Welcome to Litsy!

I thoroughly enjoyed this fun and heartwarming adventure about a father risking everything and reaching across time to save his daughter, who isn‘t supposed to exist because he had her in a timeline prior to his own timeline. There are no DeLoreans in this story, but Chen manages to make email a nail biter of a time travel device. Pretty impressive, no? 😉 I‘m looking forward to reading his other novels sometime in the near future.🏮#mayreads2021

At the age of seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, along with her family and thousands of other Japanese Americans, was forcibly removed from her home and sent to Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps to open during World War II. Houston tells a complex story of Manzanar as both prison and community, both the end of life as she knew it and the beginning of a life that would forever be shaped by her experiences there.🏮#mayreads2021

As a biracial half-Asian I‘ve never felt like I could identify with the umbrella term “Asian American,” but even Cathy Park Hong, a monoracial Korean American, feels uneasy identifying with this collective “we,” when Asian Americans are such a diverse pluralism that it‘s difficult to delineate what “we” even means. Hong‘s provocative book challenges cultural notions of Asian identity, including her own.🏮#mayreads2021

Jose Antonio Vargas gives readers an intimate perspective on what it‘s like to live in America with undocumented status and how the lack of a path to legal citizenship inhibits the most essential human rights. He shares his experience with a disarming honesty that seeks human compassion rather than detached political debate.🏮#mayreads2021

Bold Valora Luck, a mixed-race British-Chinese acrobat, uses all her wits to stow away on the Titanic in the hopes of convincing her twin brother, a ship laborer, to revive their acrobatic duo act and win the recruitment of a famous circus owner. I didn‘t expect a happy ending, and yet I also didn‘t expect so much indomitable vivacity, tenacity, and even humor to fill the pages before the novel‘s heart-wrenching conclusion.🏮#mayreads2021

In this sequel to Front Desk, Mia Tang and her family are the proud new owners of the motel they bought from their landlord. But Mia‘s best friend, Lupe, fears her undocumented father will be deported to Mexico, under the looming threat of California Proposition 187. However, author Kelly Yang puts enough love into this fictional retelling of a turbulent time in California history that there‘s plenty of room for hope.🏮#mayreads2021

I‘m finally ready to share my reads for the month of May! In recent years I‘ve been reading more books by Asian Asian/American authors (and especially by Japanese/Japanese American authors, since that‘s my heritage). This year, in honor of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Heritage Month, I decided to read books by AAPI authors for the entire month of May. I couldn‘t get enough! But this selection was fantastic.🏮#mayreads2021