In the marvelous Giant-Sized Butterflies on My First Day of School, Justin Roberts provides an invaluable life lesson for anyone fearful of approaching something new: Lean into those nerves. Roberts borrows a page from fellow musician and author Bill Harley (Sitting Down to Eat) by turning one of his own most popular hits into a picture book. During a drive to school, a girl’s mother explains that those butterfly feelings are normal and happen to everyone. Even Mom and the girl’s dad felt them when the girl first arrived as a baby. “Don’t hold them in,” her mother says. “Just let them fly.”
Paola Escobar’s art visualizes the child’s fears with colorful, delicate swirls of butterflies that follow her as she gets up and heads to school, reinforcing the message that these nerves are actually a lovely, useful force. With its reassuring text and cheerful illustrations, Giant-Sized Butterflies on My First Day of School provides a simple yet powerful message about harnessing one’s fears: “Those butterflies made me realize that the flutters inside are wings opening wide . . . guiding me through my first day.”
With its reassuring text and cheerful illustrations, Giant-Sized Butterflies on My First Day of School provides a simple yet powerful message about harnessing one’s fears.
How to Get Your Octopus to School cleverly addresses school hesitancy by making an octopus the student whose young female human owner is in charge of coaxing him there. In the process, readers learn a lot about octopuses: They are great at hiding, they have strong suction cups for holding onto things, and they squirt ink when nervous. Becky Scharnhorst’s lighthearted text emulates these characteristics, overlaying certain words with a pattern resembling octopus ink, such as when the book concludes, “When you finally arrive at school, you’ll probably be exhausted, but your octopus will be . . . EXCITED!”
Jaclyn Sinquett’s illustrations portray an energetic yet friendly struggle between octopus and human. This anthropomorphized creature is an adorable little fellow who will get laughs from readers as he considers an endless number of first-day outfits, settling on a jaunty blue and gold ensemble. How to Get Your Octopus to School reassures readers that a happy ending awaits on that big first day.
How to Get Your Octopus to School cleverly addresses school hesitancy by making an octopus the student whose young female human owner is in charge of coaxing him there.
Rosemary Wells has been entertaining children with her sly, sweet characters and stories for decades, and she does so once again with On the Night Before Kindergarten. Milo’s parents are excited for Milo’s first day, but Milo, a young kitten, is plagued by bad dreams about what might happen: showing up wearing only his red rubber boots (causing everyone to laugh), forgetting how to count to six or getting stuck on the school bus as it zips past his house.
Young readers will love watching Milo’s parents fret incessantly about his dreams while Milo goes on to enjoy a fantastic first day. Wells has a way of reaching into young readers’ souls and reassuring them about their fears—while making them laugh in the process. She bathes Milo’s dream scenes in a starry blue background, a motif she later repeats in small spot illustrations to indicate what his parents are worrying about. A fine, funny joke on Milo’s father nicely ties the story’s end to its beginning. On the Night Before Kindergarten is an excellent choice for any young child about to face a new situation.
Young readers will love watching kitten Milo’s parents fret incessantly about his dreams while Milo goes on to enjoy a fantastic first day in On the Night Before Kindergarten.
A daily trip to school is a monumental journey for the narrator of Yenebi’s Drive to School. Yenebi, her younger sister, Melanie, and her mother, Mami, rise at 4 a.m. to cross the border from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego by 7 a.m. Yenebi doesn’t mind the hours of waiting in la linea—the lines of cars awaiting inspection by U.S. authorities—noting that her mother’s wakeup call “makes my ears happier than an alarm clock ever could.” Along the way, she sees a festival of sights, sounds and smells, as vendors tempt car passengers with tacos al vapor, burritos and pan dulce.
Author-illustrator Sendy Santamaria notes that this story arose from her own childhood spent on both sides of the border: “It often felt like home was always around me but never somewhere tangible. . . . It was the moments of waiting, of being in between both countries, that felt like home.” She seamlessly weaves Spanish phrases and dialogue into her crisp text, and her art is an explosion of vibrant color, adding to the book’s multisensory celebration. Yenebi’s Drive to School demonstrates excellently that there are many ways to get to school and that the lessons and rewards of education are worth striving for.
Author-illustrator Sendy Santamaria seamlessly weaves Spanish phrases and dialogue into her crisp text and adds to Yenebi’s Drive to School’s multisensory celebration with art that is an explosion of vibrant color.
In her debut middle grade novel, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson crafts an exquisitely immersive tale describing the mythical origins of the Iñupiaq Messenger Feast and how the Iñupiaq people acquired song and dance.
A boy named Pinja is sent on a mountain journey by his family to get obsidian for their toolmaking. His mother can’t help but worry; it’s the same mountain where his two older brothers disappeared. Nonetheless, it’s a vital task, because this small family lives off the land and never takes more than what’s necessary, surviving “thanks to the animals and their kindness and generosity—and a heavy dose of luck.” They rarely see others and are extremely cautious the few times they do.
When Pinja reaches the mountain, he is immediately confronted by an immense eagle god named Savik, who snatches him and takes him far away to Savik’s eagle god family. Pinja remains prisoner for 14 moons, learning many difficult lessons from the eagle gods, including how to dance, sing, drum, build a large gathering hall and become a leader.
Pinja is thoughtful, intelligent and determined, and his intense yearning to return home drives him to study and learn from everything he encounters—even a cute lemming teaches Pinja to see the power of combining strength with others. Gradually, Pinja realizes an important new concept, one foreign to his family: “Why would you do things alone when you can accomplish so much together?”
Rainey’s writing is taut and finely chiseled, as in this description of the endless ennui of Pinja’s imprisonment: “The days cut at him like obsidian against grass with their slow emptiness.” Her fine-toned illustrations showcase the beauty of the Alaskan landscape and its people, while her knowledgeable, passionate descriptions of survival in a harsh environment integrate well into the ongoing action. Rainey herself lives with her family in a remote Alaska Native village in the Brooks Range, where they follow a predominantly subsistence life and try to preserve traditional Iñupiaq values and knowledge.
Eagle Drums marks the impressive debut of a gifted writer. Rainey gives readers an engrossing, exciting look into Iñupiaq culture while offering invaluable lessons about the power of community, kinship and celebrations.
Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson gives readers an engrossing, exciting look into Iñupiaq culture while offering invaluable lessons about the power of community, kinship and celebrations.
Award-winning author Grace Lin leads readers on a fascinating, mouthwatering tour of American Chinese food in Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods. Her enthusiastic, attention-grabbing narration often makes readers feel as though she’s addressing them directly.
Lin describes American Chinese dishes—which have been adapted and changed from those found in China—as “the flavor of resilience, the flavor of adaptability, the flavor of persistence and triumph. Above anything, this food is the flavor of America.” Chinese Menu is jampacked with chapters that are organized according to course, including tea, appetizers, soup and chef’s specials. Foods like Bird’s Nest Soup, General Tso’s Chicken (he was a real general during the 1850 Taiping Rebellion) and Chop Suey make an appearance. There’s history, too: Lin explains that the fork may have been invented in China, but that as chopsticks evolved from long bronze cooking tools to their wooden form, Confucius advised people to use them to eat instead, believing that knives and forks resembled weapons and brought disharmony to meals. Adding to the offerings are numerous color illustrations, diagrams, a map of China, informative endnotes, an extensive bibliography and an illustrated timeline showing when various dishes emerged. There’s also a recipe for Lin’s mother’s scallion pancakes.
Though all of the above is compelling, what makes this book shine are the numerous retellings of food-related myths and folktales, many of which Lin first heard as a child at the dinner table. A story about the origin of Dragon Well Tea involves a dragon, a poor old woman and a mysterious stranger who knocks on her door. Dumplings are said to have been invented during the Eastern Han Dynasty (24–220), when a doctor named Zhang Zhongjing found an innovative way to treat villagers’ frostbitten ears during the Lunar New Year. Some tales are not for the faint of heart and involve subjects like death and poverty, but throughout, Lin’s sensitive narration remains mindful of her young audience.
Lin’s illustrations are further icing on the cake—starting with the book’s ornate cover showing a young girl holding out a steaming bowl of soup, inside of which readers see the faint suggestion of a bridge and a building, hinting at the tales waiting inside.
Chinese Menu is a treat in every way: an exceptional compilation that can be read all at once or taken out from time to time as a reference while eating certain dishes—a family ritual that all ages will enjoy. Either way, it’s scrumptious!
Chinese Menu is a treat in every way: an exceptional compilation that can be read all at once or taken out from time to time as a reference while eating certain dishes—a family ritual that all ages will enjoy.
In William Kent Krueger’s exquisite The River We Remember, newspaper editor Sam Wicklow wants to write a book about the experiences of the Dakota Sioux people of Jewel, Minnesota. One character describes his project as telling “The history of this place. The whole history. The true history.” And that’s exactly what Krueger so adroitly achieves in this novel, excavating both the history and truth of a memorable town through one compelling mystery: Who killed the town’s wealthiest landowner, a tormented bully of a man named Jimmy Quinn whom no one seemed to like, and left him lying in the Alabaster River to be gnawed on by catfish?
The acclaimed author of 19 Cork O’Conner mysteries, Krueger is no stranger to the form. He sets the scene beautifully, beginning with the discovery of Quinn’s body on Memorial Day 1958, as Sheriff Brody Dern and his part-time deputy, retired sheriff Connie Graff, begin to investigate. The author is a superb director of his large cast of characters, including café owner Angie Madison, who lost her husband in World War II; her 14-year-old son, Scott, who is eager to meet life head-on despite the congenital hole in his heart; and female attorney Charlie Bauer, who, after the war, worked on behalf of Japanese American families who had lost their lives, savings and livelihoods while incarcerated in camps. The aftermath of WWII—and war in general—haunts The River We Remember. Brody, a veteran who has PTSD, is an intriguing central protagonist, and holds several surprising secrets; one of his early actions in the investigation is particularly jaw-dropping.
In this page-turning, but also rewarding read, Krueger deepens the tightly-plotted central mystery by examining many horrors of history that reach out to affect the present day. Suspicion for Quinn’s murder soon falls on Noah Bluestone, a Dakota Sioux veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife, Kyoko. Numerous prejudices run deep throughout the novel, including those against Quinn’s German widow, Marta, and Wendell Moon, a Black cook at Angie’s café. Krueger excels at embracing both the beauty and the sordid side of his characters’ lives, making them feel alive and all too human.
At one point, Sam’s wife asks her husband, “This book you’re going to write, if you ever do, I wouldn’t count on it being a bestseller. . . Why don’t you write a mystery instead? Everybody loves a good mystery.” The beauty of The River We Remember is that it’s an excellent mystery but also so much more, making readers care about all of these flawed lives while unearthing painful truths about the xenophobia and racism nestled within small-town America.
William Kent Krueger’s page-turning, rewarding mystery The River We Remember is a superb exploration of the prejudices and complexities of post-World War II America.
Yara is a young wife, mother of two girls, a teacher and graphic designer at a North Carolina college, and one day she comes to a startling conclusion: “Everything in her life had been a succession of things that she hadn’t really wanted to do.” Following her bestselling 2019 debut, A Woman Is No Man, Etaf Rum returns with an introspective second novel, Evil Eye. Both books tell universally appealing, tightly focused stories about Palestinian American women and explore multigenerational issues of inherited trauma, misogyny, the difficulty of balancing career and motherhood, and what makes a fulfilling marriage and a well-lived life.
The daughter of extraordinarily protective Palestinian immigrants, Yara had a sheltered childhood in Brooklyn and often watched longingly through a window as her brothers were allowed to do whatever they pleased. Now, living in a North Carolina college town with her workaholic husband, Yara realizes she still doesn’t have the freedom she has long craved—to travel, be creative and shape her own life. In the art class that she teaches, she bristles at expectations to “center whiteness as the custodian of high art.” No, Yara thinks, “she had not worked this hard over the years—rushing through her degrees while raising two kids and maintaining a home and standing up to her mother-in-law and trying to succeed in a world that did not value her contributions—so she could stand in front of a classroom and perpetrate the very injustices that had colored her entire life.”
Yara is a volcano waiting to explode, and she finally does, calling out a colleague on their racism in an incredibly well-told scene. There’s immediate fallout, with Yara put on probation and assigned to receive therapy. Rum excels at writing internal dialogue and keeping readers immersed in Yara’s fight for freedom, friendship and, ultimately, a purpose in life. Though resistant to her forced therapy, Yara eventually begins journaling at her therapist’s suggestion, and she finds herself carefully examining not only her life but that of her mother and beloved grandmother, Teti, giving readers an intriguing glimpse of how trauma, aspirations and cultural expectations have shaped each woman, and how political events have ongoing personal ramifications for legions of Palestinian and Palestinian American families.
Rum’s observations about the intersections of Arab and Southern traditions and their similarities in art, history, media and food are particularly strong. Yara gradually befriends a gay man, Silas, who lends support as she slowly but boldly becomes the person she yearns to be. Just like A Woman Is No Man, Evil Eye has the power to reach readers of all ages and cultures, who will undoubtedly cheer Yara on as she forges a new path.
Just like A Woman Is No Man, Evil Eye has the power to reach readers of all ages and cultures, who will undoubtedly cheer Yara on as she forges a new path.
Certain memoirs are easily devoured, practically in one sitting, leaving the reader breathless. Such is the case with Meg Kissinger’s While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. Like Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, it sheds light on the vise-like grip that mental illness can have on generation after generation. In this case, however, Kissinger—an investigative reporter and a Pulitzer Prize finalist—writes from an insider’s point of view, describing how mental illness ripped her family apart.
Born in 1957, Kissinger spent most of her childhood in Wilmette, Illinois, in a large, rollicking family whose zany anecdotes are at first reminiscent of Cheaper by the Dozen. The many scrapes, mishaps and family tales are entertaining and often poignant, such as Kissinger’s description of how much she enjoyed an eye doctor’s appointment because it afforded a great rarity: one-on-one time with her mom. Kissinger gradually ups the tension, noting that her mother was taking medication “for her dark thoughts” before she was married, and that throughout Kissinger’s childhood, her mother would disappear from time to time for hospitalizations that were neither discussed or explained. Kissinger explains her family’s situation in a nutshell: “Take two alcoholics—one with bipolar and the other with crippling anxiety—and let them have eight kids in twelve years: What could possibly go wrong?”
Plenty, of course. A number of Kissinger’s siblings began having difficulties in high school or college, especially her older sister, Nancy, who, at age 24, shortly after having her stomach pumped for taking too many tranquilizers, slipped out of the house and ended her life in front of a train. Kissinger’s father instructed his family to tell others that Nancy’s death was an accident. Kissinger recalls her devastated and stunned thoughts at the time: “More secrets, more lies, just like when my mother disappeared years earlier. Why couldn’t we just tell the damn truth? By hiding what really happened, we’d not only be dismissing Nancy’s suffering but fortifying the notion that her mental illness was a choice, one that we should all be ashamed of.”
In 1987, Kissinger wrote an essay for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Nancy’s suicide. “Meg needs to tell this story,” her mother told her horrified father. Indeed, she did—especially when, 19 years later, a similar family tragedy happened once again. Kissinger then spent 25 years traveling across the country to explore the state of mental health issues in families like hers.
While You Were Out is a spellbinding account of one woman’s experience living through family trauma and a thoughtful attempt to reckon with the past. Kissinger asks tough questions and freely admits her own regrets while pointing out systemic problems with no easy answers. Her best advice comes from a letter from one of her siblings, a piece of wisdom that became her mantra: Only love and understanding can conquer this disease.
In a thoughtful attempt to reckon with the past, Meg Kissinger delivers a spellbinding account of how mental illness and addiction ripped her family apart.
Etaf Rum barely remembers the exchange, but as a child, she apparently used to jokingly threaten to write a novel about her mother. At least that’s what her sisters tell her, and as the oldest of nine children of Palestinian immigrants living in Brooklyn, Rum no doubt had plenty of family stories to tell. “I was an avid reader,” she says, “and I think that storytelling came to me as second nature.”
Despite these early inclinations, the wild success of Rum’s novel, A Woman Is No Man (2019), is still astounding. For readers, Rum seemed to appear out of nowhere, like a meteor lighting up the sky. “To think that I penned a New York Times bestselling novel with no experience—even talking to you now, it still blows my mind,” Rum says, speaking by phone from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. A Woman Is No Man chronicles several generations of Palestinian American women, all of whom are forced to marry a man of their family’s choosing, live by his and his family’s rules, and undergo verbal and physical abuse—until one young woman finds a way to break the cycle.
“Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”
“I thought I was writing a story for underrepresented Arab women,” Rum says, “[but] the story has touched women across cultures. The universality of the message has stunned me. Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”
These readers have been eagerly awaiting Rum’s second novel, Evil Eye, which begins with mention of a family curse. Protagonist Yara’s grandmother peers into leftover Turkish coffee grounds to read the fortune of her daughter, Meriem, who is about to marry and immigrate to the United States. The novel then flashes forward several decades, to when Yara is experiencing serious job trouble while teaching at a North Carolina college, and Meriem suggests that this predicament is a continuation of the old curse. It’s an opening scene reminiscent of Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, and it sets the stage for the way fear, curses and superstition permeate Yara’s story.
“Fear that something bad will happen, that you have to worry about someone or something robbing you of that goodness—it’s such a human trait,” Rum says, noting that this is the root of habits like knocking on wood or hanging an evil eye at an entrance. On a recent trip to Greece, she was amazed by the number of evil eyes she saw. “When I say they were everywhere,” she says, “I mean everywhere. Like every store. I thought it was an Arab thing, but I think the Greeks have definitely won this one.”
“Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma.”
In many ways, Evil Eye is a continuation of A Woman Is No Man, although the writing processes were vastly different. The plot of Rum’s debut came “in a flash” as a result of processing “repressed emotions” with therapy and journaling. “Instantaneously, overnight it seemed, I wanted to write a novel,” she says. “I had this urge to write about the Arab American experience, or at least one aspect of it. I drew very heavily on my own upbringing and my own experiences as a Palestinian woman. I had to capture these feelings and maybe make someone feel seen.”
Not only did Rum write quickly, but the novel was also published quickly, making the whole experience feel like a “miracle” and leaving her with a startling revelation: “Up until that point, I was living a life that I thought was of my own choosing, but really wasn’t,” she says. “I think I went through a sort of awakening. I found my voice, and I found out who I was.” As a result, she ended up divorcing her husband, much to her family’s shock and dismay. “I cannot want courage and freedom and bravery for these characters and yet, in my own life, be living in this sort of denial,” she says.
There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.
Ironically, Rum did not want her second novel to be autobiographical, but she soon realized, “I’m a sheltered artist who grew up in a sheltered world, so I can’t escape the fact that some of the novel is autobiographical.” Like Yara, Rum grew up with highly protective parents and was given none of the freedoms that the men in her family enjoyed.
“Their future is so uncertain,” she says of her Palestinian family. “And even though they live in America, that trauma is still there for my mom and dad; it’s present with them every day. They conduct their life out of fear and wanting to protect their family. Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma. That feeling of displacement—it’s even more than that, because it’s almost as if you’re actually displaced from your own body. You’re constantly running, you’re constantly searching, you’re constantly trying to improve. And I think that’s inherited and acquired. Even now, as a mother of my own kids, I sometimes catch myself and say, ‘Relax. No one’s coming to hurt you or to take away your home.’ But how do you relax when you’re raised on fear?”
In Evil Eye, the author notes similarities between Arab culture and life in the American South, “a place [Yara knows] about only from her favorite southern writers: Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. From their books she’d gathered that southern culture was not so unlike her own: full of loud and large close-knit families where women married young and had many children, focused on conservative values with an emphasis on religion or tradition, with an adherence to recipes that were passed down through generations. Even the obsession with tea at every possible social gathering—though southerners preferred it iced while Arabs served it boiling—felt like a point of connection. The similarities filled her with both comfort and dread.” Indeed, a simmering culture clash becomes a flashpoint in the novel when a colleague makes an offensive remark, causing Yara to explode in a way that has serious career consequences.
While depicting her culture in fiction, Rum remains wary of perpetuating stereotypes, especially because there are so few American writers of Arab or Palestinian descent. “Unfortunately, my stories are very dark, and that just happens to coincide with the world I come from. I’m sure there are many Palestinian communities and families that do not live in such a stereotypical world. I wish I could write about those worlds, but I’m not there yet.”
After initially feeling like an outsider when she moved to North Carolina, Rum has now established a robust sense of community. She has remarried, and she and her husband own both a pizza shop and a coffee shop called Books and Beans. “Now I feel like this place is home,” she says. As for her next project, she’s ready for a change of pace and is considering a screenplay or a children’s book. “There are a lot of ideas popping up in my head,” she says, “but I think that the literary adult trauma novels are for now complete.”
Bestselling Palestinian American author Etaf Rum was utterly transformed by the characters in her debut, A Woman Is No Man. With her second novel, she begins to process the aftermath.
Writer and illustrator Grace Lin loves to order takeout Chinese food but confesses she’s not a whiz when it comes to chopsticks. Speaking by phone from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, she laughingly explains: “I can get the food to my mouth, but you’re supposed to hold one like a pencil, and just one chopstick is supposed to move. When I do it, both chopsticks move. It’s definitely not the correct way, but it works.”
Lin’s latest creation, Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Food, will make readers’ mouths water regardless of their chopstick skills. It’s a project she has been contemplating since 2004 but wasn’t ready to tackle until recently. Beautifully illustrated by Lin—who has won both the Caldecott and the Newbery—Chinese Menu features 40 or so stories about the legends and history behind popular American Chinese foods—everything from egg rolls and wonton soup to General Tso’s Chicken and fortune cookies.
“In my circles, it seems like people know lo mein just as well as a hot dog, you know? Working on this book has really shifted my idea of what American food is.”
“I spent most of my childhood trying to pretend that I wasn’t Asian,” Lin says, reminiscing about growing up in Utica, New York, where few Asian families lived at the time. “The two tenuous connections I had to my heritage were reading Chinese folktales and legends that my mom snuck me and the food that we ate every day. So those were the two ways that my culture was passed on to me as a child. I guess that’s why I use them so often in my books, because they were the only roots that I felt I had. I’ve been strengthening them over time.”
Even though her very first books—The Ugly Vegetables (1999) and Dim Sum for Everyone (2001)—were about Chinese food, she says, “I think for years I almost felt like I was faking it. That I look Asian on the outside, but didn’t really feel Asian on the inside. It’s really through doing all these books that I finally feel like I can claim that part of my identity.”
Her first editor advised her to write a book featuring a white character to avoid being pigeonholed as a “multicultural author and illustrator.” She didn’t take his advice. “Back then, that was a burden,” she muses. “Now I take it as a badge of honor.” Throughout a career that has spanned over two decades, Lin has created board books, picture books, early readers and children’s novels featuring Asian and Asian American characters. Several novels (Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat and Dumpling Days) are based on her own life as the child of parents who grew up in Taiwan while it was still called the Nationalist Republic of China.
Lin has come a long way since those early days of self-doubt. In 2022, the American Library Association awarded her the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. As for Chinese Menu, she says, “This book is not me claiming that part of my identity. This book is not to prove to myself or to others that I’m Asian enough or American enough. This book is a celebration to show the world how wonderful that identity is. It’s something with a lot of richness, joy and wonder, and that’s enjoyable for everyone, because it’s food.”
Over the years, Lin had filed away numerous Chinese restaurant menus that she found interesting, and she would occasionally discuss the project as a possibility with her current editor (who happens to be a best friend she met in fifth grade). During COVID-19 lockdowns, incidents of anti-Asian prejudice and violence increased, and Lin felt compelled to tackle this book. “It seemed like an opportune time to celebrate being Asian American,” she says. She dove into her boxes of material and hired a research assistant, Izabelle Brande from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture at Smith College. Lin doesn’t read Chinese, but Brande provided her with translations of many secondary sources. “I had a lot of stories via word of mouth from my parents and relatives,” Lin recalls. “I would know one version of a story, and [Brande] was really amazing because she would tell me that there are actually three versions.”
“I absolutely adore myths, legends and folk tales, as you can tell from all of my work,” she continues. “But one of the things that I really wanted to do with this book was to show how these stories are still part of our culture today. What’s more tangible and easier to understand than the food that we eat?”
“This book is not to prove to myself or to others that I’m Asian enough or American enough. This book is a celebration to show the world how wonderful that identity is. It’s something with a lot of richness, joy and wonder, and that’s enjoyable for everyone, because it’s food.”
Lin not only wrote Chinese Menu, but also illustrated it, using her tween daughter and her daughter’s friend as models. Being both an illustrator and writer allows Lin to make adjustments in both pictures and prose as she goes—for instance, shortening text that she realizes is shown in the art—even up until the last minute. Chinese Menu is unusual because it’s the first time Lin has illustrated digitally. For the cover and the present-day food pictures, she painted with gouache by hand—her usual way—but to illustrate the traditional stories, she scanned initial drawings and colored them digitally in a limited color palette.
“I wanted to separate the folktales from present-day life,” she says. Lin is happy with the results, but it took a toll physically—she moved around less at the computer and became sore from being in the same position for hours. Nonetheless, she says, “I often dream about doing a graphic novel, and I realize now that the only way I would ever be able to do that is to embrace digital media.”
Lin encountered a few surprises as she worked. First, she hoped to find a good story about soy sauce but found nothing—“just stuff about trying to make food salty without using so much salt. It was all really boring.” One discovery that delighted her, however, was the realization of how important American Chinese food is to American culture: “It’s become integrated into our lives just as much as hamburgers and pizza. In my circles, it seems like people know lo mein just as well as a hot dog, you know? Working on this book has really shifted my idea of what American food is.”
Her book includes just one recipe, for her mother’s scallion pancakes. “It’s called Chinese Menu because it’s about food that you order at a restaurant,” Lin says with a laugh. “I don’t mind cooking, but I would rather read a book!”
The increase in incidents of anti-Asian violence during COVID-19 compelled award-winning writer and illustrator Grace Lin to compile this mouthwatering tribute to American Chinese foods.
A fictitious waterway plays a major role in William Kent Krueger’s mesmerizing new novel, The River We Remember, so it seems more than fitting when Krueger says, “Your first order of business as a storyteller is to hook your reader.”
And boy does he, like a seasoned angler reeling in a prizewinning bass. At the end of a short prologue, after describing how the Alabaster River snakes across Black Earth County, Minnesota, in “a crooked course like a long crack in a china plate,” Krueger describes the catfish that feed along the bottom before announcing “This is the story of how they came to eat Jimmy Quinn.”
“I had that opening in mind for a very long time before I actually sat down to write the story itself,” Krueger says, speaking by phone from his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author of 19 Cork O’Connor mysteries adds, “I’m very fond of both prologues and epilogues,” which he believes have distinct purposes: the prologue gives readers “a sense of the story that they’re about to be a part of,” and the epilogue is his way of not leaving them “high and dry, wondering about what happened to characters after the story ends.”
“That’s really where my heart is. . . . Whenever I write a story, I love to just tap into that small town sensibility.”
The River We Remember is set in 1958, when the gruesome discovery of Quinn’s body in the river casts a deep shadow on the town of Jewel’s Memorial Day festivities. Quinn is the richest man and largest landowner in the area—and someone whom no one seems to like, not even his family. It’s up to Sheriff Brody Dern to get to the bottom of how Quinn came to such an ignominious end. Upon hearing the news, Brody is playing chess in the county jail with a prisoner, an otherwise law-abiding widower prone to frequent, disruptive Wild Turkey-fueled benders that land him temporarily behind bars. The friendly, avuncular scene is reminiscent of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Krueger laughs at the comparison, saying, “I don’t have a Barney Fife in my story, but yes.” Although The River We Remember is far from a comedy, he imbues Jewel and its intricate, long-established community with rare authenticity and warmth. The author explains that although he and his wife have lived in St. Paul for many years, he spent much of his childhood moving from place to place, living in farm towns in states like Ohio, Oregon and California. “That’s really where my heart is,” he admits. “Whenever I write a story, I love to just tap into that small town sensibility.”
The townsfolk include a diverse cast of multigenerational characters, such as retired sheriff Conrad Graff, who helps Brody investigate, and 14-year-old Scott Madison, born with a hole in his heart, who delivers meals to prisoners from his mother’s cafe. This young character, Krueger says—one of his favorites—is much like he was as an adolescent, especially in his “desire to see the world, experience it, and somehow prove to everybody that he really is a man.” With his trademark finely chiseled prose and taut plotting, Krueger uses his characters to explore a variety of themes, including racism, prejudice, war, violence, manhood, justice and redemption. “One of the things that I’m aware of,” Krueger says, “is that if you write a popular mystery series, readers are going to be a little reluctant to follow you to a place that doesn’t have all of the series’ characters and elements in it. When I set out to write this book, I wanted to write a mystery first and foremost, and then use that mystery to explore other themes.”
When The River We Remember’s similarities to To Kill a Mockingbird are mentioned, Krueger says the book is his favorite American novel, “so it’s no surprise that I’m probably greatly influenced in every story by Harper Lee.” However, he says the comparison is more apt for his previous standalone novel, Ordinary Grace, which he calls “a kind of reimagined” Mockingbird. “War informs The River We Remember,” he notes, “although it’s not a war novel.”
Krueger first tried to write the book almost 10 years ago, inspired by his father’s experiences as an 18-year-old leaving to fight in Europe during World War II, as well as by similar ordeals suffered by his friends’ fathers. Each of them “were deeply wounded by the horrors they had seen, and the horrors that they had been a part of,” he says. “All my life, I’ve wondered, how did these men manage to heal from that, those great wounds? And what about the people they left behind—mothers and wives and sisters and fathers—who were praying desperately for their loved ones while they were far away, and who in the end may have lost them? What about those wounds? That’s really what I set out to explore.”
Brody is a World War II veteran, and Krueger writes that, “No one knew the details of his war experiences but they knew of the medals.” Brody has PTSD (although, of course, it wasn’t called that in 1958) after his experiences in combat and in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, while newspaper editor Sam Wicklow lost part of his leg in the battle of Iwo Jima. Many people in town suspect that Quinn’s killer may be Noah Bluestone, a Dakota Sioux veteran who returned with a Japanese wife, Kyoko. Krueger set his drama in 1958 so he could draw from some of his own childhood memories and because he “wanted a time frame that was soon enough after the war that the war experience is still going to be fresh in people’s minds. All of those deep wounds were still there, and yet we weren’t acknowledging them.”
However, Krueger’s first attempt at writing the story didn’t go well, so he put the idea aside for years, finally giving it another go during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I know the pandemic created a great deal of chaos in so many people’s lives,” he says, “but it was one of the most creative periods for me. I wrote two manuscripts for my Cork O’Connor series. I wrote three novellas, and then I turned my attention back to the original story for The River We Remember.”
“I don’t know what happened in the intervening years,” Krueger says. “Maybe I’d just grown wiser as a storyteller, or maybe it just required more time to gestate. But I saw how to write the story now. I heard the voice of the story speaking to me. And this time around, I was able to write a much tighter, more cohesive and more deeply felt narrative than I had created the first time around. I completely rewrote the story.”
“If you wrap the ideas that you want to get across to a reader in a really good, compelling story, you get the point across so much more effectively.”
“I wanted to talk about racism,” Krueger adds. “I wanted to talk about war, the way we characterize it, and the myth that we continue to feed our sons, particularly. But I didn’t want to write a polemic. Nobody’s going to read that, so if you wrap the ideas that you want to get across to a reader in a really good, compelling story, you get the point across so much more effectively.”
Krueger’s strong feelings against war emerged early and changed the course of his life. While a freshman at Stanford University in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, he joined a takeover of the president’s office to protest the university’s compliance in the production of military weapons. “They yanked my scholarship,” he says, noting that he had had a full ride. When asked if he was shocked, he says, “No, I was really inspired. And I have to tell you, when I called my folks to tell them what had occurred, they told me that they had never been prouder of me.”
“Vietnam,” he says, “for so many of us, was finally a look at the reality of the horror that war is, and the destruction that it does to everybody.” After leaving Stanford, he logged timber, worked construction and did a lot of physical labor. “I decided very early on that I wasn’t going to be a career person,” he says. “I didn’t want to have a job that was going to suck all of my creative energy out of me.” He was inspired by his father, who taught high school English, worked for Standard Oil, then returned to teaching.
Krueger settled in St. Paul in 1980 and took a job researching child development at the University of Minnesota while his wife, Diane, attended law school. He wrote early in the morning at a coffee shop before work, and joined a mystery writers’ support group called Creme de la Crime. “That group was really tremendously important in my development as a writer,” he says, “because they never let an easy answer pass.”
Since those early days, his award-winning mystery series featuring private investigator Cork O’Connor, the half Irish and half Ojibwe former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. “In every book that I’ve written, even my standalones, the plight of the Native people here in Minnesota plays an important role,” Krueger says. “If you set a story in Minnesota, it’s hard to get away from the treacherous history of whites and the tragic history of the native people.” As he began researching the Ojibwe culture, he met and formed relationships with Ojibwe people, who, he says, “have guided me so beautifully. They’ve been so generous in their sharing.”
Krueger notes that if he were starting out today, he would probably refrain from writing about a Native character “because of the very volatile issue of cultural appropriation,” which was not as widely considered when he began writing the Cork O’Connor series in the early 1990s. “The feedback that I’ve had from my friends in the Ojibwe community, and from Native readers who’ve contacted me, has been very positive. That encourages me, but I’m always painfully aware that I’m a white guy trespassing on a culture not my own, and I work very hard to get it right.”
Krueger is currently penning his next Cork O’Connor mystery. “When I put that to rest,” he says, “I have another standalone that is just beating at my door, begging me to write it.” In the meantime, visit his website if you want to arrange a Skype or Zoom book club visit to discuss one of his many books. “I have zoomed with hundreds of book clubs,” Krueger says, “and I really enjoy it. It’s a great way to connect with readers. It’s not quite like being there in person, but you can still connect.”
Photo of William Kent Krueger by Diane Krueger.
A murder rips a midcentury Minnesota town apart in the author’s latest standalone mystery, The River We Remember.
Alix E. Harrow and her husband know a thing or two about creepy old houses. Before they were married, they pooled their savings and bought an abandoned house on several acres of land in Madison County, Kentucky, in hopes of bringing it back to life. “It was such a wild choice,” Harrow recalls. “When we closed on the house and walked in, rain was coming into the second floor. We looked at each other and asked, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Nonetheless, over the next seven years or so, the couple forged ahead, completing almost all of the renovations themselves.
It’s not surprising, then, that a mysterious, dilapidated house is the subject of Harrow’s third novel, Starling House. The book features a down-on-her-luck young woman named Opal McCoy who takes a housekeeping job at the titular home, which has haunted her dreams since she was a girl. It’s an eagerly awaited, exceptional follow-up to the bestselling author’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a portal fantasy set in the early 1900s, and The Once and Future Witches, about suffragettes in the late 1800s who happen to be witches.
“What’s funny,” Harrow says, speaking from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, “is that all my other books have historical settings, so with this one, I wanted to do contemporary. But then, of course, when I actually started to write it, I realized, oh, it’s all about the past, actually.”
The author is a pro at genre mashups, having also written two “fractured fables”—A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended—that romp through classic fairy tales. “One of the fun things about writing a house book is that you get to play with all the literary tropes and traditions of haunted houses,” Harrow says. “But then I also know the very literal experience of dealing with an old, rotten house. There’s stuff about patching drywall and glazing old windows that are jokes just for me and my husband.”
“. . . this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?”
Harrow describes her new novel as a Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast, with Opal as the beauty and her employer, Arthur Gravely, the beast—described in the book as a “Boo Radley-ish creature” whose face “is all hard angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, and his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becoming a mullet.” Opal is desperate to get her younger brother, Jasper, out of their dingy hotel room and the dying town of Eden, Kentucky, so she takes the generous-salaried job Arthur offers. It’s a big step up from her shifts at Tractor Supply Company, and Opal is beyond curious to venture inside Starling House, despite the fact that inexplicable and terrifying things seem to happen there. For instance, both of Arthur’s parents mysteriously died within the house and Opal gets a strange, bloody cut on her hand the moment she touches Starling House’s gate—a cut that won’t seem to heal.
Harrow was initially inspired by a well-known John Prine song, “Paradise,” about how strip mining destroyed the town of Paradise in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. “It’s like a tiny little Kentucky Chernobyl,” Harrow says of what’s left of that town. “Now it’s dead financially and ecologically. So, I was like, ‘What if it had survived? And what if it was haunted more literally? And what about the people who would still kind of cling on and love it despite everything?’ ” Like Prine, whose parents came from Paradise, Harrow has deep Kentucky roots. Part of her childhood was spent two counties away from Paradise. Prine describes how the coal company used “the world’s largest shovel” to dig coal, and Harrow’s father actually rode that same power shovel to the top of a mountain. (The shovel is called “Big Jack” in Starling House.) “Mountain coal is my family,” she says. “I never met my maternal grandfather because he was killed by a coal train.”
Her father, in fact, jokingly accused her of plagiarism because “I’ve just taken all of these pieces of my life and put them into a different collage.” She acknowledges that she incorporated many bits from her past into her book, but is quick to clarify, “It is mostly details, not the overall shape of my childhood. I don’t want to give people the impression that I was seriously impoverished or living on the edge of society, in a motel. I had a stable, loving household and all of that stuff. But the details—like my first job, I graduated from college in the middle of the recession and I worked as a cashier at Tractor Supply in Allen County, Kentucky. So, there are a lot of things that were just familiar to me. But, of course, there is a lot of air between me and the actual characters.”
Interestingly, there’s no trace whatsoever of a Kentucky drawl in Harrow’s voice. She attributes this to her mom’s influence as an English teacher as well as her family’s move to Boulder, Colorado, for three years when she was 10. “You can lose an accent fast when someone makes fun of you for it,” she says.
Harrow began writing this book as she and her husband and two children moved from Kentucky to Virginia, and a sense of yearning informed the process—a feeling that’s hardly new. “I moved around quite a bit as a kid,” she explains, “even within Kentucky. And then when we left for Colorado, it was huge. I remember my dad literally saying to me, ‘Aren’t you a little young for nostalgia?’ I’m just a naturally wistful and nostalgic person. So I had in my head this idea of Kentucky and the idea of home.”
As she began writing Starling House, she realized that she hadn’t set any previous fiction primarily in her home state. “All my short stories were kind of about escape and going on adventures and going through magic doors,” she adds. “Like, finding a way out, which I now see pretty obviously was a fantasy of mine. I think it’s very funny that it was only once my husband and I decided to leave that I wrote a book about staying.” She says she had always wanted to make a home in Kentucky, “but then I had children and the political climate darkened. I just could not find a way to stay, given the means and resources and ability to find somewhere safer and kinder and with more possibilities for my children. So, this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?”
Before turning to fiction, Harrow earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Vermont, then taught history at Eastern Kentucky University. She first tried her hand at writing a fantasy novel in middle school, but then didn’t write fiction again until she was in her 20s, working as an adjunct. She started writing short stories “as an experiment” and “I loved it,” she says, laughing.
A sense of history permeates Starling House: Harrow adds intriguing footnotes, as well as a bibliography containing both real and imagined sources. She also created a very convincing fake Wikipedia page within the novel for Eleanor Starling, one of Arthur’s ancestors, a 19th-century children’s writer who wrote a book called The Underland that Opal read as a child. That book plays a huge part in the novel, and harkens back to Harrow’s master’s thesis on British children’s literature in the late 1800s and early 1900s and its ties to imperialism.
“I never had a creative writing class or tried to pursue creative writing since middle school,” she says. “But the skills that you learn in academic historical writing are basically the same. You’re trying to build an argument about the world, you’re trying to make a narrative that makes sense based on little bits and pieces in support of your cause. All the research skills and all the organizational skills and the belief that if you just keep writing, eventually you’ll come to your point—all those things are not as far away from fiction as you would think. The same interests led me to history, which are basically just wanting to know why the world is the way it is and how power works.”
The novel’s corporate villain is Gravely Power, started by Arthur’s ancestors, which is lobbying to obtain the mineral rights of Arthur’s property. A relentless, devious company representative named Elizabeth Baine tries to bribe and blackmail Opal into spying on Arthur and photographing Starling House as she works. Harrow was inspired to create Elizabeth after writing The Once and Future Witches and encountering some reader reactions that were “very like, women are good and men are bad and having very little sort of critical engagement with the history of white feminism in ways that I found sort of teeth grating.” Harrow concluded she was ready for a change of pace, deciding her next villain would be a white woman as “certain forms of ambition are not specifically gendered.”
The Southern gothic, Harrow says, proved to be the perfect vehicle for this corporate showdown because one of its central conflicts can be “a huge nostalgia for a time that was just ontologically evil.” Harrow mentions the diverging viewpoints of white Southern gothic writers and Black Southern gothic writers, noting, “That’s why there’s so many different versions of the story of Starling House in the book—often it’s the same story told from a different perspective with wildly different ethics and takeaways.” As Opal hears these conflicting tales, she keeps digging to get closer to the truth, despite mounting danger.
Starling House incorporates other influences beyond Southern gothic, pulling from fairy tales and supernatural thrillers, with a touch of horror. Harrow admits, “I’ve never been particularly faithful to one single genre. I’ve always been kind of a messy reader. And when you come up with a book idea that dabbles in multiple genres, it’s almost like at the beginning of a history paper, when you want to have your historiography. I always want to be doing tropes on purpose. If it’s cliche, it’s a cliche on purpose.”
As Harrow describes her writing process, she sounds more like a historian than a fiction writer. Did she always know, for instance, how Opal would get along with Arthur? “Oh, I know everything from the start,” she replies, laughing. “I am not a casual drafter.” She begins with a general synopsis and a chapter-by-chapter outline before beginning to write. “And then I draft the book and realize that the whole thing is wrong,” she explains, “and go back and change it with a new outline. But very rarely—not never—but rarely, am I drafting a scene and like, ‘Oh my God, it just came out completely differently than I planned it.’ ”
She also notes that she is not “a haunted house person.” “When I wrote the witch book,” she recalls, “I got a number of very sweet and generous messages from people who were practitioners of witchcraft. I was very much like, ‘Oh man, I’m so sorry. Wrong audience.’” She anticipates that readers of Starling House may reach out with similar messages about ghosts and hauntings.
“I’m a huge chicken,” Harrow confesses.
What she is, it turns out, is a comedian—and one of Opal’s many endearing qualities is her often-snarky, sarcastic wit, as shown in both her narration and dialogue. Was her humor hard to write?
“No,” Harrow says with a laugh. “I find my main problem is to stop making jokes and try to rein it in a little bit.”
Photo of Alix E. Harrow by Elora Overbey.
The author poured her yearning for the past into Starling House, a fantasy that’s best described as a Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast.
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There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.
