Review by New York Times Review
SUGAR RUN, by Mesha Maren. (Algonquin, $26.95.) An ex-convict returns to her Appalachian roots in this debut novel. The literary lineages here are hard-boiled fiction and film noir - but by exploring place, connection and redemption in the face of the justice system, Maren creates bold takes on those venerable genres. ANNE FRANK'S DIARY: The Graphic Adaptation, adapted by Ari Folman. Illustrated by David Polonsky. (Pantheon, $24.95.) By turning the famous diary of a girl hiding from the Nazis into a graphic novel, Folman and Polonsky bring out its wit and humor in whimsical illustrations capturing Anne's rich imaginative life. REVOLUTION SUNDAY, by Wendy Guerra. Translated by Achy Obejas. (Melville House, paper, $16.99.) This Cuban novel, about a poet facing political and personal questions amid the loosening grip of socialism, plays with expectations; as often as Guerra gives a concrete description of Havana, she gives one that dances and evades. GHOST WALL, by Sarah Moss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) This compact, riveting novel, about a 17-year-old working-class girl forced by her parents to join a re-enactment of Iron Age Britain, asks us to question our complicity in violence, particularly against women. MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. (Doubleday, $22.95.) Murders litter this debut novel by a young Nigerian writer, but the book is less about crime than about the complexities of sibling bonds, as well as the way two sisters manage to survive in a corrupt city that suffocates women at every turn. THE BREAKTHROUGH: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, by Charles Graeber. (Twelve, $28.) Training the body's immune system to fight disease now offers the most promising developments in the effort to battle cancer. Graeber recounts the treatment's 19th-century origins and provides a panoramic view of the work being done today to make it effective. TODDLER-HUNTING: And Other Stories, by Taeko Kono. Translated by Lucy North, with an additional translation by Lucy Lower. (New Directions, paper, $16.95.) As nonchalantly as some authors might describe a character's hair, Kono details her characters' taboo desires. First published in the '60s, these stories all retain interest. WE ARE DISPLACED: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World, by Malala Yousafzai. (Little, Brown, $18.99; ages 12 and up.) The world's youngest Nobel laureate gathers stirring stories of displacement from nine other girls. A THOUSAND SISTERS: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II, by Elizabeth Wein. (Balzer + Bray, $19.99; ages 13 and up.) The powerful tale of the all-female Soviet air regiments who flew 24,000 missions to help defeat the Nazis. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection from Kono (1926-2015), one of Japan's most prestigious writers, features stories written throughout the 1960s that are both provocative and eerily moving in their confrontation of the terrifying and the taboo. In the title story, a middle-aged woman despises young girls while cultivating a secret obsession with little boys, going so far as to buy them clothes in hopes of watching them undress. In "Night Journey," after years of awkwardness, two couples address their interest in swapping partners, only to be thwarted by mysterious circumstances. In "Ants Swarm," a married couple whose passion thrives on sadomasochism are thrown off when the wife believes she might be pregnant. At first, both are upset, but their feelings evolve as they consider what changes a child might make to their erotic life. And in the hypnotic "Snow," a woman named Hayako attends the wake of her mother only to be confronted by the traumatic past they shared, and the effect such a legacy has had on her own relationships with others. She works toward recovering from that legacy: "Perhaps she could force a miracle.... She was determined to part from that old self, once and for all." Each of Kono's stories features characters confronting new ways to live with their own secret selves, resulting in a strikingly original and surprising collection. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lively translation of postwar stories from Kono (1926-2015), a Japanese master of the unsettling.There is a moment in the collection's penultimate story, "Conjurer," when the protagonist, Hisako, thinks back to a fight she witnessed between her married friends. They were vehemently arguing about whether a magic show they'd seen was real, and Hisako agreed to buy a ticket to the show to help settle their dispute. As she ponders the couple, she thinks, "They'd been forced to acknowledge something in each of them and also something about their very relationship that they'd been unconsciously avoiding, and, forced to become aware of it, they felt betrayed." This moment shines a light backward on the rest of the collection: Kono's specialty is this avoidance of the unconscious and the moments when the darkness of her characters' psyches finally spills out. In the title story, a childless woman balances a violent misanthropy with an obsession with very young boys. In the opener, "Night Journey," a couple walks across town to visit friends with whom they've tentatively agreed to swap spouses. The Twilight Zone-esque "Final Moments" explores what happens when a woman bargains with death for an extra 26 hours to live. In "Bone Meat," a woman whose boyfriend has left her becomes increasingly haunted by seemingly mundane objectsclothes, oyster shellsthat push her toward destruction. Kono, who died in 2015, structures most of her stories similarly, with an unsettling flashback at the center of a story told in chronological time to show the ways that the dark seeds of our actions are planted, often unwittingly. And though the structures of the stories repeat and the protagonists resemble each other, each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary.Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
