Books like Border Songs

I loved the book because it’s an insightful window into the challenges of a troubled community, the native Indians, who are still haunted by the painful past and face an uncertain future. I loved how the writer picks the thread of stories of many characters who have chosen to live outside reservations and then knits them all together in the end.

Unique characters with unique stories and strong evocative writing make There There a remarkable debut.  

Imagine waking up one morning to find brown, evil-smelling water flowing from your taps. This is what happened in Flint, Michigan, one morning in 2014. Some people blamed the residents of Flint for the debacle, but the city manager made the arbitrary decision to tap into the Flint River to save money. It's ironic that within a week, GM hooked themselves back up to the Detroit waterline as the untreated water was ruining their equipment. 

The story follows two families through generations, converging in the present. I found the flashback to the sit-down strike in 1936 at GM in Flint (Chevy in the Hole) especially interesting. It was the beginning of a strong UAW. 

The main characters, who are determined to coax life back into a city everyone else has given up on, are flawed, thus likeable and real. Gus, newly committed to sobriety, and Monae, an urban farmer, seem… show more.

I loved this book because it made me cry with its emotional impact. It opened my eyes to the mistreatment of Native Americans and the Spanish/Mexican inhabitants of southern California when the territory was annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War. 

This is the love story between the mixed-race orphan girl, Ramona, and Alessandro, the head of the Native American sheep shearers. When they fall in love, knowing her aunt, who took her in and owns the rancho, will never let her marry a Native American, they elope. But Alessandro’s tribe is soon driven off their land by American settlers flooding the area, and he and Ramona are thrown into poverty as they travel from locale to locale, desperately trying to find a place to call home. 

This book is the story of four teenagers desperate to escape the mining towns of Ishpeming and Negaunee but doomed to immersion in the violence simmering just beneath the surface.

Riekki did a good job of instilling a sense of impending doom from the opening pages, and I couldn’t put it down. It showed me a side of the UP I didn’t know existed, one beyond the beauty of the peninsula, shining a light on the dirty underbelly of mining—what it offers and what it leaves behind—the cavings—underground passages left by the mining company. Riekki’s description of the bottomless pit in the woods is Poe creepy.

Physically and emotionally brutalized, these four characters—angst-filled Craig; J., never touched by a woman; Antony, with the walls he puts up; and Hollow, determined to escape, are a downtrodden, culturally isolated group. I rooted for them and recognized them as characters that can be… show more.

Donald Trump called the western US-Canada border along the 49th parallel “an artificially drawn line” that is “imaginary.”

I loved Hoy’s book because it shows that Trump is right, but for the wrong reasons. The colonists who drew the line on a map had zero knowledge of the land on the ground, which was inhabited by Indigenous and First Nations peoples.

The straight line of the border created odd geographical features like the Northwest Angle and Point Roberts, and split traditional lands in nonsensical ways. The border is artificial, but the implication of that is not that Canada should be part of the United States. Instead, both the US and Canadian claims are borne through violence and displacement of Indigenous peoples. 

This is a gorgeously written biography and a sweeping description of the landscape of the upper latitudes of North America at the time of European occupation.

For me, the French navigator, Samuel de Champlain, stands out for his respectful relations with Indigenous and First Nations peoples, even as his mapping and exploring paved the way for their dispossession and displacement.

I was drawn to the vivid rendering of the region at the turn of the seventeenth century, and I learned a lot about the French history of Quebec that makes Canada what it is today. 

Donald Trump should read Blue Bird, the historical novel about Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, so he can understand how interconnected the two cities, and by extension, the US and Canada, are.

In 2026, Trump tried to block the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge across the Detroit River, but Canada opened it anyway. I was fascinated by how Blue Bird shows us the ways people evaded past efforts to limit trade between the border cities during the Prohibition era.

The book evokes the period and demonstrates that smuggling and policing are self-reinforcing. Smuggling only exists when there are restrictions at the border that need to be evaded.

I think a lot of people just assume that the majority of irregular migration at the US-Canada border consists of people entering the United States. That’s wrong historically and today.

British Loyalists during the US Revolution, people fleeing slavery on the Underground Railroad, and conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War have all sought protection north of the border. The same holds true today with thousands of people leaving the United States every year in search of asylum in Canada.

However, as Clark-Kazar’s book shows, they do not always receive a generous welcome, and Canada has tightened rules and put in place new restrictions for decades. I loved this book because it paints a complete picture of Canada’s partial and uneven embrace of refugees from around the world.

The sisters in Girls Burn Brighter aren’t related by blood or family or tradition or history. They are sisters in ways much more profound and important and life-changing and path-determining than that. This beautiful novel traverses continents and cultures to prove blood ties and family ties have nothing on sister ties.

For any peakbagger living in the pacific northwest, the ultimate list of peaks is the hundred-highest mountains in Washington. This is the only guidebook dedicated to this list of peaks, and this was our primary resource when climbing these peaks. The authors have organized the peaks into “slams” where they figured out the optimal grouping of peaks to get the most out of any trip. They give excellent route descriptions and time estimates, which are very important for trip planning.