Coyote
America tells the story of coyotes on this continent, including natural history,
folklore, and current attitudes toward these incredible animals.
It speaks to
the interconnectedness of all living things and evokes beautiful imagery,
including a reminder that coyotes have been singing their songs here for
thousands of years.
I grew up in an area without coyotes, and as a child, I pictured Wile E. when someone said coyote. I now live in a suburban landscape
that we share with coyotes. I find them to be a beautiful reminder of the
wildness around us. This book has helped me to appreciate them even more.
With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don't come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans--especially white Americans--began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York's Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes,…
Mexikid
uses the graphic novel format cleverly and beautifully to interweave lore and
flashbacks into a road trip story about a family driving to Mexico to
bring their abuelo back to the US.
This book has the funniest haircut scene
(and haircut) I've encountered. The interactions of the nine siblings are my
favorite part, though—so truthfully and hilariously captured.
The story is also touching and personal as
Pedro, the narrator, learns about his Mexican heritage and family history. It's one of the best graphic novels I've read this year!
An unforgettable graphic memoir about a Mexican American boy's family and their adventure-filled road trip to bring their abuelito back from Mexico to live with them that National Book Award Finalist Victoria Jamieson calls "one of those books that kids will pass to their friends as soon as they have finished it."
Pedro Martin has grown up hearing stories about his abuelito-his legendary crime-fighting, grandfather who was once a part of the Mexican Revolution! But that doesn't mean Pedro is excited at the news that Abuelito is coming to live with their family. After all, Pedro has 8 brothers and…
I love magical realism,
and I would say that this book is filled with it, but the author makes the
point that what some people call magical realism is just realism for her
family.
She delves into colonization and trauma and how conquerors try to
impose their ways of thinking on the conquered. Yet, a lineage of healers who
didn’t adopt those viewpoints has persisted in the author’s family and culture.
The characters in this story are richly rendered, at times funny, and more
compelling than any fictional characters I’ve come across recently. It’s one of
those rare books that has stayed with me months after reading it.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, VULTURE, PEOPLE, BOSTON GLOBE, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, & MORE
“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and…
