English: ENG 224 - Recommended Reading

Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Angeline Boulley's debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter, is a groundbreaking thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community.

Dana, the Black female hero of the book, is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy, then and now.

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers. Teenager Lauren leaves what's left of her family to trek north, hopefully toward a safer place to live.

A stunning and timely novel about a Mexican-American family in Brownsville, Texas, that reluctantly becomes involved in smuggling immigrants into the United States.

The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, she is able to create a quiet space for herself in the midst of difficult surroundings.

The son of an enslaved woman narrowly escapes drowning through the intervention of a mysterious force, an event which compels his escape and his personal underground war against slavery.

Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Adunni never loses sight of her goal of escaping poverty in order to build a future she chooses for herself - and help other girls like her do the same.

Tookie, after years of incarceration, works at a Minneapolis bookstore which has become haunted. She must solve the ghostly mystery while also surviving the events of 2020, a year of grief and furious reckoning.

From one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, an impressive, fierce novel about an interconnected group of Black British women: their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves.

Two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control, experience profoundly different lives and legacies marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration, and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.

Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees, but even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet and embark on a furtive love affair. Exit West follows the couple as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future.

When three delinquents hole up in an abandoned general store after their most recent robbery, to their great surprise, a letter drops through the mail slot. This seemingly simple request for advice sets the trio on a journey of discovery.

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of an unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant.

A tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives are inextricable from the history playing out around them.

Hurston's lyrical masterpiece about a woman's determined struggle for love and independence.

Needing to reconnect with the baby she gave up for adoption years earlier, an Ivy League-educated Black engineer uncovers devastating family secrets. The Kindest Lie is the story of an American family and reveals the secrets we keep and the promises we make to protect one another.

As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, Linus spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages. When he is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management, he's given a curious and highly classified assignment.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace for his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead. Hilarious, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.

Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Depicts four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan. Lee's complex and passionate characters survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

A sprawling, evocative, and groundbreaking autobiographical novel told in the unforgettable and hilarious voice of a young Iranian refugee. It is a powerfully layered novel that poses the questions: Who owns the truth? Who speaks it? Who believes it?

Follows twelve characters from Native communities, all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

two teens--one Black, one White--grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension.

Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn by individual desire, educational ambitions, a devastating tragedy, and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture.

A story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.

Writing letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., seventeen-year-old Justyce McAllister struggles to face the reality of race relations today and how they are shaping him.

In twelve striking, luminescent stories set in a native Penobscot community in Maine, author Morgan Talty breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future.

Thomas’ debut, both a searing indictment of injustice and a clear-eyed, dramatic examination of the complexities of race in America, invites deep thoughts about our social fabric, ethics, morality, and justice.

Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.

A riveting memoir that examines rural poverty and the lingering strains of racism in the South.

A tale inspired by "The Great Gatsby" is set in the contemporary South, and follows the difficulties endured by an extended Black family with colliding visions of the American dream.

The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of slavery, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

A follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

An examination of the unspoken caste system that has shaped America, showing how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. (nonfiction)

In this epic work, author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of Black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities from 1915-1970, in search of a better life. (nonfiction)

Explores the protagonist's transness and also unpacks their experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent.

An enthralling look at the psyches and relationships of four friends, venturing into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled, and yet somehow, improbably, breaking through into the light.