Review: Icarus Falling by Christopher Paul Meyer ★★★★
There’s an addictive quality to Meyer’s writing. He really knows how to turn […]
Review: Shattered by the Wars by Hi-Dong Chai ★★★★★
Shattered by the Wars, by Hi-Dong Chai, should be required reading. This powerful coming of age memoir is a story of love, faith, suffering, and sacrifice.
Hi-Dong Chai had to overcome many obstacles in such a short amount of time. During World War II, Korea was under Japan’s control. They imprisoned his father because he was a Christian minister who refused to bow down to the picture of the Japanese emperor. His brother volunteered for the Japanese military in hopes to save his father. During the Korean War, his father was taken away by two North Korean officers. He never […]
Review: Mom On The Road by Allyson Primack ★★★
When Maggie Stevens turned forty, something unexpected happened. She went on the road as her son’s guardian, who was part of a Broadway show touring America. Maggie doesn’t know what to expect. What she finds is herself.
The most enjoyable aspect of this novel is Maggie. She’s neurotic, insecure, energetic, and entertaining. As she tells her story, she doesn’t hold back, including sharing her experience in a hotel bathroom with a vibrator. The reader is told everything that Maggie thinks and feels. […]
Review: Sex, Drugs & Islam by Dari Ghaznavi ★★★★
The title alone suggests that Ghaznavi is a man who takes chances and fears no one. Again and again, Ghaznavi puts himself in situations that would kill most people, or at least end up in an extended prison stay. […]
Review: The House on Sunset by Sarafina Bianco
Some books demand to be written. This is one. And it also demands to be read. Ignoring domestic abuse cannot go on. Authors like Sarafina Bianco are sounding the alarm and we should listen. Heeding the alarm isn’t always easy because it forces people out of their comfort zone. The House on Sunset does just that.
Sarafina was a high school English teacher. She had recently purchased a new home, which was an accomplishment she was proud of. Not everything was going well, though. Her boyfriend of a year and half […]
Review: Forty Bibles and Forty Dictionaries by Hae-Lyun Kang
Forty Bibles and Forty Dictionaries is an autobiographical account of the lives of author Hae-Lyun Kang and her family: Korean, Catholic and middle-class, living in Sydney, from 1970 to the present. With an obsessive mother, a hard-pressing father, unusually-humored sisters, and a brother who fired two shots at Charles, Prince of Wales in January of 1994, Kang describes from her own perspective how she and her brother both grew into becoming who they are, and what may have lead her brother to the infamous circumstances in Sydney.
Advertised as the “memoir on the family of the man who committed affray […]
Mongolia Monologues: One Woman’s Quest to Experience, Learn and Grow… by Joanne Nussbaum
There’s a refreshing […]
Review: Choices by Staffan R.B. Nordqvist
There is a trend in self-publishing for the “selfie” book, a written version of the frequently-seen Instagram snap that appears online so often. Choices: A Physician’s Journey On Two Continents by Staffan R.B. Nordqvist is such a book: a memoir of a Swedish doctor who emigrates to the USA.
Sometimes humorous, sometimes hard, Nordqvist makes the step to New York in this passage,
[…]I arrived in New York in the early evening. It was raining, cold and dark. I took a taxi to Manhattan and MSKI, my new employer. I told the driver how happy I was to be back