Girl in Translation
reviewdate:
Oct 26 2015
isn:
9781101187487
Tagged with immigrants
Fire Horse Girl, the
reviewdate:
Oct 2 2015
isn:
9780545532242
author demographic:
author gender:
medium:
recommendation:
West of the Jordan
reviewdate:
Jan 29 2015
isn:
978-080708359-8
author gender:
book type:
medium:
author demographic:
Behind the Mountains
Danticat tells a story similar to her own, but set about twenty years later and with plenty of other elements to differentiate it from a fictionalized memoir, about a Haitian girl, Celiane, moving to the US and reuniting her family.
reviewdate:
Dec 19 2013
isn:
0-439-37299-2
author gender:
medium:
recommendation:
author demographic:
book type:
free:
Cooked Seed
You may recall that I was enthusiastic about Min's first memoir, Red Azalea and her novel Wild Ginger. I expected to like Cooked Seed twice as hard. It starts more or less where Azalea leaves off--at Min's emigration to the US. Somehow, even after the stories of Cultural Revolution privations, cruelties and humiliations in the first part, Seed is harder to take. I guess because you can blame Min's problems on her, or maybe because you have to blame some of her problems on the United States.
reviewdate:
Oct 19 2013
isn:
978-1-60819-424-7
author gender:
medium:
author demographic:
Dancer Daughter Traitor Spy
What a disappointment this book is. Great title, great elements--a clairvoyant teenage dancer from the USSR relocated to Brighton Beach--and there's not enough dance, the psychic moments are easy to miss, you don't care about the characters, and the whole spy/traitor thing--whatever. The one good part of the story is 1982-83 Brighton Beach. Also the cover is attractive.
reviewdate:
Aug 31 2013
isn:
978-1-61695-263-1
author gender:
medium:
Anya's Ghost
Russian 1.5 generation immigrant teenager Anya Borzakovskaya falls down a well and meets a ghost. The ghost is scary at first, then helpful, then scary again and in the end helps Anya learn valuable lessons and quit smoking.
reviewdate:
Apr 13 2013
isn:
978-1-59643-713-5
author gender:
medium:
Always Hiding
"Do you still love him?" I asked.
"With all the bile in my body."
That exchange between a Filipino daughter and mother was basically the high point of the novel for me.
reviewdate:
Jan 29 2013
isn:
0-688-15632-0
author demographic:
author gender:
book type:
medium:
Something to Declare
Although I love Alvarez's novels, I found her book of essays to be a little meh. In fact, I stopped just before the halfway point. It might be zines' fault. I've read a lot of similar themed essays (about feeling half in one world and half in another, due to immigrant status, mixed race identity or the loss of one's native language) in dozens (hundreds?) of zines.
reviewdate:
Dec 27 2012
isn:
0-452-28067-2
author gender:
medium:
author demographic:
book type:
free:
Beyond the Pale
This is such a Rivington Street readalike that it’s hard not to compare the two. Both begin in Russia around the turn of the 20th century and move to the Lower East Side after a pogrom. Both are about young Jewish female union workers and both have lesbian characters, and both depict the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Quotations:
“You sound like a capitalist, all excited about machinery,” I said. “Aren’t you afraid that [linotype] will put printers out of work?”
“I was, but now I understand that the more books and pamphlets there are, the more men will read.” He dropped his voice. “And with this machine, we can make up our own pamphlets when the boss is out and melt the evidence before he comes back.” He leaned back in the sunlight, very pleased with himself.
The Williamsburg Bridge was its own sin. Its construction, Lena told me, made hundreds of people homeless when their buildings were torn down. A little like pogrom of progress, burning anything in its path, making Jews take to the roads with everything they owned on their backs, or move in with their relatives and landslayt, crowding more than we were ever crowded in Kishinev.
reviewdate:
Jul 28 2011
isn:
0-88974-074-7