An acclaimed journalist travels the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people? Alex Wagner has always been fascinated by stories of exile and migration. Her father's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ireland and Luxembourg. Her Buddhist mother fled Rangoon in the 1960s, escaping Burma's military dictatorship. In her professional life, Wagner reported from the Arizona-Mexico border, where agents, drones, cameras, and military hardware guarded the line between two nations. She listened to debates about whether the United States should be a melting pot or a salad bowl. She knew that moving from one land to another—and the accompanying recombination of individual and tribal identities—was the story of America. And she was happy that her own mixed-race ancestry and late twentieth-century education had taught her that... Views: 13
A heartwarming amateur detective story set in Depression-era St. Louis from beloved author A. E. Hotchner.Street-savvy, almost-thirteen-year-old Aaron Broom is guarding his father's car when he witnesses a robbery gone wrong in a jewlery store across the street. To Aaron's shock, his father, a travelling watch salesman in the wrong place at the wrong time, is fingered as the prime suspect in the murder. Despite seeing the real killer flee the scene, Aaron can't do much to help in the moment—no one will take a kid's word for it. Undaunted, Aaron enlists an unlikely band of friends and helpful adults to clear his father's name. Aaron's unusual mission is complicated by the painful realities of the Depression: His father's longtime business folded, leaving the family in financial straits; his mother is in a sanatorium after nearly dying of tuberculosis. So Aaron is forced to fend for himself while his father is held in wrongful custody. He ducks truant... Views: 13
A darkly funny debut for fans of Becky Albertalli, Matthew Quick, and Ned Vizzini about a nineteen-year-old girl who's consumed by love, grief, and the many-tentacled beast of self-destructive behavior.Freshman year at Harvard was the most anticlimactic year of Danny's life. She's failing pre-med and drifting apart from her best friend. One by one, Danny is losing all the underpinnings of her identity. When she finds herself attracted to an older, edgy girl who she met in rehab for an eating disorder, she finally feels like she might be finding a new sense of self. But when tragedy strikes, her self-destructive tendencies come back to haunt her as she struggles to discover who that self really is. With a starkly memorable voice that's at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Love and Other Carnivorous Plants brilliantly captures the painful turning point between an adolescence that's slipping away and the overwhelming uncertainty of the future. Views: 13
