Asleep is the collection of three contemporary novellas: Night and Night’s Travelers, Love Songs, and Asleep. Moonlight follows a similar storyline of grief and loss. Satsuki, a young girl and Hiragi, another main character, both lose their loved ones to death. Both characters try to pull each other out of the destitute and sorrow. All in all, both stories successfully transport us into the lives of young and lonely Japanese city girls. The cautious development of the plot helps readers and Chizuru make sense of all the unsettling circumstances gradually. I enjoyed this book so much! Even though most parts of this book were sad and heart wrenching, they were also an eye opener and show me of the reality of being Asian in foreign countries. The Life of a Banana is about Xing Li, an orphaned girl who suddenly lost her mother in an accident. She and her older brother Lai Xing went to live with their old, rigid and strict grandmother, an uncle and aunt in one big house. The Life of a Banana can make people think in intimate and silent reflection. What we are all called to do is essentially understand that there must not be any form of judgment or condemnation of those who look different. We need tolerance and full acceptance without any prejudice, which makes us more human.’ Vanity Fair

Hello Yellow - 80 Books to Help Children Nurture Good Mental Health and Support With Anxiety and Wellbeing -I was at a book launch, in a book shop, last week and while waiting for the author to appear I scanned the bookshelves and spotted this.

Unable to adjust to life’s hardships, she moves to Tokyo with determination to overcome her grief and start a new journey. The Lake is brimming with eloquent imagery and plain emotion that sets a fast pace for the novel.Jadi, Saudara-saudara sekalian, pohon pengetahuan yang terlarang di surga itu bukan pohon apel. Tapi pisang. Ulangi kata-kata saya, PI-SANG! Hanya karena kesalahan penerjemahan bibel saja membuat orang awam jadi mengira buah yang menggoda Hawa itu adalah buah apel. This was, however, a little jarring at times as the narrative voice wasn’t consistent the whole way through. Most passages are from Xing’s perspective, obvious because of the misspellings of things she hears. But some are in the third person and in a much more adult voice. It was a little confusing at times. I’m a big fan of “commodity histories” -- books on how everyday objects and products have become interwoven into our daily lives. It's odd that while many educated Americans know the year the Titanic sank, for example, scarcely any of them know the provenance of the items on their breakfast table – the coffee in their cup or the banana sliced onto their cornflakes. And this is a shame, really, for it’s quotidian details as much as major events that shape our lives.

The grieving narrator reflects on nostalgic memories of their sacred time. The effect of the young girl’s imminent death on her loved ones is shown in a light and a matter-of-fact way, in a true Banana Yoshimoto style.Because Panama disease was permanently making fallow so much of its existing holdings, the fruit companies had a continuous need for new land, according to John Soluri, author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States.” Avoiding responsibility, like lying, should be practiced even when not strictly necessary if one really wishes to stay at the top of one's game. Still, the inability to bi-locate leads to occasional and unavoidable assignment of responsibility in one's absence, like when the book club (while I was at work) recently assigned me to choose a book for the coming reading season. Perhaps my real error occurred days earlier, when I mentioned to the Long Suffering Wife (LSW), a fellow book club member, that the book club's list of potential reads never included the micro-history, a genre of which I am very fond. This is yet another entry in the single-subject world of non-fiction. The narrowness of focus in books such as Salt and Cod and The Book on the Bookshelf and The Pencil and Longitude seems to be an increasingly preevalent trend in publishing. I am all for it on one level, since I like delving into the abstruse and wallowing in details that leave most people I know colder than a penguin's butt in the middle of the Antarctic winter; but on another level, I want to stop these publishers before they bore again with books inadequately edited and organized. This book contains two novellas, Kitchen and Moonlight Shadows, both recounting the personal tragedies faced by two young female protagonists, Mikage from Kitchen and Satsuki from Moonlight Shadow. Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World has incredible detail on the history and science of the banana but has significant issues with fluidity and focus.