Eight adults, each for their own reasons, reach the point they feel abandoning their homes in Sweden in favor of enduring a treacherous sea voyage to New York is the only way to find a dignified life for themselves and their eight children. The sixteen featured emigrants joined more than sixty other courageous souls onContinue reading “Book Review: The Emigrants”
Tag Archives: fiction
Book Review: Wild Ginger
Anchee Min’s Wild Ginger relates a love story in the midst of turmoil told from the point of view of a teenage girl, Maple, who suffers at the hands of a bully, Hot Pepper, because Maple’s father was in a forced labor camp at the beginning of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She meets the title character, WildContinue reading “Book Review: Wild Ginger”
Book Review: The Genie Who Had Wishes of HIs Own
Margaret Harmon’s 22 21st-century fables provide lessons about greed, hubris, jealousy, pride, procrastination, living through others, idealism, creativity, wasted opportunities, optimism vs pessimism, and the question of just what is success. Some are reminiscent of traditional fairy tales, especially three involving magic lamps and turbaned genies, “The Ingénue and the Genie,” “Freeing the Genie,” and “The Second-bestContinue reading “Book Review: The Genie Who Had Wishes of HIs Own”
Book Review: Deadly Little Secrets
In Loren Zahn’s second Theo Hunter mystery, Deadly Little Secrets, her protagonist, sometimes freelance journalist Theodosia Hunter, agrees to help out an old flame, now a Catholic chaplain, Tony Machado. Father John Fairbanks, a priest, teacher, and coach years ago at St. Augustine’s, a private Catholic high school when Tony attended, was found murdered, with theContinue reading “Book Review: Deadly Little Secrets”
Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns
During years of occupation by the Soviet Union and inter-tribal warfare in Afghanistan, two Afghan women of different generations and regions and very different socioeconomic situations find marriage to the same older man the immediate solution to stay alive when each loses her parents. But marriage brings its own problems, including brutal beatings by theContinue reading “Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns”
sandrayeaman.com 