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Loida Maritza Perez fearlessly depicts the realities of abuse and mental and physical suffering of an immigrant Dominican-American family in her first novel, Geographies of Home. Perez's simple language yet descriptive detail makes the reader feel immersed within this intricate family's struggles and triumphs.
Posted by DieterBohn
Different characters are at the center of each story, however, a few basic themes run throughout the entire book. Senior's writing style is strong, powerful and direct; these qualities make her stories and characters come alive. The changing role of women, traditions and appearances are the blood running through the veins of these stories.
Posted by DieterBohn
Danticat's story is set around Amabella who works as a maid in the Dominican Republic. A Haitian native, Amabella has been on her own since she was orphaned at the age of eight. She is in love with a Haitian man named Sebastien.
Posted by DieterBohn
"Journalist, biographer, activist for peace, social justice and women’s rights (Ishigaki, back cover), Ayako Ishigaki was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1903."
Posted by jacob
The reader may enjoy these poems on one level for their language and rhythm, or the reader may actively participate in these themes by using them as spring boards to uncover both the historical and current state of Jamaica.
Posted by LaurenCurtright
Bird Woman. Sah-kah-gar we a. Boat Pusher. Sahcahgagwea. Token of Peace. Squar. Sacajawea.
With such an abundance of names, it is not surprising that Sacajawea, the Shoshoni woman who traveled with the Lewis and Clark expedition, struggled with her identity. The inner conflict Sacajawea battled with is analyzed as Sarah King interprets her character in Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea. Focusing on the evolution of Sacajawea’s growing presence through verbal and nonverbal communication Ann McKenzie discusses in an analysis of Sacajawea based on the same novel. A voice otherwise lost, and a woman previously only remembered in myth are sought and memorialized in Glancy’s beautiful depiction, a novel of Sacajawea.
Posted by LaurenCurtright
Posted by DieterBohn
During the last two years, the four of us have been involved in the maintenance, redesign, update, and expansion of VG/Voices from the Gaps, a University of Minnesota website devoted to student writing on the lives and work of women writers and artists of color. This process has demanded that we theorize the website, as well, as we have come to realize that VG presents both potential and pitfalls to women, as artists and scholars, negotiating the academy...
Posted by LaurenCurtright
Posted by LaurenCurtright
Posted by LaurenCurtright
Posted by SaraCohen
Ishigaki explores the multiple sets of worlds Haru simultaneously inhabits: Japan and the United States, tradition and modernity, men's and women's experiences, upper and working class and Japanese America and White America. As one of the very first English novels written by a Japanese woman, Restless Wave is a testament to the "restless metamorphosis of women" (RW afterword).
Posted by SaraCohen
Through a progression from grim realities to hopeful awakenings to optimistic inspirations, Johnson voices her own hopes and prayers for the future. Her collection also shows what it takes to survive as a black woman--which means having the solidity and strength of a bronze figure to resist the desire to bend to other people's opinions.
Posted by LisaTrochmann
Posted by George
Posted by George
"Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea depicts the tension between the white explorers, Lewis and Clark, and a Shoshoni woman known as Sacajawea...Sacajawea’s journey as depicted in Glancy’s novel illustrates the buffalo as the Plains Indians’ ever-present connection to home."
Posted by George
In her book Affirmative Acts June Jordan takes readers on a political and social journey through the 1990s. The book is a collection of essays that directly respond to particular political, historical, and intimate moments. Jordan's style of writing is a wonderful mix of the political and personal that draws a reader into the realm of social action. If words can move an American off of the proverbial couch, June Jordan's words will do it.
Posted by DieterBohn
Pollard has embarked on a worthwhile task by pooling together material about DT, also known as Rasta Talk, in a concise manner. It is, as she explains, "the language that has evolved and particularly [to] the lexical items that have emerged as a result of the impact of the movement on the Jamaican speech situation" (3).
Posted by DieterBohn
Audre Lorde presented herself as she was. Her poetry reveals the raw human emotion in her life, from having children, to the outstanding crimes being committed in our society. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde contain ten volumes of Lorde's poetry, more than 300 poems. They range in length from being quaint four-lined poems, to longer, more detailed, lasting up to several pages. This book also includes early poetry repeatedly appearing later in other volumes, to show revisions made by Lorde.
Posted by DieterBohn
Something to Declare, by Julia Alvarez, is a collection of autobiographical essays describing the life of a Dominican writer living in the United States. It is divided into two parts: Customs, and Declarations, a play on words referring to her family's leaving the Dominican Republic and immigrating to the United States in the 1960s.
Posted by DieterBohn
Jamaica Kincaid definitely has a life full of stories to share and from which to benefit, and she tells them in a way that is so heartfelt that it encourages the reader to look at life through her eyes. Kincaid's brother Devon Drew was diagnosed with AIDS and died when he was thirty-three years old. In My Brother, Kincaid reflects upon his dying and his death, her relationship with him, and her family's life growing up on the island of Antigua.
Posted by DieterBohn
In a collection of short stories named Skin Folk, Nalo Hopkinson provides the reader with a variety of folklores and fairytale-like stories with supernatural and futuristic approaches. Though this book is an easy read, I caution those who cannot, or choose not to, handle dime store romance novels to pass through several of the stories due to their very graphic sexual details. I could categorize the fifteen stories into three main categories, though many may overlap: coming of age, sexual explicit, and the supernatural.
Posted by DieterBohn
Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory is a heartbreaking yet hopeful tale of the women of the Caco family; Danticat's fictional characters and their interactions and histories become windows for the reader into what must be the Haiti of Danticat's memory.
Posted by DieterBohn
Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas is as much about memory as it is about truth. The main character is a 24 year-old lesbian named Juani who lives in Chicago with her - very extended - Cuban family. Coming to the United States when she was only six years old, Juani's memory of her home country is patchy and second-hand at best.
Posted by DieterBohn
It might be said that a modern city is a mass of humanity but also a mass of inhumanity. A place of people and things, seemingly in harmony yet oblivious to each other and to their surroundings. A place where Thoreau noted "the masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It is in this city that Dionne Brand stages a collection of poems in a book titled Thirsty.
Posted by DieterBohn
The streets of Harlem are a prison, holding inside of its walls all the dreams and potential of people too poor, hopeless, or tired to claw their way out to a life more like the one they envisioned as children. This picture sets the tone for Rosa Guy's novel, Bird at My Window
Posted by DieterBohn
Beka Lamb was written by Zee Edgell and published in 1982. The novel takes place in Belize while the country is in the midst of a cultural and social shift. Edgell peppers the story with breathtaking imagery and colors and offsets them with the cold realities of living in Belize.
Posted by DieterBohn
In Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, a young woman follows her lifelong dream of leaving her small room and childhood bed and moving to a place that she has always dreamed of.
Posted by DieterBohn
A Burst of Light is a collection of prose that focuses on the experiences and beliefs of Audre Lorde, a self proclaimed Black Lesbian Feminist poet. The book is full of interesting information told from Lorde's view point.
Posted by DieterBohn
This patchwork quilt of a story is held together with the threads of love throughout a series of tragedies that create the fabric for this story. Starting with the death of both of Amabelle’s parents the story takes you though the journey of Amabelle’s life.
Posted by DieterBohn
Paule Marshall’s novel The Fisher King deals with several issues: generational differences, love, and jazz music being some of them. The novel is set in 1984 with reminiscences back to the height of the jazz era, the 1940s and 50s.
Posted by DieterBohn
Rosario Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust lyrically voices the generation-bridging tale of the De La Valle family and their Puerto Rican sugar mill through the eyes and souls of several family members, longtime servants and dear friends. This hypnotic story traces the many hardships and glories of a rapturous family and their beloved sugar mill; bringing readers face to face with issues of wealth and national pride through the characters that experienced it all.
Posted by DieterBohn
The short stories in this collection succeed as entertaining social commentary, exposing a garish group of characters in vivid and colorful form. Decadent imagery brings time and place to life, puts the reader immediately in the tropics, in the villages, in the houses and in the minds of the “dolls” of these fascinating stories.
Posted by DieterBohn
Rosario Ferré’s novel The House on the Lagoon centers on the life of Isabel Monfort, a Puerto Rican living in Ponce and a writer undertaking the task of recording the histories of her family and the family of her husband, Quintín Mendizabal.
Posted by DieterBohn
Lorna Goodison’s sixth collection of poetry, To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, explores themes of motherhood, the history of slavery in Jamaica, and the magical healing powers of the organic splendors of the Caribbean experience.
Posted by DieterBohn
Lorna Goodison’s only collection of short stories, Baby Mother and the King of Swords, navigates the affairs of characters whose lives have become emotionally enveloped in situations such as poverty, marriage, pregnancy, and love.
Posted by DieterBohn
Macadam Dreams, is an interesting novel because of the way Pineau parallels the violence of nature with the violence of humans.
Set in Savane, Guadeloupe, Gisele Pineau’s novel, Macadam Dreams, is a story of Eliette’s self-discovery as she is forced to come to terms with the violent memories of her past. Through the painful memories that Eliette attempts to push away, the book reveals the violent stories of the characters that make up Eiliette’s town of Savane. Wrecked by a cyclone in 1928, Neither Eliette nor Savane have been able to escape the poverty and violence the cyclone has left them with. Now, sixty years later, with Hurricane Hugo approaching, Eliette is forced to deal with the painful past in order to free herself from those memories that were initiated by the first cyclone.
Posted by DieterBohn
Exile According to Julia is a novel about longing to belong, longing for stability, longing for a sense of self, a home. This autobiographical work is Gisele Pineau’s third novel and a beautiful tribute to the grandmother who provided her with pieces of this precious belonging, and in return Pineau bears tender witness to this grandmother, “Man Ya” (a.k.a. Julia of the title), revealing her joyous secrets of life in the process.
Posted by DieterBohn
In a miserably small town of jealous and vengeful villagers, anything can happen. If one has no particular desire to be cursed for all eternity with a stutter, a clubfoot or an overly fertile phallus, one will realize the presence of the ancestral spirits and the power of their protection. These same such curses are only an inkling of what Pineau’s massive collage of characters experience in her novel, The Drifting of Spirits. This passionately poignant tale of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, encourages readers to listen to the spirits and gain deeper understanding in the nature of life on earth, She possessed a knowledge that everyone held in high regard in this country which is searching for it’s history lost in the depths of the dark days of slavery, on a boat from Colombo, in memories of Brittany or what is left of the memory of someone a hundred years old (201)
Posted by DieterBohn
Mystery of the Dark Tower is set in 1928; 12 year-old Bessie Coulter moves with her father and younger brother Eddie to Harlem from Burlington, North Carolina. Bessie's sick mother does not accompany them, nor are provisions made for her eventual arrival-- a situation that arouses Bessie and Eddie's suspicions.
Posted by DieterBohn
In her autobiographical narrative, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Bharati Mukherjee explores the cultural tensions implicit in her life as a privileged Indian woman who returns to her homeland after becoming a Canadian citizen.
Posted by DieterBohn
Throughout Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda’s grandmother remains a friend and caregiver, yet their relationship is severely warped by the institution of slavery.
Posted by DieterBohn
"Mishosha" portrays the adult characters as dangerous caregivers of the younger generation.
Posted by DieterBohn
Beyond abortion, Lucille Clifton's poetry is about racism, illness, death, gender, and ultimately human experiences. Her poem "dialysis" is powerful. She writes, "after the cancer i was so grateful/ to be alive. i am alive and furious./ Blessed be even this?"
Posted by DieterBohn
Castillo, in her afterword to My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove, explains: "The huehuehtlatolli, metaphorically thought of as mirrors held before the disciple, were repeated over and over until the lessons were engraved in the person's heart and would serve as lifetime guides." Castillo's book contains translated excerpts of these ancient teachings, the huehuehtlatolli.
Posted by DieterBohn
A young woman looks back on the past and finds her place within the future in Celeste Guzmán's autobiographical book of poems, Cande, Te Estoy Llamando. Guzmán's 16 manic and delicate poems are centered about family and circle around problems of marriage, parenthood, gender roles, and the vulnerable relationships that form amongst family.
Posted by DieterBohn
Moraga's struggle to define herself in relation to others, and particularly in the Chicana/o community, her attempts to balance her mother's values with her own, and her struggle to take pride in herself, all serve as an "axe for the frozen "sea inside" the reader.
Posted by DieterBohn
Hualing Nieh's 1981 novel Mulberry and Peach describes the life of Helen Mulberry Sang, a Chinese woman living through many years of political unrest during the Japanese invasion of China, the Communist-Nationalist Civil War, Taiwan's White Terror, and the Vietnam War.
Posted by DieterBohn
This book is an adults search for connection with the child she once was. In the first chapter, we are introduced to the personal struggle of the narrator, the adult Lucie. Lucie has distanced herself from her childhood, and the real protagonist of the novel is the young Lucie, whom the narrator describes as "the child whose place I have taken"
Posted by DieterBohn
Posted by DieterBohn
Novelist and journalist Hanan al-Shaykh offers an intimate perspective into the lives of four women living in the Middle East in the novel Women of Sand and Myrrh (1989, translated 1990)
Posted by DieterBohn
Posted by DieterBohn
Hogan begins her memoir telling us the story of a clay woman she fell in love with in a museum gift shop. The figure of the woman was spiritually connected to the earth, and was also made with clay from the earth.
Posted by DieterBohn
Every married and unmarried man and woman in America should read Successful Women, Angry Men by Bebe Moore Campbell. Overzealous as that statement may seem, this quick and concise read offers a unique view of the mechanics of marriage in our unstable, ever-changing society. The book is packed with interviews, statistics, and insightful suggestions of how to make a dual-career marriage work in today's American society.
Posted by DieterBohn
In the novel The Memories of Ana Calderón by Graciela Limón, the reader follows protagonist Ana through her journey toward self-realization as she struggles to negotiate between her past and the present.
Posted by DieterBohn
Author Sheila Sanchez Hatch portrays herself as the eternal adolescent, the precocious girl who eschewed innocent play to instead pore over her journals with melancholy tales of forgotten love and death.
Posted by DieterBohn
The recent book from Lakota writer Delphine Red Shirt is called Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter. It is a colorful, emotional journey into the lives of four generations of Lakota women living in northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota.
Posted by DieterBohn
At the end of the Three Rediscovered Novels, in the text of Trial and Triumph, Frances E. W. Harper tells her readers, "I have essayed to weave a story which I hope will subserve a deeper purpose than the mere amusement of the hour, that it will quicken and invigorate human hearts and not fail to impart a lesson of usefulness and value."
Posted by DieterBohn
Winnifred Eaton, writing under the nom de plume Onoto Watanna, is considered a pioneer by many recent scholars because she became the first author to write an Asian American novel, Miss Numé of Japan: A Japanese American Romance (1899). Eaton's ideas were progressive because she portrayed interracial relationships in her works, something that was groundbreaking for the time, but which won her immediate success.
Posted by DieterBohn
Neela: Victory Song is the story of Neela, a girl of twelve who is faced with the most important decision of her life. Set in India in 1939 and written from the perspective of a young Indian girl, this children's story recalls India's fight for independence from British rule.
Posted by DieterBohn
As a younger child she did not seem to fit into the Japanese culture, as can be noticed in the following excerpt: Unlike the average Japanese child, the little girl was restless and lacked all sense of repose, an inherent instinct with Japanese children.
Posted by DieterBohn
In this novel, Howe connects to her readers, challenging them to gain an awareness of the corruption and misuse of power prevalent with our leaders. By creatively taking on history as it relates to the present, she challenges her readers to unite to restore balance.
Posted by DieterBohn
Born in a part of the Caribbean known as Antigua in 1945, Althea Prince moved to Canada shortly after and resides there today. She has written many short stories and novels such as Ladies of the Night and Other Stories, as well as the childrens books How the Star Fish Got the Sea and How the East Pond Got Its Flowers.
Posted by DieterBohn
Father of the Four Passages is a quick, easy read with a mixture of first and third person narrations and a variety of letters written by and for the main character Sonia. Letters arrive from different parts of the world from her father, Joseph, who has abandoned his family to go on a self-searching quest for himself and for God.
Posted by DieterBohn
Sandra Benítez did not start to write fiction until she was 39 years of age, but it is her life previous to literary invention that allows Benítez to draw a reader into her Latina culture and its trials as a community.
Posted by DieterBohn
Posted by DieterBohn
Ruthanne Lum McCunn's novel, The Moon Pearl, pays tribute to women overcoming opposition to their struggle for independence. McCunn spins a tale of three young women living in China's Pearl River Delta during the 1830s. The Moon Pearl originated from stories told in McCunn's Hong Kong childhood home by various wives, mothers, concubines, and spinsters.
Posted by DieterBohn
A typical situation in the 1820s: a heartless slave owner takes advantage of his slave women, producing mulatto children that are also kept as slaves. Dove reverses this situation by creating the character of Amalia, a white, married woman in charge of a plantation, who has an affair with an African slave and chooses to give up her son for fear of his life.
Posted by DieterBohn
Though not the intricately woven web that was her highly acclaimed debut work, A River Where Blood is Born, Sandra Jackson-Opoku's sophomore effort Hot Johnny is an esoteric page-turner.
Posted by DieterBohn
A Song of Lilith is a collection of poetry by Joy Kogawa, highlighted with artwork by Lilian Broca. Kogawa is a Japanese-Canadian author, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. She is perhaps best known for her award-winning novel Obasan.
Posted by DieterBohn
Maryse Condè recalls the most influential and meaningful moments of her childhood in her book Tales from the Heart. This book is a collection of autobiographical essays that guide the reader through moments in a young girl's childhood. This childhood is not just any childhood, however.
Posted by DieterBohn
Julia Alvarez's novel In the Name of Salome weaves the life and spirit of Salome Urena, and her reserved daughter, Salome Camila, through a journey of political unrest in the Dominican Republic.
Posted by DieterBohn
Andrea Davis Pinkney's Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters is an amazing, entertaining, and educational journey back through time for both children and adults alike. It accurately depicts the changing face of America for all people.
Posted by DieterBohn
This book/essay is not an easy read, not something one would sit down with after work, but Playing in the Dark is highly recommended for anyone who has an ambitious or academic interest in Morrison's take on the African and African-American impact on the historical American literary canon.
Posted by DieterBohn
In her remarkable novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) Louise Erdrich takes her readers through the spiritual realm and on a wondrous journey of soul-searching. The novel challenges and bends our ideas about subjects as deep as the meaning of gender and the reason for religion. Erdrich paints one picture, and then turns it upside down and makes the reader look at it another way.
Posted by DieterBohn
In her intensely moving second novel, The Warmest December, Bernice McFadden depicts a young woman struggling to rid herself of the painful influence of her abusive father and the legacy of alcohol dependence that she is left with in his wake.
Posted by DieterBohn
Toni Morrison's novel, Love, published in 2003, is a story of just that: love's many faces and effects on those who love. This story talks of love as shadowed by greed, jealousy, insanity, and hatred.
Posted by DieterBohn
America is going through a slow and sometimes stagnant process of self-discovery. It is discovering that it is not a monolithic culture marching along the path of a single narrative, but rather that it is comprised of a cultural plurality that has many different and often contradictory stories to tell.
Posted by DieterBohn
Collecting and reprinting past interviews with Gloria Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Anzaldúa Interviews Entrevistas, edited by AnaLousie Keating, not only addresses a multitude of issues but also presents the reader with a spectrum of ideas. The text is sectioned off by ten separate conversation style interviews, all conducted by different interviewers.
Posted by DieterBohn
Rebecca Walker stakes her claim to writing not as the daughter of famed Alice Walker but as the author of a shocking autobiography. Her book, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, tells the story of a "Movement" child born to a white Jewish father and a black mother.
Posted by DieterBohn
Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon, Anita Endrezze's third book, tells her family history through a complex and skillfully-woven web of political theorizing, historical fact, short stories, and poetry. Born in California to a full-blooded Yaqui Indian father and European mother, Endrezze explores the Native side of her family history, and the history of the Yaqui people as a whole.
Posted by DieterBohn
In Fishing for Myth, a collection of poems by Heid E. Erdrich, the readers are able to take part in the poet's exploration of myths that are grounded together in the experience of everyday life and memory. For Erdrich, the myths that she writes in her poems become part of everyday life. It is as though she is letting us in on a very juicy secret that she is telling us in installments. I get the feeling that Heid Erdrich has only just begun to tell us her secrets through poetry.
Posted by DieterBohn
Although her story is mostly fiction, Louise Erdrich includes in her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club several fascinating characters closely resembling non-fictional people close to her.
Posted by DieterBohn
Posted by DieterBohn
In the foreword to the anthology Las Mamis: Favorite Latino Authors Remember Their Mothers, Joie Davidow describes the mother-child relationship saying, "I saw that all of us live, not standing alone, a solitary tree in the wilderness, but in the shadow of the older tree that begot us" (ix).
Posted by DieterBohn
As a young black girl growing up in the South during the 1950s, Evelyn Coleman knew first hand the ugliness that racism brings. Though the story told in Circle of Fire is fictional, it based on real life situations at the time. Because of Colemans own racial struggles throughout her life, she felt honored to write about the topic and wanted to make sure her message got out to the youth of today. "I hope you will remember that hate is always dangerous. And that it is important to speak out when you see something wrong" Coleman states in her message to readers(149). Coleman cannot stand the idea of racism and makes it clear throughout the story, and so does Mendy Thompson, the main character in Circle of Fire.
Posted by DieterBohn
Posted by DieterBohn
Using a variety of literary techniques, Jeannette Armstrong's novel Whispering in Shadows is a journey of discovery towards the intimate voices that guide the world and our souls.
Posted by DieterBohn
The gift of storytelling often lies in the fusion of details that form a lasting image in the responder's mind. In this fashion, poetry is the ultimate teller of stories in a few words enlivening a myriad of thoughts. June Jordan takes her poetic voice away from conventional form and uses it prosaically in her memoir entitled Soldier: A Poet's Childhood. Recounting her first twelve years of childhood, Jordan weaves through the emotional ups and downs of living with a father that treated her like a son.
Posted by DieterBohn
McFadden's debut novel Sugar portrays a realistic balance of good and evil in its characterization and its authentic thematic substance. Placed between 1940 and 1956 in the fictitious town of Bigelow, Arkansas, the small town residents are no different than your next-door neighbors.
Posted by DieterBohn
While reading Blaeser's poems, we jump from the Boundary Waters to the Alaskan Arctic to the desert Southwest to urban Wisconsin. Seemingly, we are in the present, but unquestionably connected to a past and a future rooted in Blaeser's Anishinabe culture on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.
Posted by DieterBohn
Although there is a universal acknowledgement of the degree to which hegemonic discourse has limited minority voices by romanticizing, categorizing, and limiting their ability to situate themselves outside these configurations, I can find few examples that call for a new manipulation of the categories "minority" and "woman" within the realm of fiction.
Posted by DieterBohn
Ruth L. Ozekis debut novel, My Year of Meats, is a tale of diversity and every reader is bound to have a unique relationship with the book. Obviously, meat and beef take center stage, but more often in a supporting role rather than as the star of the show. The narrator reveals many beef industry secrets that cause the reader to wonder what is fact and what is fiction.
Posted by DieterBohn
The name of the first chapter of Paule Marshall's latest novel, The Fisher King contains the phrase "Sodom and Gomorrah music" referring to jazz. Listeners today know that jazz is not riddled with sin as once thought, but members of older generations sometimes refuse to embrace this.
Posted by DieterBohn
To Swim Across The World brings the reader along on their journey through pain, suffering, and great loss. The authors writing style sweeps the reader up with vivid descriptions and memorable metaphors.
Posted by DieterBohn
The Roads of My Relations takes advantage of Mihesuah's academic and personal knowledge of one woman's family to illustrate a larger society. Even before the novel begins, there is a diagram of the family tree showing the relationships of the family members. While this tree is helpful, it is not really necessary for understanding this book. Actually, The Roads of my Relations seems to be two books.
Posted by DieterBohn
The title of her book is a Cambodian proverb; "when broken glass floats" is a time when evil triumphs over good. Him takes her readers from beginning to end of her experience growing up in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Posted by DieterBohn
In her novel Bruised Hibiscus, Elizabeth Nunez confronts the differences between passion and power, black and white, and male and female.
Posted by DieterBohn
In the tale Money Hungry, Sharon G. Flake uses multiple writing techniques to bring us into the life of Raspberry Hill, a thirteen-year-old girl living in a housing project. Raspberry has a unique condition for a girl of her age: she'll do anything legal for the almighty dollar.
Posted by DieterBohn
In her novel, The Day of the Moon, Graciela Limón writes in a sensitive and engaging style that traces the individual lives of a family with a sensitivity and kinship that demands the same from the reader.
Posted by DieterBohn
The twenty short stories contained in The Fat Man from La Paz give an overview of Bolivian culture from romance to politics to revolution. Although the stories are unrelated and written by twenty different authors, they strictly follow the order of the stated themes.
Posted by DieterBohn
At once insightful and honest, English Lessons and Other Stories explores the courage and adaptability necessary to maintain an Indian identity while living in an English-speaking country. Baldwin also emphasizes the importance of family in Indian culture as each tale revolves around familial interactions. By looking at the changing familial roles Indian women face today, Baldwin offers a candid glimpse into the challenges faced by Indian women at home and abroad.
Posted by DieterBohn
A world of nightmares vanishes as a world of hope emerges in Anchee Min's first novel, Katherine. This novel follows Anchee Min's international bestseller, Red Azalea, a memoir that was named by the New York Times as one of its Notable Books of 1994.
Posted by DieterBohn
In Lolita Files' second novel, Getting to the Good Part, the continuing sagas of Misty Fine and Reesy Snowden are played out except unlike from the point of view from Misty Fine in Files debut novel, Scenes from a Sistah, Getting to the Good Part is told from the view of outspoken Reesy Snowden. Told from the setting of New York City, Reesy Snowden goes through tumultuous pitfalls and escapades to finally face what it is she really wants out of life, one of them being if Misty and her are to or should remain "sistah's forever."
Posted by DieterBohn
Through the use of historical and cultural information, Limón develops a very interesting background for her novel. She also uses this information to introduce and follow Adriana, Juana, and Orlando in their fight for independence. Three themes-- betrayal, oppression, and survival-- flow throughout the novel. With the use of these themes, Limón isolates and unites each of her characters.
Posted by DieterBohn
Overall, The Forsaken Brother is a faithful (as far as we know) transcription of a Chippewa folk tale. The language of the piece is not overly flowery, but is a clear and succinct telling of the story.
Posted by DieterBohn
The poems, essays, and translated tales that Jane Johnston Schoolcraft included in the magazine were purposefully chosen to present a positive image of Native American culture.
Posted by DieterBohn
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