A classic, vividly written immigrant saga.
A Chinese American woman looks back on poverty, war, and family betrayal in this heartfelt memoir.
Jensen writes in her mother Helen’s voice as she recaps Helen’s life story, starting with her childhood in Detroit in the 1920s and ’30s, where her father, Ho Sin, and mother, Bo-Ling, both Chinese immigrants, ran a laundry that barely provided for them and their six children. In 1936, after Bo-Ling’s death, Ho Sin returned to China with the children, remarried, and then returned to America, leaving them in the Tai Ting Pong village in the care of their new stepmother, Seam. Jensen paints a detailed portrait of the traditional village lives they led, which were culturally vibrant but materially austere, a problem exacerbated by their uncle Ho Huang, who gambled away the family’s farmland and brutalized his wife. In 1940, Ho Sin brought 17-year-old Helen to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she re-Americanized herself and waitressed at swanky eateries—her recollections of Chinatown are colorful and bustling. Later chapters describe her version of the American dream, with nice suburban houses and the resources to put her daughters through college. Jensen’s absorbing narrative spotlights the clash between old country and new—Ho Sin almost disowned Helen for waiting tables, a disreputable occupation for a woman from China, he believed—and the discrimination Chinese immigrants faced in America. It’s also a story of family values under the pressure of a poverty that forces agonizing trade-offs between love and material sustenance, as when Seam stirs her stepchildren’s resentment by giving her own daughter extra rice and sausage. Jensen relates all of this in richly evocative writing that sometimes achieves a plangent poetry. (“A man’s wife was his property….After each beating, Auntie would cry great sobs. Then she would be quiet for a while, and then she would gather herself to continue the day’s business.”) The result is an engrossing read that brings to life both the strength and adaptability of its subject and the wrenching changes she endured.
A classic, vividly written immigrant saga.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798897409709
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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