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First Person Fiction: The Stone Goddess by Minfong Ho
The latest in the First Person Fiction series, Goddess tells the story of a young dancer-in-training and her family living in Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia, resulting in the...
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Little Sap and Monsieur Rodin by Michelle Lord, illustrated by Felicia Hoshino
Little Sap, a poor country girl, is chosen to become one of the royal court dancers of Cambodia. She travels to France on a royal tour in 1906, where she inspires the legendary French artist Auguste...
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A Song for Cambodia by Michelle Lord, illustrated by Shino Arihara
Arn Chorn-Pond was just 8 years old when he was torn from his family in 1975 as the Khmer Rouge invaded Cambodia. He survives years of unimaginable atrocities with only rare moments of music to soothe...
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Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me by Alice Pung
Already a many-time-many-variety award-winner in her native Australia, Alice Pung‘s debut memoir arrives Stateside filled with humor and bittersweet grace. Born one month after her family arrived in...
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The Silence of God and Other Plays by Catherine Filloux
Playwright Catherine (pronounced Ka-treen) Filloux has built her dramatic reputation on giving voice to lost, overlooked souls. In Lemkin’s House, Filloux presents the struggle of Raphael Lemkin, a...
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The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who...
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Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by...
Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth...
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Half Spoon of Rice: A Survival Story of the Cambodian Genocide by Icy Smith,...
Tragically, death and destruction are very much a part of human reality … when and how to introduce such difficult topics to our children is always a tough decision for both parents and teachers. For...
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First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung +...
For someone who has experienced hell, Loung Ung is a bright, welcoming voice filled with inviting laughter. She’s warm: “I just had dinner with my writing group last night. They’re my PenGals. I just...
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Alive in the Killing Fields: Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide by Nawuth...
‘Collateral damage’ is such a detached, sanitized phrase for the innocent people who pay the highest price for the tragic folly of war; and surely the youngest and the eldest suffer the greatest. “I...
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Roots and Wings by Many Ly
Born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town, the only connection 14-year-old Grace has to her Cambodian heritage are her mother and her grandmother. While these three generations of women clearly need...
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The Clay Marble by Minfong Ho
Twelve-year-old Dara, her older brother, and their mother are the only ones left of their once-large family. Although the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, neighboring Cambodia – decimated by Pol...
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World and Town by Gish Jen
Hattie Kong’s email inbox is full of desperate pleas from various relatives to please send back her parents’ bones to the family plot in Qufu, China. Because her American missionary mother and her...
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The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam
Before you open Somaly Mam‘s astonishing memoir, you need to be prepared to bear witness to some of the most horrific acts a human being can commit against another, especially helpless young girls....
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Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double...
When I recently met Loung Ung in person at one of her Washington, DC readings, we were the lone Asian women in the room. Yes, get ready with your “uh-oh.” Within minutes, a random stranger asked if Ung...
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The Rent Collector by Camron Wright
Allow me to begin with an intriguing tidbit and a cringe-inducing warning … Thumbs up: The Rent Collector is a father’s novel inspired by his son’s documentary, River of Victory. Not only is the story...
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Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick
I admit I had a few false starts before I finally settled into Patricia McCormick‘s latest, which was a 2012 National Book Award finalist for Young People’s Literature. Based on the horrifying...
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Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Above all else, Janie is a survivor. She escaped the horrifying deaths that took her entire family in her native Cambodia. She’s outlived her adoptive Canadian mother who passed away just last year....
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The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay
This has been my go-to article of late: “The One Thing White Writers Get Away With, But Authors of Color Don’t” by Gracie Jin. In the few blurbs I’ve briefly perused online about Lost Memories, I...
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In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner
Confession first: I took almost two years to finish this debut novel. Not until an interview deadline loomed (stay tuned!) could I force myself to keep turning the pages until I reached the end....
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