The links lead to longer reviews. 22: Skim : This is very good, but not my sort of thing. An understated graphic novel about a teenage girl dealing with various Stuff. Others have reviewed it better... but even as a white australian woman the idea of a black African man whose predator nature shines through his magical eyes as he turns into a leopard a bit..dodgy. It didn't put me off too much, YMMV

Mystery/thriller is one of those genres that I don't read often, but that I do read occasionally when I need a change of pace. I've been reading a lot of fantasy lately, and needed a break. I saw this...and often scary. It's "beach read" type stuff, but it was just what I needed; it had just enough mythological material to suck me in, but was different from my usual fantasy fare and gave me a "break.

Min Fong Ho is an American author of Chinese descent who grew up in Thailand.  Her story Hush! is evocative of her childhood home outside Bangkok which was, as she describes it on her web page, "an airy...cot.  The lovely illustrations of Thai scenes are perfect for the story, but unfortunately not done by a POC. Hush! makes a great bedtime book and has just enough irony for any exhausted parent

She's a fiddle player with Voodoo magic, he's a sex slave Merman. They fight crime! Overall I thought this was ok but underwhelming. I wrote a short review on my lj . A question for people who've read...it in this one, and I vaguely recall someone complaining about a similar problem with another of her books. Given that these are romance novels it's not much fun if I find the romance unengaging :

I loved The Iron Hunt , and was eagerly looking forward to the sequel. (Has it really only been a year?) I'm happy to report that Darkness Calls is a worthy successor. This time around, Maxine and her...is rarer in the genre: a long-term relationship that works . Maxine and Grant face tons of problems, but you get the sense that their love and commitment are a match for whatever comes their way

#15: Laurence Yep, Dragonwings It is 1903, and Moon Shadow lives in China with his mother; a few months before Moon Shadow was born, his father, Windrider, left for America, the Land of the Golden Mountain...way that Smith doesn't stop with documenting the issues; she also focuses on how to solve them. It wasn't an easy book to read, but it is shocking and illuminating and important, and I'm glad I read it

Apologies for the brevity of these reviews, but they're from my Twitter book-review project (@booktweeting, for those of you who Tweet). Life is Short but Wide , by J. California Cooper New York: Doubleday... by Linda Furiya Berkeley, California: Seal Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1580051910 SWEET MEMOIR of growing up Japanese in rural Indiana has charm, poignancy, but may seem slight to some readers. B PLU

I got many of these from Hexpletive but afaict she hasn't got a post which combines them all together. These are all about the Northern Territory, which has been in the news a lot recently. Racial...about sex (which seem prone to WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN hysteria) but I'm still pretty sure people wouldn't be in favour of implementing these rules for nice white middle class suburban kids

These are reviews of two novels I listened to as audiobooks last month. 16. Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun , 2009 This is a first novel by Korean-American author Nami Mun about a young girl named...bodies of dead people, and the narrator's psychic connection to that collective life form was not really interesting to me. If you like your paranormal thrillers though you might want to check it out

11. Henry Chang, Chinatown Beat Jack was born and grew up in New York City's Chinatown, and now that he's an adult, he's back in the neighborhood working as a cop; Johnny is a new Chinese immigrant...and honesty. It's funny, really funny, but what I was most surprised by was how tragic the book was also. There's a lot of death, and bad choices, and tough realities in here. Very highly recommended