Poetry and Books: Sunday Salon

The Best American Poetry 2025 is a landmark edition that not only showcases the finest contemporary American poetry but also honors David Lehman’s achievement as the anthology’s founding editor. 

Familial Hungers: Poems by Christine Wu

Description

Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.

Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. 

There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.

In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award

The Master Jeweler by Weina Dai Randel, June 24, 2025; Lake Union Publishing, NetGalley

Genre: historical fiction, Shanghai, WWII

Review: 

Captivating story of a 15 year old girl, Anyu, who leaves home in the north of China for the glittering world of Shanghai, where she learns the art of jewelry making from a family of Jewish artisans. She becomes a master jeweler with her designs and artwork and rewards the family by making their name famous in the city. The detailed descriptions of the work that went into making fine necklaces, rings, tiaras, bracelets and more using basic materials from scratch make the novel particularly interesting. 

The plot itself of a young girl who is trained to become a top artisan in her field is intriguing. The somewhat sad ending as China is invaded by the Japanese pre-WWII makes the story realistic and puts in historical context. The descriptions of Faberge eggs designed for the tsars in pre revolutionary Russia is detailed, as is Anyu's efforts to reproduce the intricacy of the jeweled eggs for her own work.

Informative and well written, an enjoyable novel of historical fiction.

Audiobooks on my list

  

Transplants

by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

A novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery.

On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a retiring Chinese student, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They each meet with hostility on campus for several reasons and forge a friendship.

They then swap places. Lin goes to Liz's Ohio hometown, and Liz searches for answers in China re what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. 

Transplants is a story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is an exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown.

What are you reading, watching, or listening to this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday, Book Blogger Hop

To Be Read Books: The Break In; I Did Warn Her; Wanting

 TBR List

The Break In by Katherine Faulkner, Aug. 26, 2025; Gallery Books, NetGalley.  Mystery, thriller, suspense

After killing an intruder in self-defense, a wealthy London mother must unravel a terrifying mystery filled with twists and turns, from the author of the “deliciously twisted thriller” (People) The Other Mothers.

I Did Warn Her by Sian Gilbert, June 17, 2025; William Morrow, NetGalley, thriller

A superyacht in the middle of the Atlantic.
A stewardess running away from her past.
A fatal secret.

Below deck, nothing stays hidden for long. (publisher)

Book beginning:

SASHA:

I don't deserve it: the sparkling sea lapping against the pier, the smell of salt and petrol, the freedom that awaits me. I don't deserve any of it. 

Wanting by Claire Jia, July 1, 2025; Tin House Books, NetGalley, contemporary, multicultural

A searing novel of envy, longing, and regret across three lives and two countries that asks how far we’ll go for a friendship, a romance, a dream.

Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing and wants for nothing – until her childhood best friend, Luo Wenyu, comes back after a decade in California. Luo has a successful career, a millionaire American fiancé, and a mansion in the Beijing suburbs–throwing Lian’s own reliable choices into high relief.

What are you reading, watching, or listening to this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday, Book Blogger Hop

Meme: book beginnings by Rose City Reader

Booking Through Thursday: What Makes a Good Book

 

Join Booking Through Thursday: 

Everybody needs a change now and again, so what new topics or authors are you interested in these days? Or what new kinds of books do you wish you had time for?

I'm looking for good writing in the books I read these days, and if the first page or pages don't grab my interest right off, I move on to the next book. First person narratives are interesting, as are the voices of adolescents or children, or struggling personalities, female or male. 

Books with in depth characterizations, complex individuals, and teasing ideas are just as important or even more important as the plot per se. Of course, an intriguing and unusual plot that leads you on becomes just as important as the characters sometimes. 

Have you found any books lately that fit the bill for you? 

Here are a few books that kept and are keeping my interest throughout:

Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh, May 6, 2025; Tin House, NetGalle

The Master Jeweler by Weina Dai Randel

Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa, (September 30, 2025; Knopf Canada; NetGalley

The Water Lies (October 2025; NetGalley)

What books are you reading that have you staying up at night? 

Re gardening: the storms and rains have prevented much gardening but the yard looks bright and green though overgrown. I replanted red lilies from the back to the front flowerbeds, but the winds and rain uprooted them, so I'm back to digging and fixing this morning.

How about you? 

We'll Prescribe You Another Cat and Other Reviews

 

Multiple Book Genres

I've been jumping around genres recently, from Japanese literary fiction to thrillers and cozy mysteries, to historical fiction. 

We'll Prescribe You Another Cat by Syou Ishida, Sept. 2, 2025, Berkley, NetGalley

Genre: magical realism, contemporary Japanese fiction

The doctor and nurse at The Healing Clinic for the Soul lends out Bengal cats for a week, prescribing a cat for those with problems at home that could be fixed with a cat in the house. The stories are clever and cute, and I loved the magical and fantasy aspects of both cats and clinic, and the doctor who does the prescribing. If I did not have allergies, I'd prescribe myself a cat!

 

Look in the Mirror by Catherine Steadman, July 30, 2024; Ballantine

Genre: thriller, suspense

Two women, Nina and Maria, are caught up in a house that they cannot fathom, it's secret so huge literally and figuratively. Both women are warned not to enter the basement or enter any of its doors, but they don't comply, being too curious and overly adventurous.

Maria's ordeals in the basement and Nina's bewilderment at the house that her dead father bequeathed her, turn out to be a puzzle the women must play and win. The author's plot around this house as the scene for a dangerous game is intriguing and original.

Thrilling and suspenseful, the story is surprising and the ending shocking.

 

Currently reading

The Master Jeweler by Weina Dai Randel, June 24, 2025; Lake Union Publishing, NetGalley

Genre: historical fiction, Shanghai

Description: the epic story of a brilliant young woman’s rise to fame in the perilous world of jewelry in 1920s Shanghai.

Harbin, China, 1925. Fifteen-year-old Anyu Zhang discovers a priceless Fabergé egg in the snow and returns it to the owner, Isaac Mandelburg, a fugitive former master jeweler for Russia’s imperial palace. In gratitude, he leaves her his address in Shanghai and a promise of hospitality, forever altering her fate.

Memes:  It's Monday: What Are You Reading, , and Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday

Sunday Salon: Swallows: A Novel by Natsuo Kirino, and Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman

 Two reviews

Swallows by Natsuo Kirino

Genre: Japanese literature, adult fiction, contemporary fiction


Riki comes to Tokyo not knowing anyone and needing to find a job, but the only thing she can find is a job as a surrogate for famous ballet dancer Motoi and his wife, Yuko, who cannot have children. Riki provides the egg, and she is artificially inseminated with Motoi's sperm. The dancer and his wife agree to take care of all Riki's surrogacy expenses and to raise the child as their own.

However, when Riki discovers she is carrying twins who may not have been fathered by Motoi but possibly by one of two other men with whom she had brief affairs just before insemination, things become complicated for all concerned. And especially for Riki whose maternal instincts kick in later in her pregnance, leading her to maybe consider the idea of raising the twins by herself.

The complications of surrogacy is explored in this novel, not only the physical demands and procedures, but the emotions of the people involved. Changes of mind by all three, from one state to another, make this novel a study in personalities and characters in a difficult situation. I read on, mesmerized by the story and the final resolution. It was not a disappointment.

Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman

Genre: thriller, mystery set in Bora Bora

Erin and Mark on their honeymoon and sailing in Bora, Bora, find a heavy, bulky bag floating in the water far away from land. They decide to turn it in to their hotel front desk, but Erin, ever the curious one, tears open the bag and makes an irresistable find. They try to keep the bag for themselves, but Erin digs into the background of the possible owners by powering up a cell phone left in the bag and talking to someone on the other end.

Scuba diving in the same area, they had also found the sunken wreckage of a small plane, with people inside.

This starts a cat and mouse game, with Erin digging herself deeper into the mystery and getting both herself and Mark in danger from the unknown persons connected to plane and the bag. They both decide to keep the information to themselves and return home to England with the bag's contents.

Needless to say, danger follows them, and the reader is left with a plot twist that is as mind boggling as it is unexpected. Excellent thriller.

 

Authors coming to our local library

June 17, 2025; William Morrow, NetGalley

Laura Lippman, mystery author visits our main library for her talk on June 26 featuring her books and most recent mystery novel.

Description: Muriel Blossom, a former PI and a middle-aged widow, takes a vacation on a Parisian river cruise, and finds a deadly international mystery only she can solve.

 

May 20, 2025; Sourcebooks, NetGalley

Kristina McMorris will discuss her historical fiction novels on July 22 at the library

Description: Portland, 1888. In the notorious Shanghai Tunnels in underground Portland, a drugged woman finds herself "shanghaied" and being shipped off as forced labor. She serves as a maid for the family of a dubious mayor and becomes entwined in a goldminers' massacre. Being half-Chinese, passing as white during an era of anti-Chinese sentiment, Celia must find a way to escape a place of unearthed secrets more dangerous than the dark recesses of Chinatown.  

In my mailbox

Thanks to Soho Press for a hard copy of the new mystery by Zoe B. Wallbrook, History Lessons, publication July 1, 2025.

What are you reading, watching, or listening to this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday, Book Blogger Hop

Book Reviews: Sunday Salon

 

The House Guest by Hank Phillippi Ryan

Feb. 3, 2023; Forge Books

Genre: thriller

My thoughts: The plot was clever and the characters unusual.  I was however disappointed in the personality of deceived wife, Alyssa, separated from unfaithful husband Bill. Alyssa feels Bill is playing tricks on her from afar, testing and harassing her from wherever he is hiding out.

Her new house guest, Bree, is a strange one, and I was suspicious of her from the beginning, especially as she seems to be planning with her friend Dez, to maybe trick Alyssa in her home. Alyssa seems so clueless at times, unaware, and often too dense to take in her situation and dealing with the cops and Bree and Dez

There are plot twists that show the reader may not be always correct in making assumptions right off the bat. Yet Alyssa is naive enough that you have to root for her as the novel goes on.

Audiobook 

Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadman,  published January 7, 2020, Ballantine Books 

Genre: psychological thriller

Setting: Britain 

I reviewed this book on another blog five years ago and gave it a solid five stars. Now on listening to the audiobook, I'm just as impressed as I was when I first read the book.

Mr. Nobody is suffering from fugue, retrograde amnesia due to psychological trauma, which means he does not remember anything from his life before he found himself wandering on a beach in the north of England. Neuropsychiatrist, Emma Lewis, is called in to the hospital to diagnose and treat the patient, which becomes one of the most challenging cases in her career.

Mr. Nobody seems to know Emma, however, and maybe even her secrets from her past. Mr. Nobody may be a military man who has lost his memory. Nobody knows for sure. I don't recall the ending of the novel and am enjoying the audio and anticipating a dramatic ending.

Finished reading

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer; Sept. 9, 2025; Minotaur Books, NetGalley

This novel is about the disappearance of a famous Icelandic crime writer, Elin S. Jonsdottir, whose sudden absence is investigated by a young detective, Helgi.  

The story is reminiscent of Agatha Christie's famous disappearance and reappearance, but the fictitious story of Elin is quite different. Elin's private life and the people involved in her life are key to the mystery, and the result of Helgi's search then becomes plausible. 

Helgi's own private romantic life is a side story added to the main plot. It makes the detective more human, and contributes to the novel's interest. 

This mystery is a traditional mystery and not noir, as so many Nordic mysteries are, but it was an enjoyable read, nevertheless.

Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa, (September 30, 2025; Knopf Canada; NetGalley

Genre: adult fiction, Canadian fiction, Laotian 

I enjoyed the realistic portrayal of a nail salon owner, Ning, how she deals with her staff and clients, and how she achieves the smooth running of her shop. Nings's observances of people and situations puts her on top of all possible scenarios that might crop up, and rewards the reader with astute and discerning commentary in this first person narration.

Ning is acutely aware of the biases and the stereotypes that the public makes of her occupation, even by her very own clients. This character driven novel is informative, giving us an inside look into a workplace and the staff and customers and their interactions or noninteractions as the case may be.

A highly recommended and unusual book.

About the author: Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books, and the award winning short story collection HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and resides in Toronto.

What are you reading these days? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves 

Invited to Read: Two New Books

 Invited to read by the publishers on NetGalley, ARCs

An over age 65 sleuth! 

July 8, 2025; Berkley, NetGalley

The World's Greatest Detective

Description: A brilliant Boomer detective and her ambitious Gen Z assistant try to get along in this delightful feel-good mystery.

Olivia Blunt is thrilled to be hired as assistant to the nationally renowned investigator Aubrey Merritt. She longs to become a valued contributor to the great detective’s work, but Merritt is a difficult, exacting boss, and the learning curve is steeper than she expected.

After weeks of boring computer work, Olivia is finally invited to join Merritt on an important case. On the night of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. She was a happy woman—rich, beloved, in love, and matriarch of the preeminent Summersworth family. The police ruled her death a suicide, but Victoria’s daughter Haley thinks it was murder.

Merritt and Olivia soon discover that the Summersworth family is complicated web of lies, ambitions, and resentments. As the list of suspects grows, Olivia makes one apparent mistake after another. When she blunders into a truly dangerous situation, she realizes Merritt might be right: she might be in over her head with this whole detective thing…or she might be unravelling a mystery even bigger than the one they started with.

A more serious read by the famed Japanese writer, Natsuo Kirino, author of Out

Sept. 9, 2025; Knopf

Swallows

Description:

The highly anticipated new novel. When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she’s ready to sell anything—even her womb—to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a little like the wife. But is anything ever that simple?

Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido, where she worked at a nursing home, for a better life in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security, and barely scrapes by. She eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day, sometimes for dinner, too. Many of her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance for an interview.

Meanwhile, former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. After trying what feels like every available option, it seems futile—until Motoi dives deep into his research and learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, there is a company that’s found a loophole.

Before long, everyone has an opinion on the matter: from Yuko’s sex-obsessed, asexual best friend, to Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina mother, and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times, after she accepted a down payment to be a surrogate.

Acutely funny and addictively page-turning, Swallows pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. What does it mean to be “in control”? And can money really buy happiness?

June 24, 2025; Muswell Press, NetGalley

I couldn't resist getting this thriller set in Copenhagen, even though it's the fourth in the series, but still a stand alone mystery. 

Out of the Dark 

Description: Matilde Clausen, 9, vanishes from a crowded playground in the middle of Copenhagen, triggering a frantic search across the city. When a link emerges to the disappearance of Lea Høgh, aged 10, six years ago, DI Henrik Jungersen is thrown back into the nightmare that almost finished his career. 

Desperate for redemption, but barred from reopening the old case, Henrik turns to his estranged lover, Dagbladet chief crime reporter Jensen, for help. As the investigation reaches deep into Denmark’s underworld, how will Henrik, Jensen and her teenage apprentice Gustav manage to escape the darkness that threatens to engulf them, in time to solve the mystery? What really happened to Lea? And where on earth is Matilde? 

What are you reading these days? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves 

Thriller: The Deepest Lake by Andromeda Romano-Lax

 

The Deepest Lake: an atmospheric thriller, is set on a lake in Guatemala, where Rose, who lost her daughter years ago, attends a luxury memoir-writing workshop.

 Determined to find out the circumstances of her daughter's drowning in the lake, Rose goes to the workshop in Guatemala, her real reason  to find out how and why her daughter drowned, and why she was alone in the lake even though she feared water. 

This ARC was sent for possible review/feature. The book was published May 7, 2024 by Soho Press. 

I have just started reading it! 

Bookstore Browsing: Sunday Salon

 At the bookstore

 Book Display at the store 

Chairs and a cat on the Toshikazu Kawaguchi book covers; cats only on books by T. Shigematsu and Syou Ishida. The Japanese are certainly fond of cats. I bought Before Your Memory Fades, the most recent in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series by Kawaguchi.

How many of these have you read, if any?

 On a poetry binge, I couldn't resist this new collection or its colorful cover.

The New Yorker started as a weekly in the mid-1920s, and is now published forty-seven times per year, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Poems, cartoons, satire, and essays are included in each weekly. 

I like that there are many short and shorter poems on various subjects in the collection. makes for easy reading.

And  I had to get a thriller too

The House Guest by Hank Philippi Ryan, published 2023 by Forge Books.

Description: Alyssa Macallan is terrified when she’s dumped by her wealthy and powerful husband. She begins to suspect her toxic and manipulative soon-to-be-ex is scheming to ruin her—leaving her alone and penniless. And when the FBI shows up at her door, Alyssa knows she really needs a friend.

And then she gets a seductive new friend, one who’s running from a dangerous relationship of her own. 

Alyssa offers Bree Lorrance the safety of her guest house, and the two become confidantes and schemers. 

Currently reading/almost finished

I am enjoying the descriptions of the canals in the watery neighborhood of Venice, California, where The Water Lies (October 2025; NetGalley) takes place.

In this mystery, a heavily pregnant woman, Tessa, tries to find the link between Gigi, a woman she just met at a local cafe, and her toddler son who seemed to recognize her. 

When Gigi turns up drowned in the canal in front of her house, Tessa becomes unnerved and bent on finding out how her son was connected to Gigi, calling her by her name in the cafe. 

Enter Gigi's mom, Barb, also determined to find out how or why her daughter drowned in a shallow canal even though she had been a swim champion in school.

The two women, Tessa and Barb, work together, and so far there are so many twists and turns in the plot that I can't wait to find out what really happened. 

 

What are you reading this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves 

Asian American/Pacific Island (Hawaiian) Authors

 

Asian American Authors - Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month

April 1, 2025; Simon & Schuster, NetGalley

Boat Baby: A Memoir by Vicky Nguyen is a memoir about the author and her family's harrowing trip from communist Vietnam in the mid-1970s to safety.  Traveling by boat, the group is attacked by pirates on the ocean, but manage to reach the refugee camps in Malaysia before being sponsored to come to America. 

April 10, 2025; independently published

In a brief biography, NBC News anchor and correspondent Vicky Nguyen also tells the story of her unlikely journey from refugee to award winning reporter and an NBC news anchor.

May 6, 2025; Norton & Company, NetGalley

The Wanderer's Curse: A Memoir by Jennifer Hope Choi, 

Description: An immigrant Korean mother runs off to Alaska, sparking a greater season of wandering. Could her daughter be destined for the same?

This probing memoir follows Choi through her many former homes, from a crumbling Chinatown tenement to a haunted museum in Georgia. 

The memoir is an electric mother-daughter story, exploring ideas of belonging, self-determination, and possibility, leaving readers to wonder what we take with us generation to generation, what we wish we could leave behind, and how we move on.

Jennifer Hope Choi is also an award nominated senior editor at Bon Appetit. 

May 20, 2025; Thomas and Mercer, NetGalley

Kaua'i Storm: a Ranger Makalani Pahukula Mystery by Tori Eldridge 

Genre: mystery, set in Kaua'i

Description: Returning to Kaua‘i after ten years as a national park ranger in Oregon, ranger Makalani Pahukula finds her family divided and their way of life at risk. But when hunters find a dead body in the Keālia Forest Reserve, Makalani fears something ominous is at play, and her search for her cousins is a mystery she must solve.

Tori Eldridge is the bestselling author of the Lily Wong mystery thrillers as well as a two-time Anthony Award nominee, Lefty and Macavity Awards finalist, and winner of the 2021 Crimson Scribe Award for Best Book of the Year.

Born and raised in Honolulu—of Hawaiian, Chinese, and Norwegian descent—she lived in New York and Los Angeles before settling in Portland, Oregon. She holds a 5th degree black belt in To-Shin Do ninja martial arts.

Have you read any books for AAPI Heritage Month? 

What are you reading, watching, or listening to this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday