Shelf Awareness - Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade

Starred Review

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  The Cooked Seed: A Memoir

  by Anchee Min

  From the labor camps of Mao's China to the streets of Chicago and California, Anchee Min's The Cooked Seed offers readers a rare, honest account of being a poor, non-English-speaking immigrant in the U.S. Constantly fearing deportation, Min worked five jobs to pay for her schooling, rent and food. She learned English by watching Sesame Street and reading Gone with the Wind, lived in run-down storage spaces and cold apartments for the cheap rent and suffered a rape in silence, all the while struggling to grasp the American dream and the longed-for...

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  The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

  by Margalit Fox

  In 1900, archeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a cache of clay tablets in an unknown script on Crete. For 50 years, scholars across the world struggled to decipher that script--Linear B--without knowing what language it encoded. In 1952, an amateur named Michael Ventris solved the puzzle with what is often presented as a single stroke of inspiration. Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth adds a new layer to this story.
  
  Ventris's inspiration, it turns out, was based on the work of another, largely forgotten, scholar--classicist Alice Kober. Working...

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  Gorgeous

  by Paul Rudnick

  Paul Rudnick (I Shudder) makes a smashing YA debut with this novel about what truly makes someone beautiful, the doors that beauty opens and the responsibility that comes with opportunity.
  
  On Becky Randle's 18th birthday, her 400-pound mother dies. Before Becky left the house that morning, her mother told her, "Something is going to happen to you, and it's going to be magical." That magical something is a phone number for Tom Kelly, a world-famous designer. He offers Becky $1,000 and a plane ticket to New York, and she leaves behind her trailer park in...

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