Featuring 320 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfi ction, Children's and YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 9 | 1 MAY 2020 REVIEWS What Does the Power of Story Mean to You? Why We Need Learn More from Award-winning Authors Tami Charles, Francisco X. Stork the Power of Story & Kelly Yang Build Your Library with New Books from Scholastic There’s nothing more powerful than a story to connect us, to help us understand each other, and build empathy. Scholastic's ongoing Power of Story initiative highlights books for all ages that represent diversity of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and physical and mental abilities. In sharing these books with young people, you will be giving them the opportunity to see themselves and their communities re ected, to read widely, and to understand and expand their world. Visit Scholastic.com/PowerofStory for a complete catalog of diverse books for all ages updated for 2020. What Does the Power of Story Mean to You? Tami Charles, award-winning author of All Because You Matter For the rst 11 years of my life, I was an only child, so stories were all I had to keep me company. Stories gave me the power to envision myself far beyond where I was at the moment. Now I’m in an incredible position to show the power of story to readers. I get to share the power of story with my son, Christopher. I want him, and all children, to grow up knowing that they have a purpose in this universe. The stories I write and the stories that we read together take us to places both near and far, and teach us October 6 about people who are like us and those who are beautifully different. Francisco X. Stork, award-winning author of Illegal The power of story happens when there is a character in a novel who is like me, although I’ve never seen myself that way, and there are words for what I’ve felt before but could not name until then, and something suddenly opens in me and around me and I see new worth and value to who I am, such as I am, and to my life, such as it is, and I am rung like a bell, certain that I am being asked to give to life what only I can give. © 2020 by Bryan Collier August 4 Kelly Yang, award-winning author of Three Keys Stories are powerful because they transcend the boundaries of race, All Because You Matter All Because You gender, and your current socioeconomic station. They don’t care that you add water to your shampoo to make it last longer or that you practice the piano on your desk because you can’t afford a real one. They put all those differences aside and appeal to what we all have in common. My parents and I were rst-generation, struggling immigrants from China, working in motels all over California. But I always had stories, borrowed from my school library. It didn’t matter that my parents and I worked seven days a week or that the last vacation my family took was coming ANOVEL KELLY YANG to this country – through those stories, I could travel the world, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR be anyone, do anything! That is the power of story. September 15 SCHOLASTIC TM/® Scholastic Inc. Artwork from Featuring 320 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 9 | 1 MAY 2020 REVIEWS THE Diversity ISSUE Celebrating the books that reflect our diverse world Conversations with Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi, Rishi Reddi, Ainissa Ramirez, and more from the editor’s desk: Chairman Our Diverse Future HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher BY TOM BEER MARC WINKELMAN # Chief Executive Officer MEG LABORDE KUEHN [email protected] Photo courtesy John Paraskevas courtesy Photo If there’s one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it’s that we’re Editor-in-Chief TOM BEER all interconnected. The world is a smaller place than ever before; we are affected by [email protected] what takes place halfway around the globe, and the fate of our fellow humans—no Vice President of Marketing matter their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, creed, or ability—is our fate as well. SARAH KALINA [email protected] This Diversity Issue, our second annual, was conceived and assigned before the Managing/Nonfiction Editor coronavirus turned our world upside down. But the principles that this issue cele- ERIC LIEBETRAU brates—that our differences as people are a source of strength and that by embrac- [email protected] Fiction Editor ing our diversity we are a fuller and fairer society—are as true as ever before. LAURIE MUCHNICK In How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness, and Community in Times of Global Cri- [email protected] Children’s Editor sis (Bloomsbury, April 14), the Italian physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano notes VICKY SMITH that the virus “doesn’t care about us, our age, gender, nationality, personal prefer- [email protected] Young Adult Editor Tom Beer ences….The community we should be taking care of isn’t our neighborhood or our LAURA SIMEON city. It’s not a region, or Italy, or even Europe. Community, in the contagion, is the [email protected] entirety of the human species.” Nevertheless, it is also true that here in the United States, low-income Editor at Large MEGAN LABRISE people of color are being disproportionately affected by COVID-19, as suggested by early data from Chi- [email protected] cago, Milwaukee, and Michigan. Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has shared Vice President of Kirkus Indie KAREN SCHECHNER a distressing thread about these disparities on Twitter. [email protected] Unsurprisingly, a pandemic can also exacerbate racism and xenopho- Senior Indie Editor DAVID RAPP bia. President Trump has referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” the [email protected] most high-profile instance of an anti-Chinese and anti-Asian backlash that Indie Editor includes bias attacks and discrimination in several countries. In India, as MYRA FORSBERG [email protected] author Arundhati Roy writes in the Financial Times, impoverished and work- Associate Manager of Indie ing-class citizens fled locked-down cities on foot, headed to their villages, KATERINA PAPPAS only to be stopped and beaten by police. The world over, such scenes of cru- [email protected] Editorial Assistant elty and prejudice continue to play out. JOHANNA ZWIRNER The Diversity Issue offers a different vision. Here we aim to celebrate [email protected] Mysteries Editor the books and authors who are expanding our horizons and complicating THOMAS LEITCH our understandings of identity, never a simple construct. We speak with Contributing Editor author Rishi Reddi, whose debut novel, Passage West (Ecco, April 21), reveals GREGORY McNAMEE the little-known story of Indian immigrants in California in the early 20th Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS century. Scientist Ainissa Ramirez, author of The Alchemy of Us: How Humans Designer and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, April 7), shines a light on the ALEX HEAD overlooked contributions of women and people of color in the sciences. National Ambassador of Young Director of Kirkus Editorial LAUREN BAILEY People’s Literature Jason Reynolds and scholar Ibram X. Kendi discuss their collaboration on Stamped: [email protected] Racism, Antiracism, and You (Little, Brown, March 10), a young adult “remix” of Kendi’s groundbreaking Production Editor adult study of white supremacy. S.K. Ali and Aisha Saeed, editors of the anthology HEATHER RODINO Once Upon an Eid: Stories [email protected] (Amulet/Abrams, May 5), reflect on the little acknowledged diversity of of Hope and Joy by 15 Muslim Voices Website and Software Developer the Muslim world and the writers who share their unique stories of observing the religious holiday in com- PERCY PEREZ [email protected] munities from New York City to Malaysia. Advertising Director There’s much more to read and think about in these pages, including our editors’ recommendations MONIQUE STENSRUD of some of the best diverse books they’ve seen in adult fiction and nonfiction, children’s and young adult [email protected] Advertising Associate literature. TATIANA ARNOLD Meanwhile, as Arundhati Roy observes in her essay, the pandemic, among many other things, is a [email protected] Graphic Designer moment of rupture with our past and its prejudices. “It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the LIANA WALKER next,” she writes. “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, [email protected] our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk Controller MICHELLE GONZALES through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” [email protected] The work begins, as it so often does, with our books. Keep reading. for customer service or subscription questions, please call 1-800-316-9361 Print indexes: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/print-indexes Submission Guidelines: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/submission-guidlines Kirkus Blog: www.kirkusreviews.com/blog Subscriptions: www.kirkusreviews.com/subscription Advertising Opportunities: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/advertising- Newsletters: www.kirkusreviews.com/subscription/newsletter/add Cover design by opportunities Melissa Taylor 2 | 1 may 2020 | from the editor’s desk | kirkus.com | you can now youpurchase can now bookspurchase online booksat online kirkus.comat kirkus.com contents the diversity issue fiction indie INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ...........................................................4 INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ....................................................... 141 REVIEWS ...............................................................................................4 REVIEWS ........................................................................................... 141 EDITOR’S NOTE.....................................................................................6 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 142 INTERVIEW: KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN ...................................14 SEEN & HEARD ................................................................................