Cannonball Read 13

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Does what it says on the tin!

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang

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This was good and I liked it, but I didn’t expect it to be so young-skewing. It’s definitely a middle grade book. Older teenagers and adults can read and enjoy it, but it’s not really an all-ages read. Aside from that, it was really well done. I went into this with no background, and it was a fun read that way, but I wish I would have read the historical context/afterword from Yang at the back of the book first. Better yet, I wish they […]

“Maybe it wasn’t about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.”

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

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This felt like two separate books to me, and one of them I liked much better than the other. The two central characters in this novel are Deming Guo and his mother, Polly, who is a Chinese immigrant (undocumented) from the city of Fuzhou, now living in New York (I loved the specificity of Deming and Polly insisting they speak Fuzhounese, which is a dialect of Min Chinese; this book had great cultural and historical detail like this all throughout). The first third of the […]

Life is a Mystery

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This is the second book I’ve read in the last three years on Vietnamese immigrants to the US and both have been good in different ways. Dragonfish isn’t in the same league as The Sympathizer, the latter being the best thing I’ve read this decade. But it’s still a good book and if these two books provide a baseline quality for Vietnamese-American writers, I need to be checking out more of their work. I almost returned Dragonfish to the library before even reading it because the GoodReads reviews were…well they […]

“The Departed” set in Giuliani’s New York

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This is what may be termed as a “bad sandwich” book: nothing wrong with the bread but what’s in the sandwich is awful. In other words: the first and third act are a lot of fun, the second act soured me to the point where it’s tough to appreciate the book in its totality. I’ll start with the positives. I liked the Michael Forsythe character. Immigrating from Ireland to get work, Michael is stuck with a violent gang tied to the Irish mob in early-90s […]

Great Expectations

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In Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee, Casey Han, a Korean American immigrant in New York City, struggles with being an Americanized daughter in a traditional Korean household.  Unlike her younger sister, Tina, Casey fights against her parents’ expectations of her. For example, her parents, especially her mother, are devout Christians, but Casey enjoys casual sex and has even had an abortion.  And although Casey graduated from Princeton because it was what her parents wanted/expected, she still hasn’t decided what she wants to […]



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