RECOMMENDED READS Diverse Protagonists RED AT THE BONE EDUCATED Jacqueline Woodson Tara Westover An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set two families from different foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the social classes and exposes mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the private hopes, world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and disappointments, and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the longings. Moving forward summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a and backward in time, midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged Jacqueline Woodson's taut in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated and powerful novel uncovers from mainstream society that there was no one to the role that history and ensure the children received an education, and no cdoemcismiounnsit, ya nhdav ree lpaltaioynedsh inip es one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers eoxfperiences, these families, and in the life of the new child. became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and THEY CALLED US grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would ENEMY transform her, taking her over oceans and across George Takei, Justin continents. Eisinger, and Steven Scott A stunning graphic memoir recounting A WOMAN IS NO MAN actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood Etaf Rum imprisoned within American concentration Rum’s novel is told from the varying perspectives camps during World War of three generations of Arab-American women. II. Fareeda, the eldest of the women, struggles to maintain her family’s Arab identity in America. Isra, Fareeda’s daughter-in-law, moves from Palestine to New York with her new husband after DRAWN TO BERLIN an arranged marriage and grapples with the Ali Fitzgerald discrepancy between the life she imagined for Fitzgerald describes her herself and reality. Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, experience teaching fights for the opportunity to go to college rather drawing to students who than repeat her mother’s fate. It is an intriguing are among those seeking book about maintaining cultural identity in a asylum in a worldwide foreign land as well as the role of women (and crisis on a scale not seen men) in a conservative Arab family. since WWII, fleeing from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan. HEART BERRIES THE RECOVERING Terese Marie Mailhot Leslie Jamison Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic Leslie Jamison presents an memoir of a woman's coming of age exploration of addiction that on the Seabird Island Indian blends memoir, cultural history, Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. literary criticism, and journalistic Having survived a profoundly reportage to analyze the role of dysfunctional upbringing only to find stories in conveying the herself hospitalized and facing a dual addiction experience, sharing diagnosis of post traumatic stress insights based on the lives of disorder and bipolar II disorder; artists whose achievements Terese Marie Mailhot is given a were shaped by addiction. notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world GIRL IN TRANSLATION Jean Kwok A KIND OF FREEDOM An inspiring debut about a Chinese Margaret Wilkerson Sexton immigrant girl forced to choose Sexton’s novel personalizes the between two worlds and two trajectory of racism in American futures. When Kimberly Chang and by exploring how it affects three her mother emigrate from Hong Kong generations of an African to Brooklyn, she quickly begins a American family in New Orleans. secret double life: exceptional Through the lens of Evelyn, Jackie, schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown and T.C., Sexton takes us through sweatshop worker in the evenings. the Jim Crow South in the 1940s, Disguising the more difficult truths the drug epidemic and economic of her life-like the staggering degree recession of the 1980s, and the of her poverty, the weight of her current crisis of mass family's future resting on her incarceration in post-Katrina New shoulders, or her secret love for a Orleans. factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles. SPEAK NO EVIL THE GOOD IMMIGRANT Uzodinma Iweala Edited by Nikesh Shukla On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in and Chimene Suleyman Washington, D.C., he's a top student The Good Immigrant presents and a track star at his prestigious essays by first- and second- private high school. Bound for Harvard generation immigrant writers in the fall, his prospects are bright. on the realities of immigration, But Niru has a painful secret: he is multiculturalism, and queer - an abominable sin to his marginalization in an conservative Nigerian parents. No one increasingly divided America. knows except Meredith, his best From Trump's proposed border friend, the daughter of prominent wall and travel ban to the Washington insiders. As the two marching of White friends struggle to reconcile their Supremacists in desires against the expectations and Charlottesville, America is institutions that seek to define them, consumed by tensions over they find themselves speeding toward immigration and the question a future more violent and senseless of which bodies are welcome. than they can imagine. Neither will escape unscathed..