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If you'd like personalized book recommendations, check out our Tailored Titles services for both fiction and nonfiction books. |
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Between Two Moons
by Aisha Abdel Gawad
It's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents' roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance. Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust? A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.
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Away
by Amy Bloom
Arriving in America alone after her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian Leyb receives word that her daughter Sophie might still be alive and embarks on a risky odyssey that takes her from New York's Lower East Side to Seattle's Jazz District, Alaska, and along the Telegraph Trail toward Siberia to find the missing girl.
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Make Your Home Among Strangers
by Jennine Capó Crucet
Upsetting her family by attending an elite college far from home, Cuban-American Lizet struggles with identity issues and her father's abandonment before meeting a young boy whose mother's death enmeshes Lizet's family in Florida's heated immigration debates.
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The Veins of the Ocean
by Patricia Engel
Blaming herself for the horrifying crime that has landed her brother on death row, Reina moves to a sleepy Florida Keys community, where, through a friendship with an exiled Cuban, she gains understanding about her own connection to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean.
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A Good American
by Alex George
The Meisenheimer family struggle to find their place among the colorful residents of their new American hometown, including a giant teenage boy, a pretty schoolteacher whose lessons consist of more than just music and an spiteful, bicycle-riding dwarf.
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A Great Country
by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member's perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.
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Not of This Fold
by Mette Ivie Harrison
When local authorities dismiss the strangling of an undocumented immigrant who had reached out to her for help, Mormon bishop's wife Linda Wallheim battles dogmatic Church power dynamics to find the killer and advocate for better community support
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A River of Stars
by Vanessa Hua
In a powerful debut novel about motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman makes her way to California and stakes a claim to the American dream. Holed up with other moms-to-be in a secret maternity home in Los Angeles, Scarlett Chen is far from her native China, where she worked in a factory job and fell in love with the owner, Boss Yeung. Now she's carrying his baby. Already married with three daughters, he's overjoyed because the doctors confirmed he will finally have the son he has always wanted. To ensure that his son has every advantage, he has shipped Scarlett off to give birth on American soil. U.S. citizenship will open doors for their little prince. As Scarlett awaits the baby's arrival, she chokes down bitter medicinal stews and spars with her imperious housemates. The only one who fits in even less is Daisy, a spirited teenager and fellow unwed mother who is being kept apart from her American boyfriend. Then a new sonogram of Scarlett's baby reveals the unexpected. Panicked, she escapes by hijacking a van--only to discover that she has a stowaway: Daisy, who intends to track down the father of her child. They flee to San Francisco's bustling Chinatown, where Scarlett will join countless immigrants desperately trying to seize their piece of the American dream. What Scarlett doesn't know is that her baby's father is not far behind her.
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Together Tea
by Marjan Kamali
In Together Tea, Marjan Kamali's delightful and heartwarming debut novel, Darya has discovered the perfect gift for her daughter's twenty-fifth birthday: an ideal husband. Mina, however, is fed up with her mother's years of endless matchmaking and the spreadsheets grading available Iranian-American bachelors. Having spent her childhood in Tehran and the rest of her life in New York City, Mina has experienced cultural clashes firsthand, but she's learning that the greatest clashes sometimes happen at home.After a last ill-fated attempt at matchmaking, mother and daughter embark on a return journey to Iran. Immersed once again in Persian culture, the two women gradually begin to understand each other. But when Mina falls for a young man who never appeared on her mother's matchmaking radar, will Mina and Darya's new-found appreciation for each other survive?.
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Tehrangeles
by Porochista Khakpour
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, HARPER'S BAZAAR, W MAGAZINE, AND VANITY FAIR - MEET THE MILANIS. FAST-FOOD HEIRESSES, L.A. ROYALTY, AND YOUR NEWEST REALITY TV OBSESSION Delightfully twisted and heartfelt...Khakpour is a satirist extraordinaire. --Kevin Kwan, author of Lies and Weddings Iranian-American multimillionaires Ali and Homa Milani have it all--a McMansion in the hills of Los Angeles, a microwaveable snack empire, and four spirited daughters. There's Violet, the big-hearted aspiring model; Roxanna, the chaotic influencer; Mina, the chronically-online overachiever; and the impressionable health fanatic Haylee. On the verge of landing their own reality TV show, the Milanis realize their deepest secrets are about to be dragged out into the open before the cameras even roll. Each of the Milanis--even their aloof Persian cat Pari--has something to hide, but the looming scrutiny of fame also threatens to bring the family closer than ever. Dramatic, biting yet full of heart, Tehrangeles is a tragicomic saga about high-functioning family dysfunction and the ever-present struggle to accept one's true self.
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Miracle Creek
by Angie Kim
A dramatic murder trial in the aftermath of an experimental medical treatment and a fatal explosion upends a rural Virginia community where personal secrets and private ambitions complicate efforts to uncover what happened.
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Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo - and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera - the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west - through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas - we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure - both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.
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The New American
by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Inspired in part by interviews with Central American refugees, a timely novel recounts the epic journey of a young Guatemalan American college student who gets deported and decides to make his way back home to California.
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The Bad Muslim Discount
by Syed Masood
A homesick Pakistani immigrant chafing against the strictures of his family's new devout Muslim life in California and a young woman who barely escaped war-torn Baghdad upend their community in the aftermath of a fateful chance encounter.
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Someone Like Us
by Dinaw Mengestu
The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.
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Digging to America
by Anne Tyler
A chance encounter between two families--the Donaldsons, and the Iranian-born Yasdans--at the Baltimore airport, as both couples await the arrival of an adopted daughter from Korea, prompts an examination about what it means to be an American while the lives of the two families intertwine over the years.
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The Next Ship Home
by Heather Webb
On Ellis Island in 1902, linguist Alma, who works at the immigration processing center, meets Francesca, an immigrant from Italy, and together, after discovering that corruption runs rampant in this refuge, they fight to claim the American dreams they were promised.
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American Street
by Ibi Aanu Zoboi
On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie--a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's west side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world, a dangerous proposition presents itself, and Fabiola soon realizes that freedom comes at a cost. Trapped at the crossroads of an impossible choice, will she pay the price for the American dream?
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Avon Lake Public Library
32649 Electric Blvd.
Avon Lake, Ohio 44012
440-933-8128alpl.org |
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