BookBrowse Review:
Novels set in foreign locales offer windows into other worlds; not the peek of a week-long vacation but something akin to a lived-in comfort. And setting a novel in Japan is, by nature, a world of contrast for western audiences.

Japan kept itself isolated from the western world until American gunboat diplomacy forced it open in the 1850s. It is in this time, before our "black ships" arrived and when Japan was struggling to maintain...    Continue Reading

BookBrowse Review:
I loved this book. If I'd read this book when I was 14, I would have written that with capital letters and exclamation points, the page soggy with tears. Remember when you could read a book and feel like it was written just for you? That the author was writing about your own private world, your singular thoughts, the startlingly originality of you and your friends? The feeling is absolutely thrilling, but it fades as we grow older and...    Continue Reading

BookBrowse Review:
Writers pegged as "regional" are a lot like character actors: both can become wedged so tightly into one hole they can never be taken seriously elsewhere. Of course, this isn't always a negative. Faulkner is largely considered a regional novelist, a Nobel laureate who created a whole oeuvre built around a mythical world known as Yoknapatawpha, based on the area surrounding his native Oxford, Mississippi. Likewise, most of Daniel Woodrell's...    Continue Reading

BookBrowse Review:
Rwandans have a favorite saying: Imana yirwa ahandi igataha i Rwanda. "Wherever God spends the day, He comes home to sleep in Rwanda." For much of the early 90's though, as the country was torn apart by tensions and later genocide, this statement would have been hard to believe.

Naomi Benaron's incredible debut novel, Running the Rift, is set during one of the most tumultuous times in Rwanda's recent history. The...    Continue Reading