Kevin D. Hendricks's Blog, page 39

When My Name Was Keoko: World War II Korea

When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park is set in occupied Korea during World War II. It follows a brother and sister as the Japanese inflict more and more hardships.

The story itself didn’t blow me away, but the history was a perspective I knew nothing about. I don’t know much about Korean history, so it was fascinating to get this glimpse.

Much of the World War II story we get is the brutality of the Nazis. I’ve heard some about Japanese soldiers, but this viewpoint is more from a civilian p...

Art-A-Whirl Old School Portrait

Last Saturday we stumbled unwittingly into Art-A-Whirl in support of our friend Paul Johnson’s new photography magazine, Leaf Shutter. As part of the festivities, photographer Victor Keller had an old school camera set up and was taking portraits.

The camera he used was a refurbished Deardorff 8×10 (V8) view camera commonly used in the portrait studios in the 1930s-50s. It looked like something out of the 1860s, a square, boxish thing, complete with the black sheet the photographer hides under...

Subverting Expectations in The Butterfly Mosque

An American woman moves to Cairo in 2003, converts to Islam and marries an Egyptian.

She’s not a terrorist (though the State Department was very interested in her activities).

She’s not an abused and mistreated Muslim wife.

She actually writes for The Atlantic Monthly and Marvel—yes, she writes comic books.

G. Willow Wilson has an incredibly interesting story (one of the many I discovered at the Festival of Faith and Writing) and The Butterfly Mosque is a glimpse into that story. She navigates a...

Experiments in Fiction: Fiction Unboxed

If you like to see the bleeding edge of fiction, check out the work of Johnny B. Truant, Sean Platt and David Wright.

These guys host the Self-Publishing Podcast and write a lot of books. They follow a serial format—think of a TV series for books. They release individual episodes, collected into a season that makes up each series. And they’ve done a ton of different series.

Platt and Wright have the successful Yesterday’s Gone series, Truant wrote Fat Vampire and Platt and Truant wrote Unicorn...

The Last Wild: All Imagination, All Rise

The Last Wild by Piers Torday gives us a post-apocalyptic world where the red-eye virus has killed nearly all the animals. Save for a few holdouts, humanity has been pushed into cities and subsists on a synthetic formula.

It’s a bleak setup for a children’s novel. But it gets worse.

Kester Jaynes is trapped in a home for troubled children because he stopped talking six years ago. There’s your rejected outcast hero.

But then some of the remaining animals start talking to him, including a flock of...

New/Old Asian Superhero: The Shadow Hero

This is fun: Gene Luen Yang is releasing a new retelling of a classic Asian superhero, the Green Turtle.

It’s an exploration of the immigrant experience through the superhero genre, which is essentially all about immigrants and living in two cultures at once. As Gene says:

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Take at look at Superman, the granddaddy of them all. His parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He had two names, one American (Clark Kent) and the other foreign (Kal-E...

How to Steal a Dog Shows the Reality of Homelessness

How to Steal a Dog by Barbara O’Connor is a quick and powerful story that realistically portrays the reality of homelessness.

Georgina finds herself homeless when her father runs out, their family gets evicted and Georgina, her mom and her brother end up living in their car. But she sees a lost dog poster on a telephone pole and gets an idea—she’ll steal a dog and then claim the reward. An extreme situation prompts extreme action and Georgina makes some hard choices.

It’s not a happy-go-lucky s...

Criss Cross is the Intersection of Lives and Nothing More

The book jacket description of Criss Cross by Lynn Rae Perkins doesn’t really tell you anything. There’s a reason for that. This book isn’t about anything.

“She wished something would happen,” it says right on the cover, and that’s about right.

The story follows several teenage characters with intersecting lives and it just hums along through ordinary days. You get slice of life stuff. Hector wants to learn how to play guitar. Debbie and her friend Patty change clothes after leaving the house b...

Jacob Wonderbar and the Random Capers Kids Love

Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow by Nathan Bransford is a boy-friendly space adventure story with plenty of wacky capers. Jacob is a troublemaker at school and he teams up with his best friends Dexter and Sarah for some non-stop fun, initiated when a man in a silver suit trades a spaceship for a corn dog.

Yep, that’s the kind of randomness you can expect from Jacob Wonderbar.

I thought it felt a little too directionless, but I read it aloud to Milo and he loved it. It’s turned into a...

Sarah’s Key Explores the Vel’ d’Hiv Holocaust

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay explores the Vel’ d’Hiv’ tragedy during World War II when French Jews were rounded up and ultimately sent to the death camps. It was by order of the German occupation, but carried out by French authorities.

The story is told from the perspective of a young girl rounded up with her family and also a middle age woman in 2003 researching the story as a journalist when she uncovers a personal family connection.

It’s a compelling story and engaging as the mystery unf...