In the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by another six Southern states. Among the countless contentious points between the Union and the fledgling Confederacy was the existence of a 75-man ...
Read ReviewAs Erik Larson recounts in The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours later, Union Major Robert Anderson and his small force surrendered with no loss of life. Ironically...
Read ArticleDaughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. Overall, First Impressions readers loved the book, awarding it an outstanding average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars.
What Daughters of Shandong is about:
This book is a work of fiction, ...
Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong
Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences...
Read ArticleBrooklyn-based novelist Xochitl Gonzalez is an inspiring writer to follow. At forty, she decided to pivot in her career and pursue a lifelong dream of writing fiction. She enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and in 2021 received an MFA. A year later, her debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming ...
Read ReviewThe title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, ...
Read ArticleThe titular protagonist of K. Ancrum's young adult novel Icarus lives a double life that mixes the mundane and inexplicable. By day, he is like any other high school senior, managing his classes, navigating student cliques, and preparing for the frightening and exhilarating independence lurking just...
Read ReviewIcarus and Helios in Greek Mythology
The titular protagonist of K. Ancrum's young adult novel Icarus denies that his name is an allusion to the famous character from Greek mythology and reveals that his mother christened him after the scientific name of a beloved fern, Icarus filiformis. Nonetheless, Icarus's denial of this ...
Read ArticleThe poignant, accessible poems in Palestinian American author Hala Alyan's fifth collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, emerge from a family history of Arab diaspora. Simultaneously tied to and cast out from various war-torn nations of the Middle East, generations of her family have been exiles. ...
Read ReviewA Reading List of Palestinian American Literature
Hala Alyan, author of the poetry collection The Moon That Turns You Back, has also published two novels: Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award; and The Arsonists' City. Her work is part of a flourishing Palestinian American literary scene. For a ...
Read ArticleWe so often think of plants as stationary creatures—they are rooted in place, so to speak—that it can be easy to overlook the biological ingenuity that allows them to thrive in many locations at once. Plants are in fact anything but sedentary. Throughout human history we've moved them ...
Read ReviewFew plants have impacted world history as profoundly as Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. Jessica J. Lee, in her book Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, describes how tea is integral to both seemingly disparate halves of her family tree—her Welsh paternal grandparents and her ...
Read ArticleMay 15, 2024
This issue of The BookBrowse Review contains reviews and "beyond the book" articles for 16 titles, including Colm Tóibín's Long Island, Rachel Khong's Real Americans and Caoilinn Hughes' The Alternatives. We also bring you the latest book news, previews of upcoming books and much more.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.