Book list Carlitos lives with his mother and his abuela in Cataño, Puerto Rico. Though he's happy in his cozy house, his family is different because his father is gone, living somewhere across the bay in San Juan. An idea forms: he'll bring a photo of his father and take the ferry to the capital. He shows the picture to strangers, and some offer suggestions. He wanders until the only place left to look is the El Morro castle. But there's no Pa...More
Publishers Weekly This multilayered autobiographical narrative illuminates Wang’s experience as a child of Chinese immigrants in Ohio. In spare, elegant free verse, Wang (Magic Ramen) recalls a car ride interrupted when her parents notice watercress in a roadside ditch. “From the depths of the trunk,/ they unearth/ a brown paper bag,/ rusty scissors,” a verso page reads as the parents rummage through their old red Pontiac. Cornstalks tra...More
Publishers Weekly Once again, Woodson (If You Come Softly; From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun) reveals a keen understanding of the adolescent psyche via the narration of a winning seventh-grader. Lafayette, whose mother has recently died, is worried that some day he will be separated from his two older brothers: high-school-graduate Ty'ree, who gave up a scholarship to MIT to take care of his younger siblings; and Charlie, the rebellious middle boy, wh...More
Library Journal It's post-World War II, and Alaska has become the homeland for the Jews (as Franklin D. Roosevelt actually proposed). There, the murder of a former chess prodigy sends Det. Meyer Landsman on a hunt that leads back to the formidable Rebbe Gold. Chabon's first full-length adult novel since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; with a ten-city tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal With her third novel (after the acclaimed Sharp Objects and Dark Places), Flynn cements her place among that elite group of mystery/thriller writers who unfailingly deliver the goods. On the day of her fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne vanishes from her home under suspicious circumstances. Through a narrative that alternates between Amy's diary entries and her husband Nick's real-time experiences in the aftermath of her d...More
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin
Publishers Weekly As New York University historian Grandin observes, President Trump's aim of building a wall along the American border with Mexico breaks the nation's tradition of "fleeing forward" to a supposedly ever-expanding frontier, in the hope of "avoid[ing] a true reckoning with its social problems." He recounts that, in the 1760s, the British Crown's refusal to allow white settlers to move across the Appalachian M...More
Publishers Weekly Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to...More
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