As the youngest of seven children born to a junkyard-tending father and midwife-herbalist mother in remote Idaho, Tara Westover realizes at age 7 that the single fact “that makes [her] family different: we don’t go to school.” Her family espouses Mormonism, although their practices tend toward...
Versatile, charming, culturally well-matched Soneela Nankani auspiciously voices Sujata Massey’s ("Rei Shimura" mysteries) promising new series set in early 20th-century colonial India. Here the author introduces feisty Perveen Mistry, India's first female solicitor in 1921. Perveen's debut dovetails her challenging career journey – from facing...
Talking Mormon Murder Mysteries with Mette Ivie Harrison Trust me: Linda Wallheim is a sleuth like no other. She’s a devout Mormon, for starters, and the wife of a respected Utah ward bishop. And yet her sense of justice gets her into plenty of trouble, especially...
After a Salt Lake City reading, novelist Tim is approached in – okay, stalked to – a convenience store by Danny, a former college writing classmate. Danny has a mysterious manuscript for Tim, which has quite the provenance story involving Danny in São Paulo on...
Continuing the story begun in Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s 2016 Newbery Honor book, The War That Saved My Life , World War II rages on, and Ada is now 11. She has escaped London and her abusive mother and finally has the surgery to reverse her...
With raw honesty (the memoir opens with suicide ideation), debilitating angst (the unrelenting hold of mental illness), and humor when least expected (the terrors of securing a prom date), Haroon Moghul’s memoir becomes an illuminating antidote to contemporary Islamophobia. As the U.S.-born son of immigrant Pakistani...
ABSTRACT These books feature diverse characters who – in a multiplicity of ways – suffer, learn, and generally triumph in their differences. Varying in genre from picture book to poetry, in setting from Kenya to California, and in ethnic focus from Muslim Bangladeshi to Ojibway/Anishinaaabe (Canadian...
Debut novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi's protagonist, like the author herself, is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee father and Israeli Jewish mother. Ahlam comes of age in the Arizona desert, physically safe from war but damaged by the bitter fighting between her parents that too...
*STARRED REVIEW Now older than his 43-year-old father was when he died in a 1977 terrorist attack, Omar Saif Ghobash writes his Letters to his two young sons as a matter of permanent record. As the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Russia (Ghobash's father was Arab, his...
In thrice voicing Linda Wallheim, the Mormon bishop’s murder-solving wife, Kirsten Potter has settled comfortably into a quixotic emotional range that can move from stiff politeness to philosophical musing to overwrought shrillness without much warning. Confronted with a third dead body – “How does this always...
The unrelenting conflict between Palestine and Israel keeps the Middle East in the news. But for a fuller picture of the Palestinian and Palestinian American experience than what the media can provide, here's a starter reading list for young people. Stay tuned for our list of titles about...
On September 11, 2001, 9-year-old Amani Al-Khatahtbeh should have been enjoying Yearbook Day at her New Jersey elementary school. Instead, “[t]hat day has become crystallized in my memory,” Al-Kahatahtbeh writes – and narrates, “not just for how harrowingly scary it [was] – how we didn’t...
'The Golden Legend' tells a magnificent story of terror and dignity I must confess: I missed my deadline. I simply didn’t want to finish this book. Letting go of Nargis, Lily, Helen, and Imran felt like a visceral cleaving. While Nadeem Aslam’s previous novels, including Maps...
Nikki’s begrudging agreement to help her sister, Mindi, “find a husband the traditional way” takes her to Southall, a predominately South Asian immigrant neighborhood in west London, to post a discreet marriage advert at the gurdwara (Sikh temple). Unlike Mindi, Nikki considers herself modern and...
This is the second in a two-part series of recommended books for youth about the refugee experience. For a list of picture books, click here. Canada, with her groovin' President, functional healthcare system, and more welcoming borders, is currently in the throes of "Month 13," the first month following...
This is the first in a two-part series of recommended books for youth about the refugee experience. For a list of middle grade and YA titles, click here. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also known as the United Nations Refugee Agency,...
The first line speaks volumes: "If you're reading this, you – like me – have probably won the lottery. Not the giant-check, instant-millionaire kind of lottery. The other lottery win ...
*STARRED REVIEW As both the introductory note and epithet doubly insist, August Town, divided into two words, is a real town in Jamaica, made (in)famous for being the founding home of Bedwardism, a short-lived, early twentieth-century religion. Fast-forward to 1982 when teary Kaia comes home to his...
Once adventurous Paolo de Padova has aged into the cautious first assistant to his cousin, the pope. Just before the Dalai Lama’s Vatican visit, His Holiness asks Paolo for a nearly impossible favor: to plan “an unofficial vacation” that includes the Dalai Lama. Initially Paolo thinks...
From our northern neighbors comes the story of Irene Couchie Dupuis, co-author Dr. Jenny Kay Dupuis’s grandmother, who at 8 years old, was forcibly removed from her home by the Canadian government and sent to a faraway residential school with her two brothers. The strict nuns...
