International Fiction Book Reviews

Bangalore Baloney written by Thomas Itty is a story that spans several decades and takes place in several countries. At its core, though, the book is the intimate journey of three young men. Given how personal it feels, one gets the feeling that the author lived many of these experiences.

Swami, George and Venu form a trio called the Scrimshankers They become best of friends at an all-boys middle school in Bangalore, India when the book begins and when the book ends, the now thirty-something Scrimshankers’ relationship is just as strong.

Swami is our middle ground; an upper-middle class, brown-skinned […]

The Spark, by Norwegian novelist O. H. Robsson, is a love story. It’s a slow, relaxing, rambling tale of a man who rediscovers his one true love after thinking she was lost to him forever. The first three-quarters of the book are mostly devoid of tension; any complications that do arise are relatively minor and are quickly put right. This wasn’t a problem at all for me. I kept turning pages in this book, not because of cliff-hanger chapter endings, and not because I was dying to learn how it all turned out, but because this story is just […]

As I started reading this book, I was struck by two things.  One, this book has the look and feel of a James A. Michener novel; broad, sweeping, long, intricate, descriptive and not intended to be gobbled up in a few days.  The second was the feeling of Roots in in its themes and content.  I was taken back in time to before the black man was taken from Africa as slaves to a new land, through the process of slavery and adaptation and then to the present time.  But this is no Roots, because this is not America.[…]

Eyes Behind Belligerence by K.P. Kollenborn is an ambitious book about complex subjects.  The Yoshimura and Hamaguchi families of Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Washington, endure the bigotry of the 1940s and are forced into the Manzanar Internment Camp, but their stories transcend any location.

Eyes Behind Belligerence is essentially a story of families and how they come to terms with loss — whether of people, life as they knew it, or the ability to make their own choices.  Americans whose ancestry is not Japanese may look at Japanese-American families and see homogeneity.  The book shows that the cultures […]