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 football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
