Book cover of Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx

Book description

Pura Belpre Honor winner for The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano and one of America's most influential Hispanics--'Maria' on Sesame Street--delivers a beautifully wrought coming-of-age memoir.

Set in the 1950s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. Emmy award-winning actress and writer Sonia Manzano plunges…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Becoming Maria as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Manzano played Maria for more than 40 years on Sesame Street, but this isn’t a book about that show. A sort of next-gen, nonfiction companion to Dominicana, it tells the story of Manzano’s hard-knock childhood in the South Bronx, and how her gifts as an actor and storyteller propelled her out of a rough neighborhood and troubled home (her father physically abused her mother.) Manzano doesn’t paper over the anger she felt and still feels about the systemic forces that ghettoized Hispanic kids like her. But she succeeds in offering hope and modeling Nuyorican success to latter-day versions…

If you love Becoming Maria...

Book cover of Unfathomable: 20 Wild (But True) Stories About the Ocean

Unfathomable by Mary Boone,

Did you know you can survive being swallowed by a whale? Or that octopus wrestling used to be an actual sport? Or, that once a town in Oregon didn't know what to do with a whale carcass that washed up on their beaches, so they...BLEW IT UP?

As strange as…

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