pickI read and highly recommend the original middle grade chapter book Refugee by Alan Gratz frequently. This graphic novel version still brings a lot of the emotion but with using panels & speech bubbles paired with illustrations instead of descriptive paragraphs of text.
pickA book I hope will be read in a lot of schools. Or, let's say, a book I hope will be read by a lot of people. Especially in Europe, even though it's a universal topic.
Loved Salama and her spirit, her goal to help. And loved how not toxic Kenan was. No toxic masculinity here. I wish them all the best for their future 💖
so-soI picked this up for info on the Secret War after a friend told me her family fled Laos during the war (my friend is not Hmong but Mien - which, I can‘t find anything on to read). It‘s very informative & I‘m looking forward to Kao Kalia Yang‘s next book: The Song Poet. Giving it a so-so bc the writing felt a bit stiff. I‘m hoping that the author‘s voice is more evident in The Song Poet. Finished on a flt to MN which has a large Hmong community.
I participated in an author event at The Back Room hosted by Hank Phillipi Ryan and Karen Dionne. Authors Lyn Liao Butler, Lisa Gardner, Eliza Reid, and Francesca Serritella engaged in fascinating conversations. I wrote about my experience on my blog and it‘s loaded with book recommendations.
abookandadog.com/author-events/the-back-room-september-2025
pickThis book was so much more in depth than I expected. In an effort to understand his father‘s suicide (his father was sent through an ad to a family in England at age of 11) the author dug deep & retraced the fates of both the children in the adverts & their families. For me his journey elicited contradictory responses in that it was both fascinating & heartbreaking. #NF Highly recommend.
pickOur protagonist here is Peggy and she is a bindery girl at the local Press. Peggy lives with her twin sister on a narrow boat surrounded by books. Complete books, damaged books, parts of books and odd pages on every surface.
Peggy has always loved books. She has longed for more, to study, but obligations, class, society and circumstance have held her in her place. When the men are drafted into war, the lives of women begin to change.
In Mark Twain‘s biography by Ron Chernov, the author gives extensive attention & coverage to Twain‘s eight months in Vienna.
I had no idea that 20,000 Jewish refugees from Vienna traveled to Shanghai to escape the Nazis.But in 1941 the Nazi‘s arrived in the face of the notorious Colonial Josef Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw.”His ideas for the solution of the “Jewish problem” scandalized the Japanese, despite the fact that they committed atrocities themselves. Instead they created a 3/4 square mile ghetto fie the Jews,where they were starved & exposed to typhoid.
