Review of James, by Percival Everett, read by Dominic Hoffman

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

James

by Percival Everett
read by Dominic Hoffman

Books on Tape, 2024. 7 hours, 49 minutes.
Review written September 2, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I put James on hold shortly after reading the graphic novel Big Jim and the White Boy, by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson. And then, when my hold was only a couple weeks away from coming in, I accidentally canceled the hold when I meant to cancel a different hold – and then had several more months to wait. Anyway, that gave me more time between the two books, which are essentially doing the same thing – retelling the story of Huckleberry Finn, this time from the perspective of Jim.

I honestly enjoyed Big Jim and the White Boy a little more. It was more light-hearted and cast Jim as essentially a superhero, telling something of a tall tale about his exploits. A lot of fun to read.

“Fun” isn’t the word I’d use to describe James. Though it was certainly more realistic, and gave you some insights about what would happen if a slave ran away with a white boy and floated south down the Mississippi River.

In both books, James doesn’t talk in the ridiculous way Mark Twain portrayed him talking. In this book, it’s quite a theme that among themselves, slaves speak “proper” English, but deliberately sound ignorant and childlike if any white people are around. James knows how to read and has spent hours in Judge Thatcher’s library reading philosophy. He dreams about people like Voltaire and has discussions with them about their defense of slavery. Throughout the book, it’s just plain comical how disconcerted white folks are if they hear Jim speaking without using slave speech. There’s a funny scene where the elders are teaching kids how to speak to white folks. The trick is to always play dumb and let the white folks figure things out for themselves.

Mostly the book is a series of adventures and tight spots, some with Huck and some without. James wants to be free and wants to purchase the freedom of his wife and daughter. And along the way, he acquires a pencil and also wants to write his story. There’s plenty of insight and commentary on slavery in the days just before the Civil War began. A very powerful and moving story that does shine light on an evil time in our nation’s history.

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Review of My Father, the Panda Killer, by Jamie Jo Hoang

Historical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

My Father, the Panda Killer

by Jamie Jo Hoang
read by Quyen Ngo

Listening Library, 2023. 10 hours, 17 minutes.
Review written November 3, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

My Father, the Panda Killer is the story of Jane, an American teen living in San Jose in 1999, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Jane’s mother left their family four years before, leaving Jane to go through high school as the mother of her little brother, then three years old. As well as giving her the responsibility to spend most of her time helping her father run their family convenience store. And bearing the brunt of her father’s unpredictable wrath and violent beatings.

Now it’s the summer after Jane’s senior year. She’s been accepted to UCLA, but doesn’t know how her father will respond to the news that she’s leaving. And she doesn’t know how to even begin to tell her brother that she won’t be there any longer to shepherd him through life and protect him from their father.

But alongside Jane’s story, we also hear the story of her father’s harrowing journey as a 13-year-old refugee from Vietnam. That part of the story is horrific with lots of death and life-threatening situations. But as Jane pieces together her father’s history, including a trip to Vietnam where she meets her grandparents for the first time, she begins to understand him better. As she understands her father better, she’s better able to understand herself and her heritage.

One little problem with this? I’m not sure I actually wanted Jane to come to terms with her father’s abuse in that way. I was reminded very strongly of the nonfiction book What My Bones Know,, by Stephanie Foo, and her C-PTSD and journey to come to terms with it through therapy as an adult. This book implies that even calling it abuse is a violation of Vietnamese culture. It left me feeling uneasy.

However, it certainly gave you sympathy and understanding for Jane’s father. In view of the horrors he endured, you can understand his ways of coping much better. So I was left not wanting to judge – but I still don’t think the beatings his daughter received are okay. Understandable, but not okay.

Anyway, the author’s note at the end said that the next book will be about the little brother – and his mother. I definitely want to read more. The interweaving of the father’s journey with the daughter’s conflicts was a big strength of the book. The front of the book says, “THIS IS NOT A HISTORY LESSON,” but at the same time the author points out that there aren’t many narratives of the Vietnam War told from the perspective of the Vietnamese people. At the very least, this book is valuable for filling that gap.

heyjamie.com

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Review of Mattie and the Machine, by Lynn Ng Quezon

Historical, Teen Fiction Review 0

Mattie and the Machine

by Lynn Ng Quezon

Santa Monica Press, 2022. 264 pages.
Review written April 23, 2023, from my own copy, sent by the publisher.

I really enjoyed Mattie and the Machine. I think part of its appeal is that as a woman studying math in college, I did feel like I had to prove myself.

This novel tells the true story of Margaret Knight, a mechanic and inventor. She starts out the book working as a mechanic at a bag-making factory. But when she learns that the male mechanic – and all the men – are making more than her, simply because they’re men, she confronts the owner.

And a challenge is born. Mattie is challenged to make a new machine that will produce the new square-bottomed bags. But her machine has to do it more quickly than the male mechanic’s machine.

The challenge takes up the first half of the book. Once Mattie has her machine, she’s urged to get a patent. But there are obstacles all along the way, and no one wants to work with a woman. And then she gets betrayed and has to go to court to get credit for her invention.

The storytelling style in this book is old-fashioned and reminds me of books I read when I was a kid, though Mattie is fifteen. It’s a little slow-moving, but I was fascinated by Mattie’s quest to prove herself.

The book closes with a copy of Margaret Knight’s patent. I wish that there was an author’s note about what is fact and what is fiction and what she went on to do with her life. How many more patents did she get? Did she ever marry, and was it to someone who appeared in this novel? For that matter, how many of the characters in the novel were actual people. This book made me want to find a biography of her life to find out how much was true and what this amazing woman went on to do.

Wikipedia article on Margaret Knight
NgQuezon.wordpress.com
santamonicapress.com

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Review of Austen at Sea, by Natalie Jenner

Austenalia, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Austen at Sea

by Natalie Jenner

St. Martin’s Press, 2025. 304 pages.
Review written August 25, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

Like the author’s wonderful earlier book, The Jane Austen Society, this book wasn’t so much a retelling of one of Jane Austen’s classics as it was a story about her legacy. In both books, something I loved was the characters discussing the fine points of Jane Austen’s novels as true aficionados. Other Janeites will enjoy that part as much as I did.

And we’ve also got Louisa May Alcott as a character in this book! That was a nice surprise. Here’s the set-up: In 1865, two sisters from Boston and two brothers from Philadelphia are on a ship crossing the ocean to visit the elderly Admiral Frank Austen, Jane Austen’s surviving brother. The two parties hadn’t known about each other, but both had written to the admiral about their love of Jane’s writings. And the admiral got some match-making ideas.

And another person traveling on the ship from Boston is Louisa May Alcott, accompanying an elderly friend to Europe to regain her health after the Civil War (as she in fact did). On the ship, the ladies decide to put on a theatrical production as a benefit to charity, with Lu in charge – as she had often done with her sisters, and as the characters do in Mansfield Park.

I was honestly a little disappointed that, although there is plenty of romance in this book, the admiral’s schemes don’t bear fruit. The book ends up being very much about women’s rights – and how women lost them when they married. Though it turns out that the laws were different on opposite sides of the Atlantic. But I’d never thought about what it meant that a woman marrying no longer had property rights.

So – I enjoyed the story, loved the characters (especially Louisa May Alcott!), delighted in the discussions of Jane Austen’s books and the visits to the places she lived, and learned things as well. This is definitely another good one for Jane Austen fans like me. (And do check out my Austenalia page while you’re at it!)

nataliejenner.com

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Review of The Women, by Kristin Hannah, read by Julia Whelan

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Women

by Kristin Hannah
read by Julia Whelan

Macmillan Audio, 2024. 14 hours, 57 minutes.
Review written August 5, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I know, I know – I’m way behind most people on reading this book, but Wow! Now I see why it’s been so popular.

“The Women” the title refers to are the women who served in Vietnam. Even though they were often told after the war that “There were no women in Vietnam.” (And Kristin Hannah’s author’s note at the end tells us that was a detail she got from more than one woman she interviewed.)

She tells the story of many women by focusing in on one woman, Frankie McGrath. At her brother’s going-away party, setting off to serve in Vietnam, when they all thought the war would be over soon, she was told, “Women can be heroes, too.”

So Frankie trained as a nurse and decided to serve in Vietnam with her brother. But the very day she signed up and told her parents the news was the day that they got word that her brother was killed in action, no remains found.

When Frankie got to Vietnam, it was trial by fire. Kristin Hannah takes us through her bewildering first day when there was a mass casualty event, through her training in the neuro ward, watching over patients who were unresponsive, through her coming into true expertise as an Operating Room Nurse.

And the author shows us how this was the worst and best time of Frankie’s life. Besides the horrors that haunt her, she built friendships like cement. She fell in love more than once – trying to avoid the ones who are already married. And she watched people die. But she also saved many lives, and held the hands of the dying so that they were not alone.

Half of the book is about what happened after Frankie got back. She was not hailed as a hero, not even by her parents, who’d told people she’d gone to school in Florence. The reader can see her PTSD symptoms – before that was even named as an issue.

There were times as I was reading this book when I cringed because I was pretty sure another impossibly hard thing was going to hit Frankie. And I wasn’t wrong.

But this is ultimately a story of a woman who went through impossibly hard things and came out the other side. The book ends on a well-earned hopeful note. And I love that Frankie represents the actual lives of the thousands of women who served in Vietnam. Her story helps us understand their stories.

kristinhannah.com

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Review of Daughters of Shandong, by Eve J. Chung

Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Daughters of Shandong

by Eve J. Chung
read by Yu-Li Alice Shen

Books on Tape, 2024. 11 hours, 7 minutes.
Review written July 3, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Daughters of Shandong tells the harrowing tale of a mother and her daughters caught in the crossfire of the Communist Revolution in China after World War II.

Hai, the oldest daughter, tells how her mother’s life was difficult even before the Communists. Because she hadn’t borne any daughters to her husband, the honored son of a wealthy land-owning family, her mother-in-law made her life miserable, working her from dawn to dusk and forcing her to kneel for hours as punishment for her many imagined failings. So when they get warning that the Communists are coming, Hai’s mother and sisters are left behind, supposedly to protect the land, but with no way to do so.

Since her father and grandfather are not there for the Communists’ renunciation, Hai must take their punishment and almost dies after the ordeal. So her mother leads them to Qingdao, where they learn their family has already fled to Taiwan. For them to follow is tremendously difficult, needing connections and ingenuity. They live as refugees in Qingdao and then Hong Kong before finding a way to Taiwan, and all along the way, they learn that things can get even worse than they had imagined – and then even worse than that.

So it’s not an easy tale to listen to. But the author based it on the life of her grandmother, doing tremendous research to fill in the gaps, and overall telling a story of rising against incredible odds. In the end, she shows that yes, even daughters are people of incredible worth, capable of amazing accomplishments.

evejchung.com

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Review of Under the Same Stars, by Libba Bray

Audiobooks, Historical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Under the Same Stars

by Libba Bray
read by January LaVoy, Jeremy Carlisle Parker, and Major Curda

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2025. 16 hours, 31 minutes.
Review written June 10, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Under the Same Stars is a skillfully crafted historical novel about resistors in three time periods – 1941 Germany resistance, 1980s divided Berlin punk bands, and the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. As the three stories progress, we learn that the stories are intertwined and there are returning characters.

One of those returning characters shows up early – the Bridegroom’s Oak, a tree in the forest outside Kleinwald Germany known for its magical matchmaking powers. We’ve also got a fairy tale about the tree, with forest magic woven through the tales.

Dear friends Sophie and Hanna start out by sending their own letters through the tree – which makes a cover for later using the tree to pass along forged documents to rescue people from Nazi Germany.

In 1980s West Berlin, Jenny, the young daughter of a diplomat isn’t at all happy about spending her summer away from her friends in Dallas. But when taking pictures of the city, she meets some punks and starts playing with their all-girl band, behind her parents’ back. And then she starts falling in love with her band mate, which would also horrify her parents. This girl is originally from East Berlin, and Jenny learns that the band’s music is an act of resistance.

And then in 2020, Miles is in isolation while one of his mothers got stuck overseas and the other is working around the clock in a New York City hospital. When his friend Chloe – who hadn’t been speaking to him – gets in touch, he starts working on the mystery of her grandmother’s partial story about a magical tree. Thinking about resistance helps him break out of isolation when the Black Lives Matter protests start up.

As usual, my summary doesn’t convey how well these stories are interwoven and the strong message that resistance is a loving and hopeful act. It’s something you do not for yourself, but because you have hope of a better world. It also conveys the message that the need for resistance is unfortunately very common.

I wish that message weren’t as timely as it is.

Even without the powerful message, this is a set of three gripping stories of folks who put their lives on the line.

libbabray.com

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Review of The Antidote, by Karen Russell

Audiobooks, Historical, Paranormal 0

The Antidote

by Karen Russell
read by Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, Shayna Small, Jon Orsini, Natasha Soudek, Karen Russell, and James Riding In

Books on Tape, 2025. 16 hours, 56 minutes.
Review written June 22, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

The Antidote is a historical novel of the Dust Bowl, woven throughout with magical realism. When I began the book, I wasn’t sure I liked it, and the pace is literary and more slow-moving than the young adult and children’s books I often read. But by the last several hours – well, let’s just say that I stayed up until 3 am and finished a jigsaw puzzle to also finish this book. (Would I have stayed up to finish the jigsaw puzzle anyway? Maybe. But wanting to finish this audiobook meant I didn’t even try to resist.)

The “Antidote” of the title is a person. She’s a prairie witch, and that’s the name she uses for customers. She’s a vault for things you want to forget, memories that trouble you or that you want to stop thinking about for a time. The Antidote goes into a trance and the customer talks into her ear trumpet and the memories get transferred to her to carry. The customer doesn’t remember what they confided, and the Antidote never heard it, but they can come back at any time, read their deposit slip backwards, and this time the transfer will go the other way, giving the memories back to the customer.

But the book opens on Black Sunday, the day an enormous dust storm went through Nebraska. On the same day, the Antidote went bankrupt. She can feel in her body that all the deposits were lost. What will she do when the customers fleeing the dry prairie want their deposits back?

There are other characters we follow. Harp Oletsky is a farmer whose wheat crop was miraculously spared. Even the scarecrow survived intact! He starts seeing lights coming from the land.

Harp’s niece, Asphodel, is living with him after her mother was found dead in a ditch. She tries to escape her nightmares about her mother’s body by playing basketball. But the folks supporting their team one by one are leaving Nebraska. And Asphodel wants to make some money by working for the Antidote.

Then there’s a government photographer. She’s a Black lady traveling alone. She tries to follow the instructions for the pictures the government wants to support the New Deal – but then her camera reveals images that she didn’t see when she took the pictures.

And through all of this, we learn about life on the prairie and the hard things that happen there – things people are willing to pay to forget. For example, the Polish settlers don’t want to face that they were offered free homesteads in order to secure land that belonged to the Pawnee people. And in fact, the Pawnee people are being treated exactly the way the Polish people were treated in Europe.

It also turns out that the no-good sheriff has been forcing the Antidote to receive deposits in order to hide evidence. And that comes to a head when the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer – who supposedly killed Asphodel’s mother – has a botched execution on Black Sunday when the electric chair malfunctions. The election is coming up, and the sheriff intends to win on his record, never mind what is really the truth behind the murders.

And it’s all wound together in a way that winds itself into your heart. I have to admit it got me thinking uncomfortable thoughts about my homesteading ancestors in a way I never faced before. The motto of the prairie in this book is “Better you than me.” And the book shows up the problems with that motto – and how deeply it’s embedded in the heart of America. Powerful stuff, and an engrossing read (once you get started).

karenrussellauthor.com

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Review of Rebellion 1776, by Laurie Halse Anderson

Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Rebellion 1776

by Laurie Halse Anderson

Caitlyn Dlouhy Books/Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2025. 416 pages.
Review written June 18, 2025, from an Advance Reader Copy sent by the publisher.
Starred Review

Here’s a side of the American Revolution I had never heard. We’ve got Elspeth, an ordinary girl living in Boston in 1776 and working as a maid. Her mother and brothers had died of smallpox in Philadelphia, so her father took the two of them to Boston, and he found her a position as a maid. The book opens as cannons are firing from both the British, under siege in Boston, and from the Patriots, trying to dislodge them.

The British and Loyalists are driven out, and Pappa plans to evacuate at the same time. Elspeth doesn’t want to go, so she hides overnight – but Pappa never shows up! Did he leave without her? Did something happen to him? While she’s trying to find him, to get in touch with him, Elspeth works for the family that replaced the loyalist judge she’d been serving. But her position is precarious as a girl without her father there to vouch for her.

And then smallpox comes to Boston. Elspeth has had it, but now folks are being inoculated – given a light dose of the disease – which is still a dose of the disease. And still takes months to run its course! (And I thought being sick for a day after a vaccination was bad.) And her good friend wants to enlist as a soldier. And the 16-year-old ward of the family she serves has independent ideas. And there are nefarious characters making use of wartime to enrich themselves.

The whole tale pulled me in and made me think about ordinary people during wartime – and how most folks simply want to live their lives. But world events can make that difficult.

It was a delight to read about Elspeth’s resourcefulness and courage as she holds on when it seems like she’s alone in the world.

madwomanintheforest.com

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Review of Enter the Body, by Joy McCullough

Audiobooks, Historical, Teen Fiction Review 0

Enter the Body

by Joy McCullough
read by a full cast,
including Joy McCullough, Valerie Rose Lohman, Annie Q, and Victoria Villarreal

Listening Library, 2023. 4 hours, 23 minutes.
Review written April 23, 2023, from a library eaudiobook

Joy McCullough’s debut novel, the amazing Blood Water Paint was published the year I was on the Newbery committee, so when I hear she’s written another book, I make sure to read it. This one has more of her innovative work, looking at history in a completely new way. Of course, in this case, it’s invented history — invented by Shakespeare.

The book is centered in a trap room beneath a stage. We’ve got Shakespeare’s tragic heroines spending eternity there. All of them died horribly.

Most of them go off into corners, but Juliet, Ophelia, and Cordelia get to talking. They tell their stories from their own perspectives. All of them died tragically, because of men.

But then the part I like is where they decide to make their own choices and rewrite their stories as they want them told.

I listened to this book, and the audio production is very well done, using separate voices for the different girls. But I suspect I would have enjoyed it more reading the print version, because it’s easier to notice the author’s craft — such as when the lines start going in iambic pentameter.

In the Author’s Note she mentions that Shakespeare was known for taking established work and making it his own, so she feels she’s following in his footsteps with this book.

joymccullough.com

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