An often powerful depiction of learning a new language.
Zhang, a Chinese American writer and the founder of a nonprofit that assists English-language learners, explores “what it means to live in translation” in this multi-genre work.
Drawing from her own experience and that of other ELLs, the author considers how ideas of language and self interact with concepts of home, school, and society at large. The book’s first part focuses on living, speaking, and dreaming across languages through poetry, fiction, and stage plays. Poems such as “Field Guide to Survival in English” and “Glossary for the Newly Displaced” capture the tension of straddling cultures. “A Fictional Portrait of Immigrant Fluency” is an endearing snapshot of a man who’s diligently learning what terms like “run an errand” mean with his daughter’s help. Shame about using imperfect English is a recurring theme: The speaker of “The Language Between Us” describes rewriting her mother’s notes to teachers and editing her mother’s texts before forwarding them on. A series of “Search History” poems reveal what multiple family members are Googling, such as “how to understand my daughter’s jokes,” and “can school punish if parent makes mistake in form.” The book’s second half widens the scope, analyzing legal and systemic factors affecting ELL students through essays and interviews, but it’s dry and academic compared to the rest of the book and lacks emotional impact. The epilogue includes a letter in which Zhang tells her younger self, “Just don’t give up.” At its best, Zhang’s lyrical language often cuts to the core of the immigrant and ELL experiences in lines such as “In our apartment, the walls were made of air and disappointment. / You could hear other families loving each other louder. Our / family loved in lowercase, in leftovers.” Her experimentation with form is also bold and effective in pieces such as “What We Google Instead of Ask,” framed as a group chat interspersed with search-engine queries. Her compassion for ELLs is also evident throughout: “Child,/ are you listening?/ The most beautiful part/ of your voice/ is the part you thought was wrong.”
An often powerful depiction of learning a new language.Pub Date: July 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798999585707
Page Count: 166
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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