Brief Reports on Three Recently-Read Books by Te-Ping Chen, Joan Frank, and Dantiel W. Moniz

My recently-read books have been piling up, so I am going to “catch up” with very brief entries on three of these. First, Te-Ping Chen’s “Land of Big Numbers” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) is a powerful and illuminating collection of stories about Chinese characters in China and as emigrants elsewhere. The portrayals are psychologically and culturally astute, and I felt that I learned more about China from these stories than in all the articles and books I have read about the country. (I am exaggerating, but only slightly.) The second book is by one of my longtime favorite (partly but of course not only because she is from Northern California!) authors, Joan Frank: the novel “The Outlook for Earthlings” (Regal House, 2020). This story of two lifetime friends, Mel and Scarlet, stretches from 1964 to 2013. The friends are very different, often misunderstanding each other, yet their lives are interwoven. Some readers of this blog will remember that I am drawn to stories about women’s friendships, and this one is emotionally gripping. A third recently-read book, a short story collection, is “Milk Blood Heat” (Grove Press, 2021), by Dantiel W. Moniz. It features young women of various backgrounds in Florida. The stories are intense and sharp-edged, as young women’s lives often are; the characters deal with family, bodily issues, racial issues, cultural differences, spirituality, and death. I highly recommend all three of these books.