Biblio Reviews

Should I be embarrassed to share that until I recently read Michelle Obama's memoir  Becoming (2018), I hadn't really known too much about her history? Or that I didn't fully understand others' obsession and deep admiration of her? Like many Americans, I reveled in the election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States, though I remained fearful and prayed for the family's safety throughout their eight years in the White House. While I admired the Obamas for what they symbolized, I wasn't obsessed with them. Other than a now defunct website dedicated to Mrs. O's fashion, I hadn't kept up with many of the articles or biographies that populated many shelves and websites since they first stepped into the national spotlight. Most of my perception of the Obamas came from reading 2/3 of Dreams from My Father  (2007) way back when and whatever had made it in the headlines during their initial presidential campaign. Having read  Becoming , I...

The first time I read Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do (2017), I was caught up not only by the evocative and tragic aspects of her illustrated memoir but also the commonality among seemingly disparate groups. At the time, I worked in a community consisting of a large group of Haitians and Vietnamese, two groups I had not considered as sharing much in common other than their immigrant status. However, through this memoir, I learned that both groups historically share a language because both had been colonized by the French. For some reason, the knowledge that my French-speaking Haitian students could theoretically hold a conversation with my French-speaking Vietnamese students' grandparents intrigued me. The idea that language served as both a barrier (for my Vietnamese-American students who couldn't communicate with their grandparents) and an opening because of a shared language uniting two generations from different cultures really struck me. Similar to Celeste Ng's E...

Sona Charaipotra's Symptoms of a Heartbreak (2019) in idea sounds great. A modern female Doogie Howser works to knock out cancer while trying to balance life as a teenager. In execution, however, the story...falls flat. It's unfortunate, really, because the book has so many good things going for it: teenage romance, friendship troubles, work drama, and overall likable secondary characters. On a technical front, the writing is also strong with effective pacing. An additional plus is that the story is centered around Indian-American female protagonist, sixteen-year-old Saira. So what's the issue? In the end, Symptoms of a Heartbreak suffers from too much: a lack of definition and focus on a central conflict. In addition to balancing the everyday growing pains of teenage life with being a "girl genius" medical professional, Saira is also contending with the following: maintaining professional relations with a patient, managing others' expectations of her girl...