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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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Panic in a Suitcase
by Yelena Akhtiorskaya
In this account of two decades in the life of an immigrant household, the fall of communism and the rise of globalization are artfully reflected in the experience of a single family. Ironies, subtle and glaring, are revealed: the Nasmertovs left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a huge sense of finality, only to find that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they thought. The dissolution of the Soviet Union makes returning just a matter of a plane ticket, and the Russian-owned shops in their adopted neighborhood stock even the most obscure comforts of home. Pursuing the American Dream once meant giving up everything, but does the dream still work if the past is always within reach? If the Nasmertov parents can afford only to look forward, learning the rules of aspiration, the family's youngest, Frida, can only look back.
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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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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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Nights When Nothing Happened
by Simon Han
From the outside, the Chengs seem like poster children for the enduring promise of the American Dream. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn't this what they sacrificed so much for, to be a family? But then little Annabel begins to sleepwalk at night, putting in motion a string of misunderstandings that strips away their façade of suburban normalcy, threatening to set the community against them and turn their dream into tragedy.
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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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When the Moon is Low
by Nadia Hashimi
When her happy middle-class life in Afghanistan is shattered by the rise of the Taliban and her husband's murder by fundamentalists, a former schoolteacher embarks on a life-risking effort to escape to England with her three children.
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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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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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Refuge
by Dina Nayeri
An Iranian girl who escaped to America as a child grows up through twenty transformative years from a confused immigrant to an overachieving Westerner, before the plight of refugees in Europe compels her to save her father.
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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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You Bring the Distant Near
by Mitali Perkins
Told in alternating teen voices across three generations, an exploration of sisterhood, first loves, friendship and the inheritance of culture traces a family that is shaped by Indian-American identity, a forbidden biracial love affair and social activism.
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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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