A Cigarette Lit Backwards captures all the chaos and misguided pursuits of contemporary teenage-hood. The novel is a parable of the ethics — the requirement of authenticity and the breaking of this law — of being teenage “cool.”

The plot itself is straightforward: Kat is a high-schooler in the early-middle 2000s. She suffers from occupying that middle rung of teenage society: cool enough to be unnoticed, not cool enough to be noticed by those who deign to judge others. She is every American child in that era: two parents who are successful in their respective careers — whatever they might be — a typical two-income family, part of a new immigrant class whose trajectories lack the tragedy of previous immigrant generations. Kat is white and middle-class. Her life is typical of the concerns of teenage girls of her class, her background, her community; her primary motivating desire is acceptance in the world of Cool. Casual sex, casual drug use, skipping classes, and going to concerts and underground shows are the means by which to achieve her dreams. (All hail, Ticketmaster, bestower of golden dreams and backstage passes. All Access and “Free” parking if you can afford it.)

Kat gets what she wants and predictable consequences ensue. But perhaps they are only predictable because I am the age Kat will be in 2022. The lessons of sex, lies, and the fallacy of music, drugs, and friendships have faded for me in a way that will likely fade for Kat as she matures as well. But in the turn-of-the-century world of A Cigarette Lit Backwards Kat has yet to discover how little all that matters: how sex, real or imagined, means nothing, how friendships forged in a fire fueled by drugs, infatuation, and the superficial markers of clothes, piercings, edgy haircuts, and tattoos — even forged in the trauma of drug overdoses — will fall away meaninglessly after college, after your 20s, after the hangover has cured.

Kat has not yet discovered how much she will owe in student loans. Everyone in Kat’s world has yet to encounter our morbid collective climate-change driven fate. They are just on the cusp of seeing gun violence and regular shootings in their school hallways. Have metal detectors been installed in her school yet? There is no mention of lockdown drills in the novel… A Cigarette Lit Backwards is a novel of the sunnier days of this era, before what lingered in the real darkness began to rise from a simmer to a roiling boil. This is the pre-politicized world of the 2000s, before BLM, before the election of 2016, before DACA and Dreamers, before shtuff got “real” (as if it wasn’t “real” before…)

Kat’s world is decidedly white. Appropriate for North Carolina — even in its progressive, liberal islands — where it is set.

As a historical fiction (if we can view the early 2000s as history already) the novel reflects the light-hearted, whiteness of the era. This was a moment of Britney Spears, N’Sync, and dance beats more than it was a moment of punk. Avril Lavigne — Canadian and cat-eyed — was the punkiest most 2000-era teenagers would ever get. Kat’s world in A Cigarette Lit Backwards is just ever-so-slightly darker than Lavigne’s. It is the world of wannabe punky Ashlee Simpson, just as she was caught lip syncing on SNL and tried to cover it up with a preppy little jig. Here is the punk of short, plaid skirts (held together with oversized diaper pins), rhinestone studded lip rings, and middle/upper middle class white-American, mall-lingering, Hot Topic goths.

I am too jaded, too 2022 for this novel. But it was light, funny-in-an-“ohmygod,wasIlikethat?Please,no” nostalgic sort of way; a pleasant read that was a reprieve from the typical stuff I usually read. For readers interested in taking a light-hearted trip back to the shinier world of the early 2000s, to your youth (or something like it), A Cigarette Lit Backwards will do it.

A student recently asked me in class, “Why are there reprints of books? Why do they get reprinted?” Among the reasons I gave them was this one: “Sometimes new information emerges and something important needs to be added. Or, sometimes, the content of the book becomes relevant again, given certain events or things that are happening right now.” I added, “Remember, history is less about the past, than it is a reflection of our present moment or our desire for what we want our future to look like.”

Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza, the 30th anniversary edition epitomizes this reason. The recent discovery of several hundred bodies of indigenous children buried and hidden at several residential schools across Canada — Fort Pelly, St Phillip, St John, just to name three — is a heavy reminder that the state sanctioned annihilation of Canada’s indigenous culture and peoples over the past four centuries is not a remnant of the past, but a living monster that still lives and looms over the lives of the 150,000 children and their countless descendants.

This is a living trauma, its horror and long reach remain unknown.

For this reason alone, I am considering using this book in my next iteration of a 100-level history course I teach to undergraduates for this reason.

Sterling’s accessible, authentic prose in the voice of a young girl only gives me more reason to assign it as a course reading. The length is perfect for a semester and the format in epistolary style as a diary allows me to use this in class, for small group work within the time constraints of a class session or for short individual activities.

The content though is the main appeal here. Sterling’s own experiences makes My Name is Seepeetza all the more powerful, opens an avenue for an educator to discuss this in more depth as a primary source, as a part of historical record, opens the door for historical discussions and framing it within a larger landscape of indigenous history, gendered and racial violence. My Name is Seepeetza hits on the major nerves: language weaponized, education as violence, eugenics, parenting as cultural intervention, skin color and its tormented relationship with race and ethnic autochthony. History.

A reprint is not merely a revival, it is a reflection and delivery of knowledge we need right now.

Kibogo reads like a gateway to a historical, colonial/postcolonial dreamscape. It reads like a fantastic reimagining of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, but on a mythical, quasi-spiritual platform in Rwanda. It is inspiring as a work of decolonization, heart-wrenching as a historical fiction, a lyrical maze as a work of literature.

Like Things Fall Apart, Mukasonga’s Kibogo hinges on the binary opposition between the colonizer and the colonized, the imposition of Christianity on native peoples, and the annihilation of indigenous beliefs. But while similar to this famous predecessor, it is also unique in its own right. Kibogo is a nuanced novel. The Colonizer is not necessarily European and this point is pronounced. Sometimes — perhaps more than we would have wanted — the colonizer is our native neighbor, one of our own. Fanon was an astute observer of colonial culture; too often the enemy is a more intimate partner, the one who resides within. Mukasonga also draws a perforated line between Christian and Indigenous Belief; the characters and their stories reveal a more accurate historical account of colonization by highlighting how a syncretization of beliefs and practices is likely to have taken place.

This syncretization of cultures, beliefs, practices, and ideas is the heart of Kibogo. The novel is about the gradual development of a colonial culture, not through outright conquest, but through insidious means. Magic is a key component, a driving force that propels the stories to their ends. Ritual is the means by which the magic is released, and this is not only native Rwandan magic, but also European Christian magic, the kind imbued in holy water and Christian prayer. This lends Kibogo a mystical quality. The novel unfolds as would a myth; it is a fable about the meeting of Christian and Animist in Rwandan history. The characters are heroes, heroines, archetypes, and the plot moves forward through human and divine interventions. Each of Kibogo‘s four parts focuses on a particular character, as each of their stories builds upon the last to produce at the end a full view of Rwanda’s religious, spiritual, and colonial landscape.

This is not to say the characters are hollow; no, on the contrary, they are recognizable across colonial histories. For that reason Kibogo is larger than its central focus on colonization in Rwanda. This is a story that is recognizable in other African, Asian, Caribbean, South American, Australian, Pacific Island, and colonial contexts. Kibogo is centered and set in Rwanda, but it is a work of post-colonial literature for the rest of the “formerly” colonized world as well.

In short, a very thought-provoking work wrapped in beautiful, literary prose that unwinds like a yarn told late at night to children gathered around their grandmother’s hearth. (

A colleague recommended this book to me and oh my, do I owe them BIG now! The Fortune Men is devastating in every way. The story, without question, is a profound lesson in the paradoxes and insidiousness of racism, the tragedy of putting faith in a prejudiced judicial system, how thin the line is between life and death, past and future, the awfulness of history.

The novel revolves around a young Somali man who has found his way to Britain and built a life for himself there, complete with a wife and children. He is an ordinary man, a flawed man, but not a bad man; his morals are imperfect but not malicious. In his Welsh town, there is a sundry shop, owned and run by a Jewish woman. She is murdered. He is arrested. The novel spins from that point around his trial and his incarceration.

The details of the crime and his arrest are revealed, it becomes clear that things are not so black and white, literally and figuratively, according to the shade of his skin. In this Welsh neighborhood, there has been the recent in flux of many immigrants: those from the Caribbean — coming off the HMS Windrush — as well others like him, from Somalia, parts of West Africa, Nigeria, South Asians from India, Pakistan. There are Jews, Muslims, Christians. And then there are the White Welsh and English. The only thing they seem to have in common is their denizenship in a working class milieu: they are each trying to survive in their own ways, struggling with the constraints put upon them by their race, the color of their skin, their gender.

Mohamed’s prose weaves together the multiple layers of this crime, both the murder and the crime of injustice via complex characters who each come to this place armed with their own ambitions and hampered by their past experiences; they are as flawed as the main protagonist — and like him, we can see that they are not truly “bad” people, but merely making decisions based on the ethnic, racial, and class based expectations put on them. Reader, you will weep for all the characters in The Fortune Men, for they are as trapped as the prisoner in his cell.

It is hard to write a review of this book without giving away its ending, because its ending is really the beginning of the question that led to its creation. It is based on a true story, which is what makes this even more tragic and heart-rending.

All I can say is: You must read this. You must weep for the man, the woman, his wife, his children, the families torn apart by the events that took place in 1952-1953 in this small Welsh town. And you must be angry. 

If you love multigenerational historical novels, the kind that invoke profound and simultaneous sensations of sadness, regret, and compassion or which bring to light uncomfortable truths about ourselves, our objects of love, our innermost desires, then Lost in the Long March is for you.

At first pass, Lost in the Long March did not grip me; the first few chapters were interesting, but did not give a clue to the deeper nuances that would come later. I am glad I persevered and read on; I was rewarded. By the last page I was very nearly in tears. There is deep heart-wrenching pain in this novel, the kind that is brought on by very common, mundane processes, in this case, the heartbreak of being a parent, the heart ache for the love of one's child.

Wang's novel is about the banal horrors of war; not the violence of combat, but the long arm of suffering that extends beyond the battlefield, long after the skirmish is over, when the victor is fooled by the passing of time into believing that they have won. They have not. Lost in the Long March revolves around the conflicts of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists (the Long March occurred in 1934-1935) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945); but this is really a novel about compassion and humanity and the ways in which wars and political movements can destroy them or create situations for their manifestation. Friendship, love, connection, loyalty -- the interconnections between people -- this is the core of this novel.

It is Wang's unwavering focus on this universal core of the human experience which makes the novel so powerful, so moving, so profound. Wang's prose delivers the message with perfect pacing and with ease; the prose is succinct, but the words and the silences Wang leaves between them could cut open a vein with deadly accuracy. On occasion, it took this reader a moment or two to feel the new wound, so sharply and subtly were the words and their meaning delivered. By the time I reached the end of the novel, as Wang came to the story's inevitable end, I was unsure if I could survive it. I will not give the ending away, but I will say that it did leave this reader in a state of metaphorical exsanguination.

Lost in the Long March is well-worth the grief. As with many good books, it is the heavy sense of loss they inflict which is the reader's gain. 

Mennonites? In Uzbekistan? The premise of this book caught me instantly, and I was rewarded for my curiosity. Samatar's white mosque in The White Mosque is a Mennonite church located in the heart of a Muslim community in Central Asia. Perhaps this reveals a biased tendency on my part; the juxtaposition of the Mennonites in Central Asia suggests an irresistible, exotic historical account.

That -- in part -- is what Samatar delivers, but the memoir is more than that. The White Mosque is also about the embodiment of a Christian/Muslim, Foreign/Autochthon juxtaposition within Samatar via their experience of living as a Somali-German American Mennonite, a second-generation immigrant in a largely White American community. In one sense, Samatar is a "white mosque" in her academic and personal worlds, as unique and unusual as a pilgrimage of German-speaking Mennonites trekking into Uzbekistan.

The White Mosque begins and ends with Samatar's touristic, scholarly pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of these European Mennonites who traversed that path over a century ago. It is a guided tour. Mennonites, non-Mennonites, tourists, and heritage-seekers accompany Samatar; their observations contribute to this memoir and help shape Samatar's embodied experience of being a Mennonite of color. The White Mosque also treks back in time, not only through this unique tangent of 19th century Mennonite history, but into Samatar's past as a child of a Somali father and a German-American mother and as a graduate student. The memoir flickers to the present too: Samatar as an accomplished researcher in pursuit of scholarship.

Indeed, what The White Mosque delivers to the reader is less a historical account, and more a commentary on the present moment, a moment in which cultural-ethnic-religious-racial juxtapositions are worth examination because of the violent divisions in our world along those same lines. This memoir suggests that a closer, more nuanced examination of such transcultural connections, persons, histories, and experiences is worthwhile because they are not as anomalous as they might initially seem.

Midway through reading it, The White Mosque forced me to reconsider why I was attracted to the premise of this book: Were the Mennonites so unusual in their pilgrimage? Is the idea of a European Christian sect in Central Asia such an exotic thing? Haven't such transcultural phenomena occurred all throughout history? .... Mmm. Well-played, well-played. As a historian, a humanist, and an anthropologist, I know that no human phenomenon should be surprising; we have been criss-crossing, mixing, transgressive and transcultured throughout our history. But The White Mosque makes that point poignant, brings it to the forefront cleverly and gently through personal memory, subjective experience, and beautiful prose.

For that reason alone The White Mosque is worth reading.