On the Front Line : The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper)

I really respect and admire people who are totally dedicated to their work. Especially those people who often make sacrifices of their own to help the more unfortunate. I believe that being a war correspondent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Journalists put their lives at risk to bring news of atrocities committed around the world. I am referring to the journalists who make an effort to go into the heart of a conflict, not sit back in their comfortable hotels and report their stories secondhand from refugees, soldiers, and international aid workers. Marie Colvin was one of those people. 

Marie Colvin was an American who has been a war correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1986 when she covered the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in Libya. Since then, she has reported on conflicts around the world. She has covered the Iran-Iraq War, she stayed in Baghdad throughout the bombing during the first Persian Gulf War, she was also the first journalist to enter Kosovo from Albania with the Kosovo Liberation Army after the bombing by NATO planes.

She lost the sight of her left eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka but that didn’t stop her from going back to other conflict zones after her recovery. She went back to the Middle East to report on the continuing problems facing Israeli-Arab relations, the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and the resurgence of Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban fighting against Hamid Karzai’s government. She also sent dispatches from Iran, Egypt, and Libya, until she was killed in February of 2012 while covering the uprising in Syria. 

On the Front Line is a collection of her reports in the various conflicts she has covered. Several of the articles focus on the Middle East - the Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, Soviet Jews escaping persecution and finding refuge in Israel’s Occupied West Bank. She has interviewed Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and was one of the three remaining journalists in Dili, in East Timor where the United Nations were planning to pull out leaving hundreds of East Timorese to fend for themselves against the Indonesian army and militias. However, thanks to her reporting the U.N. reversed their decision to pull out. Colvin says, “I embarrassed the decision-makers and that felt good because it saved lives.”

Colvin’s long experience has taught her that most governments lie or distort the truth to cover up what they are really doing and the only way for the world to know is to go in and report what she sees. The Sri Lankan government was a case in point. The northeast part of the island was controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), a militant organization that fought to create an independent Tamil state because of the discrimination and violent persecution of them by the majority Sinhalese who dominated the Sri Lankan government. 

The ban against journalists going to the Tamil-held areas meant they could not speak with any of the leaders of the L.T.T.E. “even though the government was involved in negotiations with them through a Norwegian envoy to begin peace talks. The only news of the problems with those negotiations came from the government”. 

The ban also meant that reporters had no first hand accounts of the nearly half-million civilians living there, more than half of them being refugees. The people “were suffering under an economic embargo that the government denied existed.”. Colvin was the first foreign journalist to enter the Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka. After she filed her story and tried to make her way back to the government-held area, she was shot in the eye, thus the eyepatch that became her famous trademark. 

I am fascinated and repulsed by crimes against humanity. After Colvin’s narrow escape from Sri Lanka, she’s often asked if the risk was worth it. Some people call her brave while others say she must be stupid. Colvin responds to her critics and supporters alike. She says, “there’s no way to cover war properly without risk”. She doesn’t care about what kinds of planes were flown, what types of tanks were used or the size of the artillery being rained down. What she is most concerned about is “the experience of those most directly affected by the war, those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive.” 

It amazes me as to how barbaric people can become. Colvin’s articles do not whitewash any of the facts - random killings, looting, rape, violence, torture, friendly neighbors turning on each other because they are of the wrong party or race. It appears it will take the world another millennia or more before all people realize that in war, it is the average citizen, young and old alike, who suffer the most. What the world truly needs are more people like Marie Colvin to continue writing the truth about the atrocities of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

When Noah goes to the mailbox and finds a letter addressed to Bird, even though there’s no return address, he knows who it’s from. Only two people in the world still call him by his real name, Bird--his mother who vanished three years ago and his only friend, Sadie, who’s also disappeared. The handwriting on the envelope is his mother’s and so is the drawing that he finds inside--a single piece of paper covered with cats, an illustration from a story his mother used to tell him when she tucked him into bed at night.

After his mother’s departure, Bird’s father has demanded that he tell anyone who asks that she’s not a part of his life anymore. All traces of her have been destroyed and Bird’s memories of her are shadowed and incomplete. It’s Sadie who reawakens them by showing him an article she’s torn from a newspaper. His mother is Margaret Miu, a famous poet. The title of her poem, Our Missing Hearts, has become a battle cry for rebels and Miu is regarded as the leader of the rebellion.

PACT is what the rebels are fighting against--the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. This is an integral part of America, installed after The Crisis that almost wiped out the country’s economy, a disaster for which China carries the blame. Chinese Americans are suddenly under suspicion, Bird’s mother most of all through the power of her words.

Suddenly Bird sees them everywhere, on scraps of paper, on posters tacked up by invisible hands, in gigantic white letters painted in front of an installation of crocheted red yarn from which dolls are suspended. 

PACT, Sadie tells him before she runs away, is why she’s in a foster home. She was taken from her parents because they were part of the rebellion--and, she says, she’s only one of many children who were forcibly stripped from their families. She and the others are “the missing hearts.”

As Bird searches for a book that might hold the story that he dimly remembers, he goes to the library where a friendly librarian helps him in his quest--and remembers both Sadie and his mother. She even knows his true name and the poem that has made his mother infamous. She’s part of an underground railroad that does its best to find the missing children and reunite them with their parents. 

Suddenly Bird becomes consumed by the thought of his own quest--to find his mother and bring her home. Armed with a mysterious address that he finds by chance and the postmark on the letter he was sent, he goes off alone on a bus from Boston to New York City.

Celeste Ng has recreated the turmoil, paranoia, and inhumanity of our present century in a novel that examines this with the soft and magical touch of a fairy tale. Bird’s journey is guided by the stories his mother read to him from books by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. From them he’s learned to trust in the guidance of strangers and to be undaunted by what appears to be matters of wild coincidence. The Duchess, the reappearance of Sadie, the bleak circumstances that govern his mother’s life are all part and parcel of the web of folktales that have informed his life.

Adult readers may find this magical construction more difficult to accept. In a world where children have been separated from their parents and may never find their way home, where Asian Hate is so prevalent that it’s featured as the cover story in magazines, and where China has become the scapegoat for many in America, one that’s responsible for everything from covid to rampant inflation, this gentle version of our reality may be offensive and infuriating.

But Ng has constructed a setting where cruelty can be combated with persistence and hope. Beneath her contemporary fairy tale setting is a call for individual action, buttressed by a sense of individual responsibility, conveyed by characters who could be real, who could be us.~Janet Brown

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell (Doubleday)

I was shocked and appalled at my utter lack of knowledge on the history of the modern Middle East. The area has been a hotbed of controversy and conflict since ancient times. However, the Middle East as we know it today was created after the end of World War I. 

Mary Doria Russell has created a novel in which a young school teacher comes into an inheritance and travels to Egypt and meets and interacts with a number of historical figures including Winston Churchill before he became Prime Minister, T.S. Lawrence, more commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Bob Hope makes a guest appearance as well. 

To be honest, I was familiar with Winston Churchill, only after he became Prime Minister. I had thought Lawrence of Arabia was a Hollywood creation, and I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was. But thanks to Mary Doria Russell’s meticulous research, I now know that before Churchill became Prime Minister, he was the Secretary of State for the Colonies and oversaw British foreign policy in the Middle East. That T.E. Lawrence was an actual person, and it was Gertrude Bell who was a notable person for helping to create the Kingdom of Iraq. 

Dreamers of the Day is narrated in the first person by Agnes Shanklin, an unmarried school teacher living in the Midwest and the eldest of three children. The time was 1918 when the “Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning”. Agnes’s family was not immune to the plague and she lost seven of her relatives including her sister and brother-in-law, Lillian and Douglas, their two young sons, her Uncle John, her mother, and her brother Ernest. 

Lillian, Agnes’s sister, had married a professor at a college they both attended and he was offered a post to teach at the American Mission School in Jebail in Syria, in what is today known as Byblos in the country of Lebanon. There, she met and became friends with T.S. Lawrence. It was in 1919 when Agnes’s sister called her and told her that she and her husband were taking her to a talk given by Sir Lawrence. It was after this that she and her family contracted the deadly virus. Agnes was the only one to survive.

After settling the affairs of three separate estates, Agnes found herself “with plenty of money and no family of my own to support” so she booked a passage and took the trip of a lifetime. She made reservations to stay at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. The year was 1921 the Semiramis Hotel was chosen as the site for the Cairo Peace Conference, a secret meeting held by British officials to partition the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire and would become the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Into this world comes a single, middle-aged lady from Hawaii who finds herself in the company of celebrities and dignitaries alike. Agnes also finds romance, albeit with a married man who is a German and is Jewish as well. She surmises that he is a spy because she is taken in by his charm and chivalry.

Russell’s story is as entertaining as it is educational. It teaches us the rich history of the Middle East but it also sheds light on the arrogance and condescension against natives by the core of the British bureaucracy. Russell has one of her characters state, “They believe that freedom is an object to be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.” 

The rebuttal by Agnes Shaklin is priceless as she replies, “They must surely know what freedom isn’t. It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation”. A major point for a lesson in American history. 

Unfortunately, the Middle East is still a land full of conflict. The Palestinians have yet to be given their own nation, the Kurds are still nationless as well. It may be another millennia before anybody sees any real changes in the Middle East. We can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne (Penguin Random House UK)

Adrian Gyle hovers perilously on the edge of the old acronym, FILTH, Failed in London, Try Hong Kong, but in his case this is reversed. Although he’s lived and worked in Hong Kong since The Handover, he’s still known only as “a writer of something or other,” a self-described “excellent nonentity.” What has kept him afloat in his adopted city--and what’s kept him from returning to London as a failure-- is a bit of luck, a friendship from his university days with the son of a Hong Kong billionaire, a frivolous but loyal comrade. 

Jimmy Tang sees himself as a kind of Pygmalion, buying his old college chum the suits that will distinguish him from other journalist hacks, taking him to Hong Kong’s best restaurants, inviting him to parties where Gyle meets “useful friends.” But Hong Kong has changed over the past decades. “The disturbances”  have erupted and the divisions they have caused are jagged ones. Students, police, and Triad thugs battle it out on the streets while families like Jimmy’s, “servants of stability,” stay aloof, worrying that the revolutionaries will “spoil their paradise.”

Gyle is emotionally detached from the battles that he witnesses until he meets Jimmy’s latest girl. Rebecca To is beautiful, articulate, 23, and a rebel. From a family so closely linked to Jimmy’s own that the two of them are committing “social incest,” she comes to dinner bearing the scent of tear gas. 

Gyle, after three meetings, becomes infatuated with his friend’s girl and when she mysteriously disappears soon after she and Jimmy have broken up, he is haunted by Rebecca. Is she one of the many bodies who have shown up in Victoria Harbor? Could Jimmy’s visit to a morgue, one where a drowned girl has recently arrived, be a sign that this dead girl might be Rebecca? And who has sent an anonymous email to Gyle with details of Rebecca’s final days and of the way she died, an email that implies that Jimmy was complicit in her death?

The real mystery of On Java Road is the book itself. Is it a thriller or a tale of the supernatural? Is it an adventure steeped in class differences and political change or just a lengthy description of Hong Kong that’s been cloaked with an overlay of fiction? 

There’s a fine line between detachment and complete disinterest that Lawrence Osborne’s novel flirts with. He gives more details about the sartorial and gustatorial habits of Hong Kong’s plutocrats than he does about the revolution that’s tearing the city apart. When conversations between his characters threaten to illuminate local politics, he removes all quotation marks and gives a brief and superficial summary of reported speech. The book is rich with Gyle’s interior thoughts and observations while every other character exists in a shadow land, amorphous and allowed only brief moments of animation.

Much praised for his sense of place, Osborne excels in his evocative portrait of Hong Kong, a city that he clearly loves. His observations of its neighborhoods are vivid enough to make readers want to get on the next plane and see this beauty for themselves. Unfortunately it also gives rise to the feeling that On Java Road is a collection of lovely pieces written for a glossy travel magazine that have been grafted onto a slender novella. Although Osborne has often been compared to Graham Greene, this work is more reminiscent of the kind of short story written by W. Somerset Maugham. Appropriately enough for the season, this is a ghost story--and the ghost of a novel that never really comes to life.~Janet Brown

Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan (Groundwood Books)

Rukhsana Khan is a Canadian children’s book writer who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. She writes mostly about Muslim culture and the Middle East.

Wanting Mor is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Jameela is a young girl and a devout Muslim whose mother is her inspiration. She was born with a cleft lip and because of that she didn't have many friends. Her father is originally from Kabul and is currently helping to build a new road for the rural village that they live in. 

The story opens with the death of Jameela’s Mor, the Pushto word for mother. Without her mother’s guidance, Jameela doesn’t know what will become of her life. There is no school in her war-torn village so she can not read or write. Jameela often avoided her Baba, the Pushto word for father. He had an unpredictable temper and didn’t like the way he would look at her lip, “like somehow it was my fault I was born this way.”

A few days later as Jameela is doing the laundry, her father returns from work and says to pack up everything and tells her they’re leaving. He tells her he sold all their belongings and said they were moving to Kabul. Jameela couldn’t protest and the only thing she was able to take with her was a bundle of her wet clothes and a comb. 

She does manage to say goodbye to her Mor at her gravesite. Jameela who has never left her village feels that she can hear her mother saying, “Remember the man who asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) for advice. What did the Prophet (peace be upon him) tell him?”  “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.”

Her father takes them to a house where Jameela is immediately put to work. She can see her father getting money from the man who owns the house. The man’s wife first tells her to clean the pots in the kitchen. They need scrubbing but Jameela who has never lived in the city has never seen soap. The dishes are done by using ash. Jameela doesn’t know what soap is, she can’t believe that you can get water inside the house and don’t need a hauling bucket. 

Jameela tries her best to please the woman of the house. She quickly learns how to use a gas stove, how to use water and soap to scrub pots. What she can’t get used to is seeing her father act the way he does - drinking alcohol, getting drunk, dancing with another man’s woman at a party. She has to keep reminding herself - “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.” It becomes her mantra of sorts. 

Things do not work out at the house but Jameela’s father already had a new plan in motion. He drags Jameela to another house and tells her, “Jameela, this will be your new mother”. Jameela’s new stepmother is even more demanding than the previous woman. The mother treats her like a slave and doesn’t like her. Finally, one day, Jameela’s father takes her to a busy market with him. He tells her he needs to do something, then abandons her there. 

What becomes of Jameela is tragic and yet inspiring. A kind-hearted man takes her to an orphanage where she at least has a temporary home, makes friends and learns how to read and write. She is a testament to her faith and convictions. Her Mor always remains in her heart. Mor was her mentor, her role model, her pillar of strength. Now with no mother, and no father too, Jameela must face the world on her own. Her mother always told her, “If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good.” She takes this advice to heart and endures a countless number of hardships before an orphanage takes her in. 

The author, Rukhsana Khan says that although the story is fiction it was based on an actual incident. She read a report on children in crisis that was issued by Afghanistan’s department of orphanages. In the report, it mentioned the story of a girl named Sameela. Her mother had died during the war, her father remarried and the new stepmother didn’t want her, so the father took her to the marketplace and left her there. 

It’s so sad to hear of reports like this and at times I found it irritating how governments refer to civilian deaths as “collateral damage” but the statistics doesn’t include the hundreds, if not thousands, of children, who are left as orphans. And the actions of the father in this story is as repulsive as the true life report. When will world leaders learn, “in war, there are no winners” or as the United Nations tweeted on their official Twitter account, “There are no winners in war, but countless lives will be torn apart.” ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk (Europa Editions)

Keith Chen has escaped from Yongjing, the rural village in Taiwan where he grew up, a place so small that the only privacy the inhabitants know is found in the secrets they carry. Secrets, Keith learns early in life, breed violence. “We never held you,” his dead father tells him in a ghostly confession that no human can hear, “We hit you instead.” 

In Berlin, secrets haunt the lives of Keith and T, the man who wants to marry him but is constrained to a domestic partnership by German law. Unable to answer the questions his lover asks in the one language they share, Keith writes down what T wants to know, in stories that T is unable to read. T’s own secret emerges in acts of sadism that culminate in his death. His murderer goes to prison and when Keith is finally released, he returns to his village and the four sisters who survived their childhoods. 

Ghosts are commonplace entities in Yongjing: the woman who haunts a deserted bamboo grove, Keith’s father whose death fails to remove him from his family, the most beautiful of Keith’s sisters whose lush body encloses an aridity that drives her to suicide.  But when he returns, Keith discovers his own ghostliness, moving through a changed landscape, where odors provide his only orientation and his sisters prove to be his only anchors.

Kevin Chen tells this story through the voices of the dead and the living, each one unfolding a narrative that’s brutal, steeped in sensory details that rarely make their way into fiction, relieved by surprising bursts of humor and quick flashes of beauty. Every voice rings out with its own individual timbre, carrying its own particular burden of memories. Slowly secrets come into the open, bit by bit, until the facts appear in stark truth, losing their power once they’ve been told.

Ghost Town is a shocking novel in the way it toys with its readers’ emotions, while maintaining a stoic and matter-of-fact unveiling of its details. A child striptease artist becomes an unlikely savior; a girl is punished by witnessing her grandmother kill her dog and serve it as the family dinner; a nouveau riche mansion is described in satirical detail, right down to the waterbed that’s filled with “melted snow from the Swiss alps.” In prison Keith takes comfort in knowing that he’s “small fry compared to some of the guys” with whom he’s acting in a version of Hamlet. “The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.” Then there are the sisters, each one of them a small masterpiece of sibling rivalry, coming together “like bacon in a skillet…I know where your scars are, you know where I hurt…The sisters kept turning on the heat.” And it’s doubtful that any reader will fail to be surprised by what emerges at the story’s end.

Everyone in Yongjing, ghosts and survivors, exist outside of the world at large, “in a time zone all of their own.” The dead, observing the present, often seem more alive and aware than the living, who carry the weight of the past. As Chen asks in his Afterword, “Do you become a ghost only after you die? Or can you qualify as a ghost while you are still alive?” It’s a question that taunts and haunts, one that will keep this novel alive long after its last page has been turned.~Janet Brown

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang, translated by Julia Lovell (Anchor Books)

Eileen Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing, was born in Shanghai, China in 1920. She was studying literature at Hong Kong University, but returned to her hometown in 1941 during the Japanese Occupation. Her stories are about life in 1940’s Shanghai and were highly acclaimed by the book buying public, although she was panned by critics for not focusing more on the political climate of the times, especially after the communist takeover. She first moved to Hong Kong then found her way to the United States. 

Lust, Caution was first published in 1979 and unlike most of her stories, focuses on characters involved in the radical and patriotic movement of the times. It is set in Shanghai and Hong during the second Sino-Chinese War. Radical Cantonese students plot to assassinate Mr. Yee, the head of intelligence in Wang Ching-wei’s government, a real historical figure who formed a collaborationist government with the Japanese occupying forces in Nanking between the years of 1940 and 1944. 

At first the students planned to assassinate Mr. Yee in Hong Kong but their plans were thwarted as Mr. Yee and his family unexpectedly returned to the mainland. The students were going to abandon their plans due to a lack of funds and no chance of getting close to Mr. Yee again. This is also when the female conspirators denounce Chia-chih as being a whore for having sexual relations with Liang Jun-shung, also a student conspirator who trained Chia-chih in the art of seduction. However, Mr. Wu, a member of the underground resistance against Wang Chie-wei’s government, offers to sponsor the student’s plans in Shanghai. 

Wang Chia-chih is a student actress who is assigned the role of Mai Tai-tai, he wife of a fictional Hong Kong businessman named Mr. Mai who was made bankrupt after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong. It is Chia-chih's task to seduce Mr Yee and lead him to his final demise. After the loss of Mr. Mai’s business, Mai Tai-tai decides to do a bit of smuggling herself and takes some luxury items to sell in Shanghai where she is soon introduced to Mr. Yee’s wife. 

Chia-chih’s becomes a member of Yee Taitai’s mahjong circle and has a secret affair with Mr. Yee. On the day of Mr Yee’s assassination attempt, Chia-chih has a change of heart and tells Mr. Yee to run.

The story was also made into a feature length film in 2007 and was directed by Ang Lee, who also writes an Afterword in the book. The character of Chia-chih is believed to be based on the real-life spy named Zheng Pingru, who gathered intelligence on the Japanese Occupying forces and attempted to assassinate Ding Mocun, the security chief of the Wang Ching-wei government. 

As Lust, Caution is a novella, the story is fast-paced and some of the supporting characters are not fully developed. As soon as they are introduced, they are never heard from again. Also lacking is the backstory to Chia-chih’s affair with Liang Jun-shung.The act of betrayal to the student conspirators leaves the reader baffled. Has she fallen in love with Mr. Yee? Does she believe that his feelings for her are genuine as well?

In the end, it is still up to the reader to decide why Chia-chih did what she did as Mr Yee escapes and the students, including Chia-chih, are captured and are all put to death. After the execution, Mr Yee realizes that he did love Chia-chih but did what he thought he must do to prevent any rumors spreading, and thus it can be said of their romance, “In war, there are no winners, but all are losers”. ~Ernie Hoyt

After the Last Border by Jessica Goudeau (Viking)

The United States is peopled by the descendants of immigrants. Despite this, U.S. immigration policy has historically been ungenerous. Emma Lazurus’s poem The New Colossus, written in 1883, has always been the ideal, not the reality. “The huddled masses yearning to be free” have received a grudging welcome through “the golden door.” Jessica Goudeau vividly reveals this in After the Last Border, through the stories of two immigrant women and a concise history of America’s stance toward immigration.

A year before Lazurus wrote her classic poem, the US slammed the door on Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A battle between restrictionists and liberalizers of immigration has been raging ever since, with racism fueling the restrictionist side. Like the president who would come long after their first appearance, restrictionists wanted “literate, upper-class, white, Northern Europeans without disabilities.” Even those criteria failed to save the 937 Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Hitler on the MS St. Louis in 1939. Refused entry into the United States, the passengers were sent back  to Europe where 254 of them died in concentration camps.

Scarred by that act of cruelty and fueled by the Cold War, U.S. immigration softened to allow entry to refugees from Communism. First the Hungarians and Cubans arrived, and after the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 came Southeast Asians. But the policy ignored Haitian refugees and Nigerians who fled the Biafran war. Racism still lurked under the surface, limiting immigration as best as it could.

Goudeau shows the mercurial nature of U.S. immigration policy through the stories of very different women whose experiences diverge because of the rapid changes that can come to that policy without warning.

Mu Naw is the lucky one. She, her husband, and their two children arrive as refugees in Austin, Texas in 2007. Karen villagers who had fled Myanmar for the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand, Mu Naw and her family had never known security and they welcome the idea of resettlement. Young and rootless, the young parents find their new life is one where they can make a living, as sparse as entry-level positions will allow, and where their children can be educated. Mu Naw had lived in refugee camps since she was five. In spite of the challenges and hardships that come her way in Texas, she proves to be more adaptable than her husband and eventually more successful. When they buy a house in 2016, her husband admits this achievement is because of her efforts.

Hasna is less fortunate. In her midyears, she too comes to Austin, nine years after Mu Naw, with her teenage daughter and a husband who has been so badly injured that he’ll never work again. War in Syria disrupted her life as an affluent, educated, proud matriarch, sending her across the border into Jordan. When she’s advised to apply for refugee status, she turns it down--until she learns that family resettlement is a key provision in immigration policy. Her husband’s objections to this plan are silenced by an explosion that tears his body apart and her adult children are scattered across different countries. The thought that they could all be together again, along with the promise of medical care for her husband, propels Hasna into the bureaucratic thicket of paperwork and interview that will take them away from war to a family home in another country. She arrives four months before Donald Trump is elected president. Two months later, his ban against Muslim immigrants and his dismantling of the family resettlement policy turns Hasna’s dreams into a waking nightmare.

Jessica Goudeau’s skillful and intimate journalism gives the narratives of Mu Naw and Hasna the pace and detail of a novel, interspersing them with chapters that illuminate the policies that have shaped these women’s lives. What could easily have been a polemic is instead a quiet and heart wrenching history that is too little known by most of us and should be read by all.~Janet Brown

A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master (Albert Whitman & Co.)

Irfan Master lives in London but has set A Beautiful Life in Gujarat, India where his family comes from. It is his debut novel. The story centers around the Partition of India. To understand the story, we need to understand the Partition of India. This was the division of British India into independent nations - Hindu dominated India and muslim dominated Pakistan and East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh. Once the British left and the two nations were left on their own, it spawned one of the greatest migrations of people in history. There was also an outbreak of sectarian violence between Hindus and Sikhs on one side fighting against Muslims on the other and an estimated 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed. 

The year is 1947, approximately three months before Partition. Thirteen-year old Bilal is a young Muslim boy taking care of his father who is lying on his deathbed. Bilal’s mother had already passed away and his older brother was hardly ever at home. Bilal senses that there is something wrong with the neighborhood he grew up in. He can’t put his finger on it yet but he feels the tension in the air and recognises the changes in the market. Two stallholders who used to be partners, one making daal while the other made rice. Now, they each have their own stalls selling the same item.

Bilal opens the story by making a confession as an adult. “Everybody lies. We all do it. Sometimes we lie because it makes us feel better and sometimes we lie because it makes others feel better.” 

What was the lie that Bilal told? It was something he felt he should not let his Bapuji (father) know as he felt the truth would send his bapuji to his death early. Bapuji is not only Bilal’s father, but he is also his guide and mentor. He was a well-educated man and was well aware of his condition. He told his son that he would need to make arrangements to live with his sister in Jaipur. 

Although Bilal agrees with what his bapuji says, he has no intention of moving or leaving his bapuji to die alone. Bapuji is always asking Bilal for news. Especially on the issue of the government reaching a decision to divide the country. He tells his son, “the soul of India can’t be decided by a few men gathered around a map clucking like chickens about who deserves the largest pile of feed.”

The only thing Bilal wants is for his father to die in peace. So, with the help of his friends Chota, Manjeet, and Saleem, they scheme to keep the news of India’s impending Partition a secret. They also devise ways to intercept potential visitors to Bapuji, even his own doctor. But how long can they keep this a secret? And will Bapuji die knowing his India is still one and the same?

I found the story to be very reminiscent of the 2003 German film [Good-bye Lenin!] which has a similar plot. In the movie, the story follows a family in East Germany. The mother is a dedicated socialist but falls into a coma in October of 1989 before the November Revolution. She awakes eight months later in June of 1990 not knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall or that East Germany has reunited with West Germany to become the nation of Germany. Her son tries to protect her from the truth as he believes it may kill her. 

A Beautiful Life is about filial duty and having the courage to face inevitable changes…in life, in the environment where you live. It is about trying to understand the hatred between people just because they follow a different religion. The death and violence caused by the Partition of India may have been avoided if the British who were leaving didn’t just arbitrarily assign a line dividing the nation in two. A Beautiful Life is a beautiful and poignant story and although written for a younger generation, the ending will stick with you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt

All the Right Places : Traveling Light Through China, Japan, and Russia by Brad Newsham (Vintage)

Some men may cry, some may get violent, while others may calmly accept the situation, however when Brad Nesham’s wife asked for a divorce, his response was to buy a one-way ticket to Tokyo, and head east from there. 

Brad Nesham shares his adventure in the Far East in what would become All the Right Places. It is a journey of self-discovery as Newsham tries to sort out his marital woes and come to grips with the reality of his life’s problems. Some may think he is just running away and avoiding the truth. His wife had been asking for a divorce for months, she moved into her own apartment, and even mentioned that she was seeing someone else. 

Newsham believes that what his marriage needs is another journey. His wife was his former travel companion, going to places such as India and Nepal. He strongly feels that his wife will join him eventually and things would resolve themselves, but life isn’t all that simple. The year is 1985, a time that is slightly ahead of Japan’s bubble economy era and when the Cold War was a cold reality. Still, Newsham finds himself in Okubo House in Tokyo, Japan.

Okubo House is a relatively cheap inn popular with budget travelers and backpackers. It is located near Shinjuku in Tokyo. The start of Newsham’s journey was less than auspicious as he “cursed himself for not having researched Japan, for having come on the spur of the moment armed only with a budget traveler’s guidebook and a half-read copy of Shogun.”

In Japan, Nesham is reluctantly baptized by a Japanese Christian, hits the batting cage with another guest from Okubo House, is approached by by a horny housewife who says to him, “Zex wiss you”, which he refuses as he still believes this trip may save his marriage. 

He cycles his way to Mount Fuji and spends about ten days around the Japanese Alps. He cycles all the way to Kyoto, stays at a place called Tani House and experiences zazen, a Buddhist meditation practice, at a nearby temple. Newsham then hitchhikes to Hiroshima, visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum where he is moved and saddened by what America did to Japan to end a war. 

On his way to Hong Kong, Newsham has a telephone conversation with his wife which still rings in his head. He kept going over in his mind the words he heard, “I think we should just tear up the divorce papers.” followed by “I want you to come home now”. And yet, Newsham chooses to stay on the road. 

Newsham checks into a monstrosity called the Chungking Mansions, located on the mainland side of Hong Kong Harbor. “Chungking is highly regarded by the sort of budget traveler who is unworried by pawnshops and girlie shows and men on nearby corners and in doorways, hissing, ‘Hash! Coke! Smack!’”. 

On his way to the mansions, Newsham meets Amy, an American girl, on the bus. Unbeknownst to Newsham at the time, Amy would become his traveling companion in China. Amy had been waiting for her boyfriend Dylan, who she said was a former junkie but could kick the habit anytime. As Dylan never showed up or left a message, Amy decides to travel with Newsham…as buddies, not lovers. 

For the final leg of Newsham’s journey, he boards the Trans-Siberian Railway alone and will make his way to London, traveling through Mongolia and Russia, which was still known as the Soviet Union at the time. He would meet and have adventures with a host of characters also riding on the same train. One of them being the epitome of the “ugly American” tourist. 

Newsham’s travels to mend his broken heart and to resolve the possibility of divorce is always at the back of his mind. He constantly writes affirmations in his notebook reminding himself that he is “in the right place, at the right time”. 

As much as I understand taking a trip to get away from your problems, I don’t believe it will help to solve anything. Yes, you may forget about them while traveling but the problems will still be there when you return. His divorce papers went through and although he and his wife still love each other, they decided to have an “amicable” divorce and continue to be great friends. 

Traveling after having your heart broken is quite common and is something I have done myself. Although I didn’t spend as much time as Newsham did on the road, I did decide to go to Shanghai, China for a week’s stay without any plan whatsoever. It may not have healed my broken heart but it was worth it for the experience of really traveling on my own. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai (HarperVia)

Rintaro Natsuki is a teenage orphan whose grandfather, the man who brought him up, has recently died. A reclusive boy, Rintaro is well on his way to becoming a hikikomori, a hermit who clings to solitude and is deaf to social cues. He spends almost all of his time in the secondhand bookshop that his grandfather owned and nurtured, a place where Rintaro is able to hide away and burrow into the pages of a book. Now that he’s alone in the world with only an aunt whom he barely knows offering him a home, Rintaro stays in the bookshop, ignoring both his school and the classmates who try to lure him back outside. Although he knows he needs to close Natsuki Books, he refuses to leave its walls until one night a visitor shows up--one who’s too unusual for even Rintaro to ignore.

“I need your help. There are books that have been imprisoned.” This statement borders on madness, especially because it comes from the voice of a large plump tabby cat.  

Not only is this a feline with the power of human speech, it’s one that’s mastered the art of sarcasm and quotes Antoine Saint-Exupery. Rintaro, despite his natural misanthropic inclinations, lets the feline draw him into four separate adventures, each involving the future of the printed word. 

There aren’t many writers who can bring adult readers into a world of youthful fantasy and keep them there, riveted and captivated. Sosoke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books takes its place beside C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a work of imagination that knows no age barriers. 

Much of this, at least at first, is due to the sardonic, sarcastic cat who keeps Natsukawa’s book from falling into an overload of sweetness and whimsy. This feline is no Disney character. It’s mean.

As he lures his teenage comrade into missions that are impossible for Rintaro to refuse, they sweep up anybody who loves bookstores, books, and the act of reading. The threats that the cat urges his follower to combat are ones that imperil the literary world right now and the weapons that Rintaro finds within himself to combat them will resonate with every reader.

Whether he encounters the speed-demon who believes the importance of reading is found in he number of books consumed rather than in the act of rereading, considering, and savoring them, or the man who tears books apart to distill them into one or two easily read sentences, Rintaro is able to point out the flaws in these beliefs. More difficult and more dangerous are the final two opponents that the cat brings to light.

The publisher who believes the only books that should survive are the ones that will sell in huge numbers brings to mind trends in current publishing houses and slows this break-neck plot into one that evokes into thought and terror. Not only could this happen, it is happening. Then comes the soul of a book that’s survived for almost 2000 years but realizes it’s losing its power. What can keep it from being “just another bundle of paper?” 

“I’m showing you the gap between idealism and reality,” it tells Rintaro, who feels the lure of cynicism and defeat. His response is one to remember and to reread, one that will shape young readers and hearten those who are older.

This quiet little book is one that will become a classic for everyone who treasures the art of reading, the solace of a bookstore, and the dazzling power exerted by pages that have been printed, bound, and brought to life.~Janet Brown

The Applicant by Nazli Koca (Grove Press, release date February 2023)

A prose poem that serves as a preface gives a misleading cast to Nazli Koca’s smart and enigmatic novel, The Applicant. “I will do whatever you ask…For Free.” Although this is the stereotypical image of immigrants who hope to come to the West, this isn’t Leyla.

Leyla is what used to be called “a slacker.” She comes to Berlin from Istanbul to gain the MFA that will give her credibility as a writer. Now after six years in a city that she’s allowed to intoxicate her, her thesis has been rejected and she’s lost her student visa. She’s spent all the money that was left to her from her father’s depleted wealth, wasting it gleefully on living a vagabond life, but Leyla still clings to the idea of privilege. Educated in international schools that gave her fluent English and an American point of view, she always knew she’d leave Turkey for Europe--she deserved it. Now she fights to remain in Berlin, on a temporary visa while waiting for her thesis to be reevaluated and approved.

Sharing an apartment with an expat from Cuba, Leyla works as a cleaner in a hip hostel, a clandestine job that she can skate through while concentrating on her real life-- the one that gives her the freedom to be high and drunk, while dreaming about writing. She drifts into an affair with a Swedish “good-hearted giant from a Grimm’s fairy tale.”, a man who’s never smoked a cigarette nor taken a drug, a right-wing conservative whose favorite food is “American cuisine.” The Swede takes her to his country, introduces her to his family, and wants to marry her. As Leyla’s dream of having her thesis approved seem less and less conceivable, she begins to cling to this man as her “antithesis,” not a dream but a pragmatic possibility.

It would be easy to dismiss this novel as a rehash of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll novels of the cocaine-fueled 80s as told by Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz, but Nazli Koca is far too smart to fall into that category. Framing Leyla’s narrative in the form of her diary, she dissects the varying degrees of privilege, where all the winning cards seem to be held by “journal-published, MFA-holding, successfully employed” American men. She shows the exhilaration that comes from the freedom of living in a place where the only forbidden speech is the two words that come as a pair, both beginning with the letter h, along with the hope that comes with that freedom--and its accompanying threat of self-destruction. Most of all, she reveals the inequities that come with a passport--where some are allowed to travel as they wish while far too many others are caught in bureaucratic regulations and restrictions. 

“I’m so tired ot the anxiety that’s attached to my passport,” Leyla complains, but she learns her Turkish passport is one that might only be good for pulling her back home. “Mastering the art of escape” is as much of an illusion as her belief that the life she’s adopted has given her the protection of invisibility. 

“A poor immigrant who wants to create art is irrelevant,” she says, but Leyla’s immigrant status is tentative, despite her background, her education, her fluency in English. “My weapons never stood a chance against death or life,” she says, as she discovers there are no easy solutions. Wisely Nazli Koca doesn’t offer any, concluding only with uncertainty and the uncomfortable truth that when it comes to immigration, the dice are loaded and the game is rigged.~Janet Brown

Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series by Kenji Miyazawa (International Foundation for the Promotion of Languages and Cultur

Kenji Miyazawa was a Japanese novelist and a writer of children’s books. He was born in Iwate Prefecture in the town of Hanamaki. He is known internationally for his novel Night on the Galactic Railroad which has also been published in English with the title of Milky Way Railroad, Night Train to the Stars or Fantasy Railroad in the Stars.

Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series consists of ten  books published by the International Foundation for the Promotion of Language and Culture (IFLC). The mission statement of the IFLC is “to translate and introduce Japanese literature to the world: to translate and introduce outstanding literature of other countries: to aid and encourage excellent translators of various languages: to provide scholarships to students of all nationalities: to sponsor seminars for language learning; and to conduct translation-proficiency examinations.”

To put it more simply, the aim of the IFLC is “to further linguistic and cultural exchange and mutual understanding throughout the world” and is authorized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science of Japan. 

At the time of writing this review, the local library in Aomori Prefecture carried only three of the ten titles in the series. I will be featuring Books 1, 5, and 7. The titles of the books are [The Shining Feet], [The Bears of Mt. Nametoko], and [Crossing the Snow]. 

The Shining Feet - originally titled Hikari no Hadashi was published in 1997 and is translated by Sarah M. Strong with illustrations by Miyuki Hasekura. This story centers on three characters. Ichiro, his younger brother Narao, and their father. The setting is the cold harsh winter of northern Japan. The father is making charcoal in the mountains as an extra means of earning income for the family. The boys are visiting their father for the weekend. As Miyazawa was a devout Buddhist, this story is all about karma and the enduring pain and suffering while still holding compassion for others. A little heavy for a picture book if you ask me. 

The Bears of Mt. Nametoko - originally titled Nametokosan no Kuma was published in 1998. It was translated from the Japanese by Karen Colligan-Taylor and illustrated by Maso Idou. This story is about matagi culture. Matagi are traditional winter hunters of Japan’s Tohoku region. They mostly hunt deer and bear. In this story, Kojuro is a matagi and is about to kill a bear, but the bear begs Kojuro to spare her life for another two years as she is pregnant. In return, the bear will willingly sacrifice itself to Kojuro after the two years are up. 

Crossing the Snow - originally titled Yuki Watari and was published in 2000. It was translated from the Japanese by Karen Colligen-Taylor and illustrated by Maso Ido. This story is about the relationship between humans and animals. However, in Miyazawa’s story, it is only children who are less than twelve-years-old as they are still considered quite innocent and pure. Crossing the snow is a metaphor for leaving the human world and entering a world where humans and animals live harmoniously together. 

I always find that children’s books are not only for children but can be enjoyed by adults as well. As a resident of the Tohoku area of Japan since 2016, I have become more interested than ever in the writers from this area. Whenever I find their publications are available in English, I can’t help but buy them or check them out from the library. I believe local writers often give you insights to their hometowns and if you decide to move and live there, what better way to get to know your neighbors if you can discuss stories they are most likely familiar with. ~Ernie Hoyt

Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie (Bloomsbury)

Vicki Mackenzie was taking part in a month-long Buddhist meditation course in Pomaia, Italy when she first laid eyes on a woman’s whose life story she would eventually write about. “A somewhat frail-looking woman in early middle age, with fair skin and a rather rounded back. She was dressed in the maroon and gold robes of an ordained Buddhist nun and her hair was cropped short in the traditional manner.”

It would be late in the evening at dinner when a man sitting next to her at the table pointed out the woman again and said, “That’s Tenzin Palmo, The Englishwoman who has spent twelve years meditating in a cave over 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas.” 

It would be a few months later when Mackenzie would pick up a Buddhist magazine and found an interview with Tenzin Palmo. What Tehzin Palmo said in that interview would change Mackenzie’s life as well. Palmo had stated, “I have made a vow to attain Enlightenment in the female form - no matter how many lifetimes it takes.” 

Mackenzie felt that female spirituality was seriously lacking in role models. “The lamas who taught us were male; the Dalai Lamas (all fourteen of them) were male, the powerful lineage holders who carried the weight of the entire tradition were male, the revered Tulkus, the recognized reincarnated lamas, were male, the vast assemblies of monastics who filled the temple halls and schools of learning were male; the succession of gurus who had come to the West to inspire eager new seekers were male.” 

Mackenzie wanted to know, “Where were the women in all of this.” Now here was a woman who said she was going to change that. From that article in the Buddhist magazine, Mackenzie would seek out Tenzin Palmo to find out more about her - Where did she come from? What had she learnt in that cave? What made her take the vow. 

Cave in the Snow is Tenzin Palmo’s story. It is about how an Englishwoman, formerly named Diane Perry, had become an ordained Buddhist nun. It is the story of Palmo’s spiritual journey which takes her from her small town in England, to finding a guru in India, then making a vow to meditate in a cave high up in the Himalayas. 

Tenzin Palmo spent twelve years meditating alone in the cave, dealing with the harsh weather, wild animals, near-starvation and facing her own personal demons, all in the name of following the path to enlightenment. 

It is the story of her overcoming many obstacles along the way - people telling her it was too dangerous, monks saying women would not be able to survive the harsh conditions or cope with the solitude. But Tenzin Palmo is no ordinary woman. She proved all her detractors wrong. She’s very modest about saying what she has gained from her near isolation but her determination to help women on their spiritual path has not waivered one bit. 

I, for one, am a skeptic about the mysticism and seemingly supernatural powers of spiritual leaders and gurus but I find the spiritual journeys people take to be inspiring and admirable. It isn’t anybody who can give up their comfortable life, their family, their friends, and move to a foreign country whose language you don’t know or don’t understand to find the answers to your own question about “Who am I?” or “Why am I here?”. Tenzin Palmo is definitely an interesting individual. You will be moved by her courage, admire her perseverance, and you may even be inspired to take on your own spiritual journey. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Music by An Yu (Grove Press, release date January 2023)

Even before the pandemic came to change the world, every body contained a city of ghosts, one that got rid of dead cells, facilitated the departure of those that were dying, and formed new replacements. Physically we’re all mixtures of what was, what is disappearing, and what is new. Mentally we struggle to reconcile memories of what’s past with the memories we make of a confusing present. In our external environments we’re faced with the same predicament each time we walk outside, working to make sense of death and flux. Seeing how quickly the memories of what once was in place fade away, we’re confronted with the inevitable question: When we’re gone will we be remembered? How can we ensure that we’ll survive in the memories of others?

Song Yan, a young urban housewife, is disturbed one night by a lucid dream, so vivid she can’t find her way out of it. Confronted by a small orange mushroom that has the power of speech, she asks it whether it’s real or a dream and is told “Sometimes these two things are not so different.” 

“I’d like to be remembered,” the mushroom says before it vanishes.

At one time, Soon Yan was once a gifted pianist.  Now she’s a piano teacher, a woman, still young,  who believes she has turned her life over to her husband. It takes a series of mysterious gifts, boxes of fresh mushrooms, to reawaken her curiosity, especially when a letter arrives that reveals the giver. The boxes have been sent by a legend from her past, China’s most famous concert pianist, who disappeared so thoroughly years ago that he’d been given up as dead.

The letter contains Bai Yu’s address and a request that she come to visit. When Song Yan musters enough courage to grant this wish, Bai Yu tells her, “Help me find the sound of being alive.”

Together the two pianists search for what lies within the cave of a musical composition and slowly Song Yan discovers a depth in her life that extends beyond the routine she’s fostered. Then Bai Yu goes away once more and the orange mushroom returns, larger and more invasive than when it first showed itself.

An Yu has written a novel that’s is as haunting and elusive as a musical composition played on a piano. Is Bai Yu dead or alive? For that matter, is Song Yan truly alive after submerging her musical talent in a life over which she has no control? And what the hell is that mushroom and its attending crop of orange fungi that eventually cover an entire room--plus the piano that stands within it?

In a story that’s both eerie and revelatory, dabbling in magic realism and yet firmly rooted on a real street in a real neighborhood in a real city, An Yu posits that to be remembered after death, it’s necessary to live a life of joy and purpose. Song Yan slowly recovers her authentic self in a process that’s both painful and exhilarating, a survival story for our time.~Janet Brown

Meatless Days by Sara Suleri (Penguin)

Sara Suleri Goodyear was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the daughter of Z.A. Suleri and Mair Jones. Suleri was a Pakistani journalist, author, and was also an activist for the Pakistan Movement, a political movement whose aim was to create an independent Muslim nation from British India. Mair Jones was from Wales and was an English professor who taught at a university in Pakistan. Suleri herself taught English at Yale University.

Originally published in 1989, Meatless Days is Suleri’s memoir. A new edition was published in the Penguin Women Writers series in 2018. However, this book is not just a biography of her life, it is about the people and nations that shaped her life. It is about living and experiencing life in the newly created nation of Pakistan, having an early education in the United Kingdom, and dealing with the mystery of the American Midwest. It also reads like a soliloquy on what it means to be a woman. 

In her discourse, Suleri says leaving Pakistan was the same as giving up the company of women. She goes on to say that “the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that just living, just living, conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”. 

In her numerous autobiographical accounts, she starts off with talking about her Dadi, the mother of her father - her grandmother. It seemed to Sara that her grandmother had a special relationship with God. “God she loved, and she understood him better than anyone.” Sara’s Dadi could also be greatly moved by food. Sara and her sisters “pondered but never quite determined whether food or God constituted her most profound delight”. 

One of the most interesting chapters is about Suleri’s friend Mustakori, a woman who had an array of nicknames - Congo Lise, Fancy Musgrave, and Faze Mackaw. Suleri met Mustakori at Kinnaird College which she was attending. Her memory of Mustakori, although humorous, sometimes verges on the disrespectful as when she and her friend Dale were talking about her. Dale says, “That girl is amazing because…” to which Suleri responds, “Because…she was born stupid and will die stupid. And that’s the end of that.” What a thing to say about an innocent friend. Suleri and her older sister Ifat and other friends found Mustakori’s innocence confounding.

However, Suleri’s most profound chapters focus on her older sister Ifat. Early in the novel, we are told that Ifat was killed in a similar way as her mother. They were both the victims of being hit by a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver who hit Ifat never stopped and looked back and was never caught. The incident happened just two years after their mother died. The love for her

sister is evident in the way she wants to avoid the tragedy and to focus on how her sister had such a big impact on her life. Ifat was four years her senior. She was born beautiful, according to Sara. It was one of her casual friends that told her she had to write about her sister’s death. She responded with a loud “Nonsense”, but after getting home she recalled the conversation, Suleri comes to the conclusion, “Ifat’s story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with a price the mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.”

Suleri’s memoir does not follow convention as we learn of her mother and sister’s death, only to have them come to life in later chapters telling the reader how each of them has shaped her lives. Her prose is flowing and full of metaphors and at times are quite hard to decipher. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was actually talking about a person or some object of her imagination. And as Suleri jumps from one relative or friend to another, we find ourselves in Pakistan, Great Britain, the American Midwest, Kuwait, and back to Pakistan. Sara Suleri had definitely lived a full and interesting life so I was a bit sad to hear of her passing this year in March. I hope one day to be as passionate about my family and friends and all those who shaped my life as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Betrayed by Reine Arcache Melvin (Europa Editions)

The story flowing from the pages of The Betrayed has the thickened, sweet darkness of freshly drawn blood. Reine Arache Melvin has created three main characters who could easily take center stage in a Greek tragedy. They inhabit a place that everyone has heard of, during an unnamed time that many will think they can identify. But the portraits of the two sisters, Lali and Pilar, along with Arturo,  the man they both long for, reveal only enough of what takes place around them to create skillful traps. One quick snap and all that seems to be understood becomes a lie.

The death of their father brings Lali, Pilar, and their mother back from a U.S. exile to their home in Manila. “The General” has been ousted but politics are so convoluted that even the new female leader must honor his godson, Lali’s husband Arturo. As new alliances are forged, Lali and Arturo’s marriage weakens. Arturo fell in love with a seductress. Now she’s soon to become a mother, a truth that shakes them.

Confused and floundering, they both take refuge in old habits. Arturo becomes attracted to his wife’s younger sister and pregnant Lali gives Pilar permission to comfort him. Lali, horrified by her changing body that no longer rivets the male gaze, comes across a foreign man in a shopping mall and decides he’ll become her prey. She fascinates him, but not for the reasons she expects.

Then both sisters are ensnared in the brewing revolution that lurks beneath the surface of the Philippines. Their story swiftly encompasses a burning village, a public decapitation, a dinner party with a man who would cheerfully see everyone at the table dead at his feet.

“I was wrong about Lali. People surprise you,” Lali once heard her father tell someone over the phone. She and everyone around her continues to surprise, going against easy assessments, right up to the conclusion of their stories. 

So does the novel’s setting. Arcache Melvin, in tactile detail, shows Machiavellian cruelty, casual corruption, and wealth that makes all wishes come true. Her trio are aristocrats, born into privilege and comfort that’s denied to the majority of Filipinos. Yet even with the insulation provided by their birth and breeding, both Lali and Pilar understand more about the people who surround them than does the foreigner Lali picked up in the mall, an investigative photographer who has steeped himself in places the sisters have yet to see, or the foreign missionaries who have made their homes in the middle of a revolution.  

“You don’t go deeper, “ Lali tells her photographer, “It’s all one-sided.” Yet within the kaleidoscope of violence and shifting loyalties of the Philippines, going deeper is like being hacked with a machete. The pain is excruciating and unfathomable.

Aracache Melvin takes her readers deeper. With skillful twists of her kaleidoscope, she shows one side, then another, with vertiginous speed and clarity. The Betrayed splits open a crack into a hidden world, quickly showing its brutality, its tenderness, its ghosts, and its darkest corners--and still by the end, readers will find themselves for answers to the enigmas they’ve been shown. “In the end, life gave more than it took away,” but for whom?~Janet Brown

Nuclear Blues by Bradley K. Martin (Great Leader Books)

Martin K. Bradley worked for decades as a foreign correspondent. He was mainly based in Asia. When he worked for Bloomberg News he was chief North Korea watcher. He gained his reputation on being a North Korea expert after writing the nonfiction bestseller Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader : North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. It was a comprehensive history of the country under the leadership of  Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

In Nuclear Blues Bradley has now turned to the world of fiction and has created a unique murder-mystery set in the Hermit Kingdom under the new leadership of Kim Jong-un. Included in his story is a Korean-American journalist-turned blues musician, suspicious men from the Middle East, and a Christian college in North Korea, credit-default swaps, Russia, nuclear missiles, and a mysterious woman who may or may not be related to the current leader. 

Heck Davis is a photo-journalist but has decided to give up the profession and become a blues musician. He still takes on the occasional story and finds himself at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, also known as the DMZ. It is a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula separating the countries of North Korea and South Korea and was established as a buffer zone between the two warring countries.

Davis was on assignment for an Internet-based news agency called AsiaIntel. He was with three other cameramen visiting the Joint Security Area (JSA) located in Panmunjom. His journalist friend Joe Hammond was also scheduled to show up at the JSA. But because Pyongyang has a strong distaste for foreign journalists, Joe had come to North Korea as a member of an ordinary sightseeing tourist. Davis timed his schedule to coincide with the tour group so he could see his friend. 

Davis’ current assignment was to take video for AsiaIntel. His editors want him to “gather military-themed footage from the southern side of the Cold War border relic.” Heck spotted his friend Joe but he felt there was something not quite right about him. “There was something wild in his eyes, something coiled and edgy about his posture.” 

Davis focuses his camera on the friend when said friend crouched, bent forward and rammed his head into one of the North Korean guards. As Joe was making a run toward the South Korean side of the J.S.A., he flashed his passport and yelled, “U.S. Citizen! U.S. Citizen” and looked at Davis and shouted “Sixty-seven twenty” before he was shot down and killed. Davis also noticed three letters scrawled on the palm of his friend’s hand - “CDs”. 

With the death of his friend, Heck Davis journalist instincts take over. He is determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Joe. He also needs to know what “Sixty-seven twenty” and “CDs” mean. But first, he must find a way to get back into North Korea. 

Thus begins one of the most original stories involving Kim Jong-un and a host of other characters. The further the story takes you inside North Korea, the more interesting and surreal the plot. Highly implausible but extremely entertaining, I for one couldn’t put this book down. It may not be the true essence of North Korea but with Martin’s background as a North Korea watcher, he makes it as real as it can possibly get. You may even want to visit the world’s most isolated country just to see for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books)

We all need a dash of romance in our reading lives, no matter how cynical we believe ourselves to be. History buffs can read volume after volume of past events but are rarely moved to tears as they turn the pages. Is it important to cry? Yes. Tears are a sign that we’ve moved beyond empathy into sympathy--feeling the same pain. Without that, our understanding is still removed, dispassionate, and easy to forget. 

History and romance are a hard combination to unite in literature, since one frequently threatens to submerge the other, but Jamie Ford did it in his debut novel, published thirteen years ago and still in demand. Cleverly juxtaposing past and present, Ford makes the days that began World War II in the US as real as anything we experience today, and he does this through the story of a childhood friendship that becomes a doomed love story--or is it?

Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe are both scholarship students at an exclusive white school, working together in the school lunchroom. Henry lives in Chinatown, Keiko in Japantown, Nihonmachi. Their two neighborhoods are adjoined but are divided by nationalism, prejudice, and privilege. The Japanese feel superior to the Chinese and the Chinese, like Henry’s father, hate the Japanese for atrocities Japan is committing in Nanjing and other Chinese cities. Even before Pearl Harbor brings the US into war with Japan, Henry leaves his house every day with a badge his father has pinned to his shirt. that says “I am Chinese.”

Born in the same city hospital, Henry is the child of Chinese-born parents while Keiko’s parents were bon in the US. Even so, when headlines are filled with Japan’s act of war, Keiko is the one at risk. In Nihonamchi bonfires in the streets consume anything that will link its residents with Japan. Family treasures are tossed from apartment windows and find their way to the flames. Signs for Mikado Street are replaced with ones with its new name, Dearborn. Japanese-owned businesses that have given economic life to the area are closed or are taken over by new owners. Japanese residents from all over the region are rounded up under Executive Order 9066 and are shipped off to internment camps, with almost 10,000 removed from Henry and Keiko’s city alone. When the Okabe family is put on a train and sent to improvised shelters built from cattle stalls in the county fairground, Henry discovers a way to visit Keiko. When her family is transported to Camp Minidoka in another state, Henry finds her. But Henry is only thirteen. His parents bitterly oppose his friendship with a Japanese girl and the two of them lose touch.

Decades later, when Henry is in his fifties, a discovery at the Panama Hotel that was once the pride of Nihonmachi makes headlines. In the basement of this neighborhood landmark are trunks and boxes that had been left in safekeeping when their owners were interned with only the possessions they could carry. As these artifacts are unearthed so are Henry’s memories and as he remembers, a vibrant community that has vanished comes vividly into light.

Ford has based his novel on solid facts. The Panama Hotel that was the sanctuary for jettisoned treasures stands in Seattle’s International District/Chinatown with belongings that were never reclaimed still in its basement. Along with a scant number of businesses and restaurants, this is all that remains of the prosperous community of Nihonmachi that once spread over almost the entire district. Until very recently its history had been forgotten and was given an impetus for revival by the meticulous renovation of the Panama and, in no small part, by Ford’s depiction of the past. 

The area has never recovered from the expulsion of its Japanese American residents. After reading Ford’s descriptions of the jazz clubs, the Japanese-owned barber shops, photography studio, the Nippon Kan Theatre, the Nichibei Publishing Company, all gone, a walk through the area is tinged with its ghostly past. Passing the historic King Street Station where Amtrak trains whisk passengers across the country, its carefully preserved architecture makes it easy to see the thousands of families being herded onto trains under the guns of soldiers. The cattle stalls of “Camp Harmony” haunt the shadows of the Puyallup Fairgrounds. The sadness of the past is palpable in the present, reawakened by Ford’s story of an interrupted friendship and a shattered community.~Janet Brown

Three Paper Charms by Shosuke Kita and Seion Yamaguchi translated by M. Owaki and S. Ballard (Shinseken)

Shosuke Kita was born in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost prefecture of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. He is a professor at a local university and researches folk tales of the Tohoku Region. Seion Yamaguchi is also an Aomori native whose occupation is an illustrator. Yamaguchi provides beautiful pictures to accompany the text.

Three Paper Charms is the English translation of Sanmai no Fuda. The tale is believed to have originated in either Aomori Prefecture or Saitama Prefecture in the Kanto area. Other scholars argue that the original telling of the story can be traced back to Niigata Prefecture. Although there are many variations, the core of the story remains the same. 

In the Tohoku region, the title is Kozokko ga Madadaga and was published in English in 2001. The story is about a mischievous little boy who is also an apprentice monk. As he was always causing trouble, the head monk decides to send the boy on a journey to learn self-discipline. 

The monk gave the boy three paper charms and said to use them only when he finds himself in trouble. As the boy walked and walked and walked, it became dark and he needed to find a place to stay for the night. 

He was fortunate enough to spot a light in the house and went to ask if he could have a bed for the night. A young and beautiful girl greeted him at the door and said he was more than welcome to stay. The woman fed him and he fell asleep shortly thereafter. 

The boy woke up in the middle of the night after hearing a strange sound coming from another room. As he took a peak, what he saw wasn’t the beautiful girl who greeted him at the door. He saw an old hag sharpening a knife and heard say, “How delicious the boy must be! He is young, plump and healthy!” The boy also heard her saying, “Let’s sharpen the knife, make it as sharp as possible, and then I can chop him up!”

The boy then tries to run away but the hag hears him and even though he says that he is just going to the bathroom, the hag ties a rope around him so he won’t be able to escape. This is when he remembers the three paper charms the head monk had given him. 

His first wish is for when the hag asks him if he’s done, to have it answer “Not yet”. He ties the rope to a pillar in the bathroom then runs away from the house. After a while, the hag realizes she’s been fooled and chases after him. As she almost catches up to the boy, he uses the second paper charm and asks it, “Please turn into a big sand mountain”

The sand mountain had slowed down the hag but she eventually made it over and soon caught up with the boy again. The boy then used his last wish and asked it to turn into a big river. Once again the hag slowed down and the boy ran as fast as he could back to the temple. The hag entered the temple as well and told the monk to give her the boy. 

The head monk was a wise man as well and praised the hag for her magic. He said he would hand over the boy if she could prove how great her magic was. First, the monk asked her to become as tall as the ceiling. She once again demanded the priest to hand over the boy. 

The priest was undeterred and asked if the hag could become as small as a pea and stand on the palm of his hand. She proved that she could do this as well and shouted, “Now, admit your defeat, priest! Give me the boy!”

But as she was just a little pea-sized hag, the priest picked her up with his fingers and threw her into a burning candle. Even the hag couldn’t stop the heat of the candle and that put an end to her life. 

Old folktales are timeless. It doesn’t matter if you're a child or an adult, they never go out of style. You can also enjoy them in all their variations. Reading old folktales and picture books can remind you of the child that still lives within you. ~Ernie Hoyt