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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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