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Bhrianna's latest list: LGBT YA Growing up can be difficult for anyone, but LGBTQ teens often face unique challenges. In addition to the typical pains and aches of adolescence, they are coming to terms with their identities while dealing with prejudice and misunderstanding from the world around them. The books in this list provide reflections for young readers to find themselves in. |
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Juliet Takes a Breath
by Gabby Rivera
Juliet, a 19-year-old Puerto Rican lesbian from the Bronx, scores a summer internship with her favorite feminist author Harlowe Brisbane. When she flies to Portland to live with Harlowe for the summer, however, she learns that her hero isn’t quite who she expected.
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As the crow flies
by Melanie Gillman
When Charlie’s parents drop her off at summer camp, she isn’t sure she’ll fit in when she sees that she is the only black girl in an all-white group. With her parents’ support, she decides to give it a chance and bonds with a young transgender girl who also feels like an outsider.
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Misty's latest list: All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity... Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but others devote their lives to the morbid trade, working to help people prepare for death and to respectfully carry out the final wishes of those who have passed on. In Caitlin Doughty's bestselling memoir, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, she takes the reader behind the scenes in a mortuary and through the history of funerary traditions, funeral rites, and cultural beliefs on a journey that is by turns touching, hilarious, and unsettling. For others, the journey to final rest is not so straightforward. In Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, writer Bess Lovejoy describes the unusual paths to the final rest many famous and not so famous bodies have taken.
For more readings on funerary traditions, memento mori, and what happens to our bodies when we shuffle off this mortal coil, head over to my personal librarian page. |
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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory
by Caitlin Doughty
Caitlin Doughty, as a twenty something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life's work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters both living and very dead, Caitlin learned to navigate the secretive culture of those who care for the deceased.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes tells an unusual coming of age story full of bizarre encounters and unforgettable scenes. Her eye opening, candid, and often hilarious story is like going on a journey with your bravest friend to the cemetery at midnight. She demystifies death, leading us behind the black curtain of her unique profession while answering questions you didn't know you had like "How many dead bodies can you fit in a Dodge van?" and "What exactly does a flaming skull look like?"
Read more from Caitlin on her blog at The Order of the Good Death, or on her popular web series Ask a Mortician.
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Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses
by Bess Lovejoy
For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.
Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse. Einstein’s brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy - which they drank.
From Alexander the Great to Elvis Presley, and from Beethoven to Dorothy Parker, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses, and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death.
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