, a triple set of images or words that Win turns to again and again, serve as a through-line (or maybe drum-line) in this truly innovative book, which evokes the power of the poet inhabiting her days as a medium of utterance and experience.

NCBR review of I Love Hearing Your Dreams by Matthew Zapruder

Scribner

The declarative title of Zapruder’s sixth collection feels unusually intimate and whimsical. In this book the general reader will experience the sensation of standing in for the various objects of the poet’s devotion—in some cases Zapruder’s wife or son, in others his beloved poet-friends, real or imagined. Robert Desnos gets a direct address in the book, as do Dean Young, Gerald Stern, and Jean Follain, all of whom were surrealist in the sense that they were known for writing poems that propelled forward in surprising, associative leaps. Zapruder is in favor of such swerves, too, as a way to thwart conventions and delight his reader. Throughout I Love Hearing Your Dreams there is an undertone of sadness and grief, not only for friends who have recently passed (such as Young), but also for community and solidarity and what we used to consider the truth itself. And yet, Zapruder can’t stop himself from stumbling into beauty, whether he’s watching the Super Bowl, brooding in a cemetery, or ruminating on an ancient tree: “O take my upper branches / like the Romans did / from the top of me // make some space / for sunlight to get in.”

NCBR review of Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Viking

In Rita Bullwinkel’s exhilarating first novel, Headshot, she experiments with form and bends time in uncanny ways. The setting: the “twelfth annual Women’s 18 and Under Daughter of America Cup at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, NV, July 14-15, 20XX.” “As they sit on their stools, legs spread and red-faced, Artemis and Andi’s minds spin like wind turbines,” she writes about the first bout. She sends us spiraling from the present, in the boxing gym where eight teenage girls are vying for a national championship on a hot summer day, into the past (one fighter recalls moments from her time as a lifeguard the day a young boy drowns while punching away; another contemplates her family’s fighting lineage: “If Artemis has a weakness it is in the fact that she is a legacy. Her sisters’ wins hang over her”), into the future (“As an actor, Tanya Maw will be given hundreds of roles to play. She will never be famous enough to not need other ways of getting money, but when she is old and frail she’ll become a beloved typecast granny”). Throughout, Bullwinkel maintains a steady beat based on eight two-minute rounds per match, the referee’s calls, the sun’s path, the bodily damage one fist can do and the inimitable intimacy of sports competitions. Genius work.

NCBR review of How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli

WTAW Press

Anita Felicelli’s haunting story collection opens with a tsunami bearing down on a drought-stricken California coast, with two friends ready to party despite the incoming danger. “On the night of the big wave, we ignore the warnings blowing up our phones and stay on the beach. It’s Violet’s idea, of course it is. Whether we’re smoking weed at midnight in the yellow sour grass by the gas station or drinking Kahlua and ice cream shakes on the clock or skimming money off the top of the cash register at work, it’s always Violet’s idea to break rules.” “Until the Seas Rise” is a brilliant opening to a set of speculative stories distinguished by surreal experiences, emotional disconnection, external disruption, technological twitches, and a steady stream of time-traveling paradoxes. In the title story, time travel happens internally, organically, as a woman artist showing her work in her studio is carried back by sense impressions, familiar strangers, and her mind’s own quirks. Felicelli captures the drastic climate change of Northern California, with its record heat, wildfires, and atmospheric rivers. She touches the tenderest of human moments in stories like “The Glitch,” in which a coder who has created holograms of his late wife and children to animate his present is hacked, losing them all over again. How We Know Our Time Travelers is a reminder that the reality of the universe sets the stage for the imagination to do its work.

NCBR review of Exhibit by R.O. Kwon

Riverhead Books

Exhibit is beautiful, a story that rises way beyond religion, or sex, or passion. Two exciting, creative, sensual young women are magnetically drawn to each other. Photographer Jin Han meets ballerina Lidija Jung. Exhibit, then, is a love story. But what is love? True love is a star to every wandering bark [sailing ship], Shakespeare wrote. Love, a word, confused by physical experience, is of unknown worth, but felt. Love, or the desire for love, draws us through life, or toward death, as Jin and Lidija are drawn to each other. So love is expressed as a heightened feeling sought after by those who understand there must be more. Is sexual passion a religious experience? Our world changes, and the answers change. But Jin, once a passionate believer, has felt religious ecstasy is only a confused step on the way to something more fulfilling. But what? Her love for her husband Philip has weakened in the glow of her passion for Lidija, a passion she believes may be base and irreligious. However, she can do little but accept her pleasures in the sex games she plays with Lidija. And they could well be a step towards that unknown star, which may not be there at all. Critics who categorize Exhibit as a queer novel, or a religious novel, have, themselves, fallen into the commonality of a limited, more conventional, human experience. Our old definitions of love must expand. Exhibit is an intelligent, honest, fully awake novel, sensitively written, and worthy of the praise it has acquired.

NCBR review of The Forgetters by Greg Sarris

Heyday

The Forgetters is a profoundly moving collection of linked stories, at once timeless and essential for this moment. The stories unfurl as a conversation between Question Woman and Answer Woman, who are both crows and humans—and both necessary for stories to exist. As Answer Woman says, “Stories, if they are good, make you ask questions. How else do we discover another story but with an answer to a question?” Sarris’s stories answer some questions but raise others, or seem to answer different questions than they begin with. Yet a form of resolution occurs in all of them through the practice of a deep, abiding generosity—a practice many of us are in danger of forgetting. Told in the traditional style of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok, the stories are alive with the voice of the patient storyteller; characters who are wise and also foolish, human and also animal; and the palpable presence of the eager listener. Sarris reminds us that the generous act of storytelling—not just writing and speaking but listening and asking—can reconnect us with each other and the natural world we belong to.

NCBR review of In This Ravishing World by Nina Schuyler

Regal House Publishing

In This Ravishing World is equally astonishing in its ambition and in its beauty. In Schuyler’s collection of linked stories, characters from different walks of life enact their own roles in the natural world and the unfolding catastrophe of climate change. A tech entrepreneur fantasizes about moving his family to New Zealand to escape climatic disaster. A volunteer at an animal shelter bonds with an abused dog. A jack-of-all-trades falls in love with an activist and finds a purpose. A teenager faces racist bullying as he tries to beautify his own neighborhood. At the center of all the stories is Eleanor, a seventy-year-old environmental economist who receives an award for her life’s work just as she’s falling into hopelessness. As it turns out, it’s not the award that lifts Eleanor’s spirits, but a group of children who still believe change is possible, and who draw her into a terrifying but transformative act of protest. As her gorgeous prose moves gracefully through all these different viewpoints, including of nature itself, Schuyler reminds us that fighting climate change can bring us to the edge of despair, but also offers moments of rapturous celebration.

NCBR review of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin

Pantheon

All Californians have experienced fire season, whether they watched flames creep closer to their communities, breathed smoke-choked air, or anxiously followed the news as fire ate acre after acre somewhere in the Golden State. Manjula Martin lives through the 2020 fires in Sonoma County and relives their devastation in compelling prose in The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. Part memoir, part natural history treatise, Martin narrates her preparation, evacuation, and return to her home, acutely aware “that people were not the most powerful or important things in the universe.” Our planet is fire, water, air, and earth, not in equal measure or force, but when fire and air join and water is scarce, earth suffers. Or does it? Martin acknowledges that “humans have an innate connection with fire, we evolved with fire, in some ways because of fire, and we have a relationship with it that is super primal.” Martin makes us understand that “harm and renewal” is necessary, but that humans exacerbated the process and must learn to live with the consequences: “There must be joy in this falling apart.”

NCBR review of What Kind of Bird Can't Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection by Dorsey Nunn with Lee Romney

Heyday

As a long-time leading advocate for California prisoners, Dorsey Nunn says that his memoir, What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly—which traces his odyssey from street thug to inmate to activist—is not a prison memoir or personal redemption story but a tribute to camaraderie, commitment, and grassroots organizing. It’s also about the devastating effects of racially restrictive housing covenants that trapped Black families in poverty amid the wealth of the San Francisco Peninsula; the almost inescapable pipeline from those impoverished communities to prison; the racism and violence orchestrated by the prison system; the genesis of the prisoner rights movement; the life-changing influence of Nunn’s mentors, friends, and family; and his own evolution as a voice for justice. It’s an old joke, Nunn explains, that a bird that can’t fly is a jailbird, but his vivid, inspirational story soars. In a voice that is by turns gritty, warm, wounded, and loving, the book carries us on Nunn’s journey from imprisonment to inspiration, illumination, and hope.

NCBR review of The Translator's Daughter: A Memoir by Grace Loh Prasad

Mad Creek Books

Grace Loh Prasad may have known that she was creating a creation myth for the displaced when she sat down to write The Translator’s Daughter. It’s certainly an exceptional narrative of a life that veered off from her initial plans and found itself in an unexpected place. In current times it is also a reminder of the effects of tyranny.  In this memoir there is a clear connection between the tides of politics and the home that a language provides, not as a slogan but as lived experience. Prasad’s writing is clean and persuasive, and the story is compelling.

NCBR review of Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse by Brontez Purnell

MCD

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt is a stunning memoir by Brontez Purnell, renowned writer, musician (frontman of the Younger Lovers), performance artist, and zine-maker. Presented in Purnell’s usual boldly phrased and unashamed poetry, Ten Bridges… is sometimes relentlessly direct, but witha comic edge that makes it all more comfortable:
“I am of the ilk
who will be done in
by sugar, salt, and flour
well before cocaine or ketamine”
In Purnell’s verse the hedonist is balanced with self-exasperation:
“I’m so f*ckin’ over me
I can’t even make myself hard for me anymore”
This book should be carried around as a reality check.

NCBR review of Hour of the Heart: Connecting in the Here and Now by Irvin D. Yalom, Benjamin Yalom

Harper

When renowned psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom realized, in his late eighties, that his memory was failing, he decided that, instead of providing long-term therapy, he would take the unconventional step of meeting his patients one time only for just an hour. During those sixty minutes, he would offer them insight, guidance, acceptance, and, if needed, referral to a colleague for continued therapy. Yalom went on to chronicle a moving collection of these short therapeutic sessions in his latest book, Hour of the Heart. With warmth, humor, compassion, and candid self-assessment and reflection, he invites us into these intimate, compelling encounters. “Sharing with my patients, aiding them through their darkest thoughts, and joining them on journeys of discovery,” he writes, had been his daily work and calling for most of his life, and he was not ready to entirely abandon his practice. The single-session format, conducted virtually, was a new therapeutic adventure that would often yield rich moments of insight for his patients, occasionally painful self-awareness for Yalom, and a heartful and illuminating experience for readers.

NCBR review of Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

University of California Press

Iris Dunkle recovers the life and work of Sanora Babb, child of the depression, chronicler of the Great Plains, a remarkable writer who may have surpassed John Steinbeck in depicting America’s Great Depression. Dunkle’s prodigious archival research allows her a breathless quality that pulls readers into Babb’s world. The biography flows smoothly, combining life and work seamlessly. Who has heard of Sanora Babb? Yet she received many literary accolades during her lifetime, was a lover of Ralph Ellison, taught at UCLA. Babb experienced a challenging childhood on the Great Plains, longing to write about all she saw. She lived in Los Angeles during her adult life, though traveling abroad and also spending time in Mexico during the McCarthy era, partly because of her Communist sympathies. Her short stories and poems received accolades during her lifetime. She started a novel about the Dust Bowl lives she knew so well, going to the San Joaquin Valley to research the lives of migrant farmers from the Plains. Bennet Cerf offered her a book contract for Whose Names Are Unknown after reading its first four chapters. However, Babb met with John Steinbeck and gave him a copy of her notes. But suddenly Cerf cancelled her book contract; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had been published, to great success. Steinbeck had used material from her notes. While shewent on to other writing successes, including editing California Quarterly, her own Great Plains/Depression book was not published until the end of her life.

NCBR review of The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos by Angela Garcia

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Way that Leads Among the Lost is both an anthropologist’s view of Mexico City’s anexos and an attempt to make peace with Garcia’s own troubled childhood and youth. The author interweaves her field research in these homes dedicated to saving Mexicans from the country’s drug horrors with recollections of her own growing up without parents or a home. She begins with the story of Hortencia, who has sent her son Daniel to an anexo (annex) in Mexico City to try to wean him from the pervasive drug culture that surrounded them. These anexos feature rough treatment, little food, and long daily sessions of personal testimony from their captive residents. Families pay fees for this care, hoping to save their loved ones. All of them that Garcia visited were crowded, noisy, and Catholic. Her accounts are detailed and vivid. While Garcia positions herself as an observer of this subculture, her own painful memories often color her observations, giving her narrative a compelling tone. These are “small dim rooms filled with troubled kids.” She often interjects stories of rampant crime in Mexico, and of protests and outcries from citizens. She finally visits Hortencia again and then ends with an account of her own visit to an experiencia, a three-day retreat that allows her to come to terms aspects of her own struggles.

NCBR review of Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

The New Press

In 2017, Arlie Hochschild began over four years of intensive interviews with residents of Pike County, Kentucky, the second poorest of America’s 435 congressional districts. She begins her narrative with the planning of a white supremacist march in Pikeville, led by a neo-Nazi. She takes a close look at these rural citizens, with a focus on the men, ferreting out the emotions that drive them, especially shame and pride. With the loss of their well-paying jobs came a loss of pride. Most of these interviewees felt that they were personally responsible for their downfall in fortune; to some of them the white supremacists offered community and pride. While many of her interviewees supported Trump, racial issues played a minor role for most. As opportunities for good jobs declined, the standard of living decreased. Some local citizens succumbed to drug addictions, though she found cases where addicts had been able to overcome this plague. She found that some residents had been able to move beyond the major economic shifts that struck this locale, taking advantage of government sponsored retraining programs. A number of citizens left for larger cities with more job opportunities, while others remained loyal to their home area. Her measured responses to the conflicts she saw give readers an eye-opening picture of an area that time almost seemed to leave behind. The march takes place without major incidents.

NCBR review of The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England by Nicholas Jenkins

Belknap Press

This exhaustive analysis of W. H. Auden’s early poetry relies on extensive research and careful scrutiny of multiple poems to achieve a new view of the poet’s thematic centers in his first poems. In them Jenkins finds strong echoes of World War I’s traumas (including the absence of Auden’s father) and a concomitant desire to return to a more grounding rural England. He determines to recover “the eeriness, beauty, and deep power of Auden’s early work.” Jenkins shows the writer captured by the lure of national belonging that permeated England after 1918. He follows Auden’s early school love affairs and the influence of his father’s participation in the war. We see Auden fascinated by abandoned mines, as the war’s violence transposes to a rural countryside replete with holes, tunnels, mines. A kind of insular poetic conservatism marks these first poems. “I chose this lean country,” Auden announces, as he spends countless hours exploring England’s rural landscape. The poems themselves suggest a kind of war anxiety and a belief that a poem might reflect a collective voice. Extraordinary close readings of the poems show their tight construction and their repetitive themes. After thoroughly grounding himself in the idea of a rural, preserved England, the poet leaves the country. We also see Auden in Weimar Germany, though we see little of the time he spent in Spain at the end of this period.

NCBR review of A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham

Riverhead Books

Lauren Markham presents readers with a put-it-together-yourself map of the past, current, and future state of immigration on this planet. As immigrants move from one habitat to another, so Markham wanders through her multiple narratives to give readers a poignant picture of one of today’s most vexing and painful issues. She begins with a 2020 fire at the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where six young Afghani males are accused of the crime, focusing on Ali Sayed, who had nothing to do with it. She ranges widely from there, covering echoes of horrors for refugees on the United States/Mexico border, her own heritage of immigration from Turkey and Greece, the ideals of ancient Greece, a frozen border in Norway, and the relationship of national myths to refugees. She even touches on the migration of trees due to climate change toward the end of her quilted narratives. Ali’s trial comes back three quarters of the way into Markham’s mosaic. He is sentenced to ten years in prison and awaits an appeal. Her personal goal is ending immigrant detention; she stresses the economic advantages for countries who allow immigrants to enter and work, highlighting plights of various humanitarian workers. To her, maps become a way to perpetuate myths of nationhood. She questions herself as she writes, always trying to put together her own pieces, her own map. Her book moves quickly, always surprising, never disappointing.

NCBR review of Guerrilla Blooms by Daniela Catrileo, translated from Spanish by Edith Adams

Eulalia Books

Originally written in Spanish by poet and activist Daniela Catrileo and translated into English by Edith Adams, Guerrilla Blooms features a trilingual presentation of writing that also includes translations of the poems by Danny Reveco into Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people, also known as the Araucanians. In searing lines with forceful, disruptive images, these brilliant poems document Mapuche resistance to the colonial powers of Chile and Argentina in invocations that read like rituals, a gathering of poetic material for sustenance: “we returned to the other language / collecting sap like tongues that are ready / for the savage downpour / of tomorrow.” The four long sequences that comprise the volume masquerade as narrative, but their real creation is a voice, expertly articulated by Adams, that pushes back at authoritarian power using all the means available to it. As Catrileo reminds us in her introduction: “There are an infinite number of ways to dislocate the colonial narrative” and one of them is poetry.

NCBR review of No Gods Live Here by Conceição Lima, translated from Portuguese by Shook

Phoneme Media/Deep Vellum

No Gods Live Here is a groundbreaking publication, one of the few comprehensive collections by an African poet and the only translation of a woman from the small island-nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. Conceição Lima poetic oeuvre, spanning over twenty years and several books, speaks through the history of colonization and liberation while evoking a spirituality that arises from the terrain and flora of the island. Lima writes, “I feebly say your name and free a bird / Hidden in my voice, anchored in insomnia’s light. / I shoo away omens to cast out the erosion of prophecy. // Did the angels desert or was it I who stole their wings?” (“3” of When Velvet Tamarinds Flower on Pico São Tomé). Her poems range from lyrical meditations to historic depictions and questioning to poetic series, exploring philosophical and psychological themes—all interwoven with the distinctive aspects of life of São Tomé. Translator Shook has adeptly rendered the poems into English with extensive consultations with Lima. It’s a lovely bilingual edition with generous notes that allows the reader to profoundly experience Lima’s voice.

NCBR review of To the Letter: Poems by Tomasz Różycki, translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Archipelago Books

Born in 1970, Tomasz Różycki is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose in his native Poland. The poems collected in To the Letter move from casual and chatty to devastating with a quick shift in line, associative thoughts leaping out like small flames. Różycki populates his poems with lovers and travelers unable to find a place of arrival among the changing hours: “It seemed we’d given time the slip, but when / you took a bite of apricot, there it was again.” (from “The Garden”) Similarly, a number of poems haunted by the refrain “I wish you were here” reach out across an ever-present divide that the poem approaches again and again, never quite able to cross the void. Mira Rosenthal’s outstanding translations read like original poems in English: subtle, musical, and swift while never slipping into translation-ese. Różycki has found an eminently worthy translator in her hands. An extensive afterword by Rosenthal places the poetry in context of contemporary Polish culture, tracing many of Różycki’s allusions and discussing formal elements of the original Polish verse.

NCBR review of Chronicles of A Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiên, translated from the Vietnamese by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

Yale University Press

An exquisitely unique novel, Chronicles of a Village reveals the world of a rural village, its mythologies and histories, its intricate relations with birds and mountains, its growing seasons and ancient crafts, what is said and what is written. All this undergoes slow attrition under continual attacks of “history,” from the period ending French colonialism, to the wars with the United States, and the Communist takeover. The narrator, a young man, tries to make sense of all that as, one by one, his family members are murdered or taken. Shifting from a lyricism interwoven with nature and village mythology to historical accounts and the narrator’s stream of consciousness, the novel offers the reader a collage for understanding the terrain of changes. This novel asks for poetic and patient readers: “All these sounds echoing through the village were the confessions of a place ever reluctant to be positioned, ever reluctant to be fixed.” Translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng has so adeptly rendered this poetic prose into English, transposing the distinct sentence style and lyricism of the original. She has gifted to the English language one Vietnam’s major contemporary writers, Nguyễn Thanh Hiên, whose extensive work has found limited publication. We can only hope for more.

NCBR review of Jénifer, or a French Princess: The (Truly) Unknown Islands by Joel Neto, translated from the Portuguese by Diniz Borges and Katharine F. Baker

Letras Lavadas Edições/Bruma Publications

Intriguingly, the reader is not sure when this book is journalism, and when it glides into fiction. The main character, Jénifer, is unique—you’ve never seen someone like her before in a book. Jénifer is a girl of ten who lives in a housing project on an island in the Azores of Portugal. Despite her surroundings, her possible special needs, and her lack of role models, Jénifer uses inventive language to imagine herself becoming a marine biologist, a fashion model, or a unicorn. The narrator shows the desperation in this public housing complex without making the residents less than, or more than human. Ultimately, this book is a cry to save the lives and talent of all those who live in neglected communities. Diniz Borges and Katharine F. Baker have chiseled an English text that conveys the creative phrasing and slang expressions in the Portuguese original.

NCBR review of The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations by Andriy Sodomora, translated from the Ukrainian by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi

Academic Studies Press

Ukrainian classicist Andriy Sodomora is renowned in his home country for his superb translations of Greek and Roman classics. But as this volume demonstrates he is also a master of the prose meditation, exploring in depth the meaning and circumstances of such varied phenomena as a mitten, a dead owl, a rainbow, and a jug of wild strawberries. A genial, thoughtful companion, aware of time passing in ways that echo Virgil and Horace, Seneca and Augustine, Sodomora leads us through the streets of Kyiv, where it always seems to be rainy and cold. The past is not dead but it is elusive, as when Sodomora attempts to conjure his mother’s smile but can only see the family’s wooden coffee grinder, “golden-hued, with a shiny nickel top.” Maybe, he conjectures, maybe he didn’t see his mother’s smile enough. Instead he remembers “her face heavy with sadness, staring into the distance.” In these moody, introspective vignettes, Sodomora demonstrates what can be discovered simply by looking inside oneself. Gracefully translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi, Sodomora’s educated, allusive prose offers often overlooked fragments of the present, discovering in them the scent of the past.

NCBR review of Eloísa's Musical Window by Margarita Engle, illustrated by John Parra

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Eloísa’s Musical Window is a gorgeously illustrated book inspired by stories from Margarita Engle’s mother’s childhood in Cuba. Young Eloísa loves music but cannot afford a radio, so she finds music in the rhythms and melodies drifting through her open window. Birds and cats create daily choruses, neighbors’ radios play songs through the air, and children in the street shake maracas and beat bongo drums, lutes, cowbells, and güiros. The shy Eloísa finds inspiration in the beautiful music she hears from behind her barred window, but when her mother falls ill and the family cannot afford medicine, Eloísa wonders if la música can heal and comfort her mother as it has always done for her. This heartwarming story celebrates the power of music, family, and community to provide joy and healing during hard times.

NCBR review of The Man Who Didn't Like Animals by Deborah Underwood, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Clarion Books

The Man Who Didn’t Like Animals is the amusingly illustrated story of the courtship of cats, the friendship of dogs, the rowdy good nature of geese, the companionship of chickens, the cheerfulness of pigs, the goodness of goats, and the curiosity of cows. But primarily it is the sweet, funny, intriguing story of the conversion of a lonely man who prefers a tidy house to the messy imperfection of love. The man, as the title indicates, doesn’t like animals; but animals adore him. They show up on his doorstep, fly in through his windows, curl up on his lap (and sometimes on his head); watch the sunrise with him, garden with him, offer unwanted advice while he’s cooking, and even join him in the tub while he’s taking a bath. Gradually, without realizing it, he comes to love them; and when he tries to throw them out so he can return to the sterile imperfection of a house where everything is in perfect order, his heart nearly breaks. So he comes up with a solution, and at that point, the plot suddenly takes a wonderful, unexpected twist that neither small children nor adults are likely to anticipate.

NCBR review of The Night Market by Seina Wedlick, illustrated by Briana Mukodiri Uchendu

Random House Studio

Inspired by author Seina Wedlick’s and illustrator Briana Mukodiri Uchendu’s memories of traditional Nigerian markets, The Night Market is a lush, magical feast for the eyes, ears, and imagination, and a joyful celebration of a culture. Mukodiri Uchendu’s illustrations capture the glow and shimmer of a fabulous market glittering in the night as a young girl leads the reader through booths and stalls offering primroses that bloom only at night, strange-looking keys that open interesting locks, a peacocks’ parade, jazzed up performers, sparkly fabric, freshly baked mooncake, and so much more. This jewel of a book delivers on Wedlick’s wish expressed in her author’s note, to invite every child to visit with the turn of a page.

NCBR review of The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko

Knopf Books for Young Readers

This well-written, engaging story raises tough questions about kids forced to grow up too fast due to the failings of the adults in their lives. Eleven-year-old Hank’s mother has substance abuse issues. When she disappears—again—he tells himself and three-year-old sister Boo she’ll be back soon, but this time it’s been a week. With the landlord threatening eviction and their cereal supply running out, Hank tracks down an emergency contact found on a school form. She takes them in but favors Boo, and Hank faces his fears of further family separation. Missing his mother and his old school, Hank manages to find new friends, allies, and encouragement for his talents. Things get worse when his mother flees court-ordered rehab and shows up with an alarming plan. Hank and Boo eventually end up together in a new home—not the one Hank wanted, but a place where they can thrive—and in the process Hank discovers inner reserves of strength and resilience and learns a more expansive meaning of family.

NCBR review of The Long Way Around by Anne Nesbet

Candlewick Press

Imagine a gripping wilderness survival story, but one where the protagonists pitted against hostile nature are not yet in their teens. Amy, her sister Vivian, and cousin Owen have wangled permission to spend a night solo on the other side of a pass from their parents’ campsite in Sequoia National Park. When an earthquake blocks the pass, they have to find and hike an arduous trail, “the long way around” to get home. A dreamer who prefers stories to real life, Amy fears wildfire. The more prosaic Vivian is anxious about starting middle school and also—inconveniently for scrambling over high mountain passes—has vertigo. Owen’s PTSD from a serious car accident has left him feeling disconnected. Making it back requires them to overcome these personal challenges to find the strength, courage, and resilience to work together effectively. The book is a real page turner, with believable, engaging characters and taut suspense leavened by a droll wit, and the Sierra landscape is accurately and vividly portrayed.

NCBR review of The Wrong Way Home by Kate O'Shaughnessy

Knopf Books for Young Readers

Frankie lived a peripatetic life with her mother before arriving as a five-year-old at The Ranch, as ecluded country commune in upstate New York run by Dr. Ben. For six years, as “Fern,” she experiences the commune’s routines, seeing more of Dr. Ben than her mother, and not attending formal school. Late one night, shortly before Frankie is to undergo a mysterious rite at Dr. Ben’s insistence, her mother wakes her and bundles her into a taxi, leaving their possessions behind. In California they begin a new life, with Frankie attending school. Her mother has kept their whereabouts unknown to Dr. Ben, but Frankie wants to return to the only stable environment she has known and contacts him. When she learns more about Dr. Ben and why her mother left the commune, Frankie must decide whom to trust, what is truth, and what is home. A suspenseful story that captures the moment when children realize not all adults are trustworthy and that they themselves are responsible for their lives.

NCBR review of When the World Tips Over by Jandy Nelson

Dial Books

Wynton Marsalis apparently said “Every moment in Jazz is a moment of crisis, and you bring all your skills to bear on that crisis.” Marsalis was probably talking about the tensions and instabilities inherent in jazz’s devotions to collaborative improvisation. He could as easily have been talking about When the World Tips Over. The Fall siblings, all named after virtuoso jazz trumpeters, inhabit a funhouse mirror of the California wine country, and Nelson uses magical realist sensibilities brilliantly to heighten the intertwining of beauty and cruelty, abundance and emptiness, infinite creative invention and the bottomless human capacity for self-destruction. The multiple-POV narrative is itself an ensemble jazz trope. Dizzy Fall, a bullied child who sees ghosts in the vineyards and can’t remember her mysteriously absent father, is twelve when a rainbow-haired apparition named Cassidy saves her life. Cassidy goes on to create ripples that affect all three of the Fall children, and, as with an experimental jazz track, there are moments of crisis that aren’t fully resolved. But the things that do work are hauntingly perfect and bursting at the seams with personality. There’s a less than ideal amount of reckoning with some especially bad decisions by adults in this story, but that’s arguably one of its most realistic features. Meanwhile, the depictions of teen and tween angst, confusion, death and grief, love, dependence and individuation are note-perfect, the atmospherics are captivating and the prose feels lit from within.

NCBR review of Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay

Kokila

Timely, and also timeless, Randy Ribay’s Everything We Never Had tracks four generations of Filipino-American men from rural Ilocos to the fields and orchards of the Salinas Valley to Philadelphia during the pandemic lockdown. The progression of generations tells an archetypal immigrant story—gradual, against-all-odds financial security, but also conflicted identities, family dysfunction, alienation and displacement. But equally, this multi-POV novel is a quiet masterclass on generational trauma, familial versus societal expectations, father-son power dynamics and the universal quest to be comfortable in our own skins. Ribay’s style is naturalistic, and restrained almost to the point of terseness (which is fitting enough, given the four protagonists all struggle to make themselves heard in one way or another). His characters are ringingly authentic, and his use of four voices coming from four different contexts brilliantly highlights each protagonist’s personal blind spots; the way the book toggles back and forth in time underpins the strong sense that each of these men is unwittingly in a solitary confinement that’s partly of their own making. This novel is blazingly sincere, clear-eyed, and unflinchingly compassionate.

NCBR review of Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham

First Second

Bestselling graphic novel creators Yang and Pham blend their talents to tell a poignant story about fate, family, community, falling in love, Valentine’s Day, and the Lion Dance. The story is set in Oakland and has cultural elements which are a hybrid of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. No one in Valentina’s Vietnamese American family has ever found lasting love. She’s been told that her mother passed away when she was a baby, leaving her and her Dad alone. But every year, she finds an anonymous valentine in her mailbox. When Val reaches high school, that experience is forgotten. Val thinks she is cursed, that her family is cursed; she believes that she only has a year to find true love or lose it forever. Throughout the book Val is haunted by the ghost of Saint Valentine. This makes the story more than just a romantic “meet cute”; the plot also involves some interesting complexities. Among them is the cultural significance of the Lion Dance in the context of Vietnamese TET, Chinese New Year, and American Fourth of July. Underlying the story is a comedy of errors based on valentines and the resolution of this confusion is what leads Val to her true love. This brilliantly rendered YA love story is laid out with a fresh, original adolescent sensibility which readers of all cultures will identify with.