Books like My Name is Seepeetza — picked by fans

From our comfortable perch in North America, it’s almost impossible to imagine how children—girls, especially—survive in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The Breadwinner made it real to me, with all the oppression that the main character, eleven-year-old Parvana, experiences and all the courage she demonstrates. This book showed me the common humanity we share with people whose lives are so different from our own. And it forced me to ask myself: Could I have been as brave and resourceful as Parvana?

Twelve-year-old Emmaline and her mother are desperate for help with their farm and agree to take on Angus who has just been released from a hospital for patients with mental illness. At first they have the same fears and prejudice as people in town, but they come to learn that Angus is gentle and extremely knowledgeable. Thanks to him they have the best crop they’ve ever had. The most heroic point in the story is when one of the locals, Harry Record, leaves Angus far from town during a snowstorm with the expectation he will die. But as Angus struggles for safety he finds Harry’s little boy who was accidentally stranded in the storm and near death and gets him to the hospital in time to save his life. 

Quote: "That man is from the mental, stay away from him." 

This book was lovely to read because it was written… show more.

Although I love a book that takes you traveling to the past or to foreign lands, sometimes I want to jump into the shoes of a contemporary character and understand their world. This book does just that. 

Starr Carter is a black teenager who lives in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood but attends an elite, mostly white private school. Starr manages to code-switch between her two lives until her childhood friend is shot by the police. 

If you like books about social justice and characters who stand up for what they believe, this is a fantastic read. 

As both a reader and a writer, I seem to be drawn to books about characters experiencing oppression and persecution, and drawing on inner reserves of courage and compassion to combat it. This book fits that description perfectly. I was on the edge of my seat following Hanneke as she works for the Dutch Resistance during World War II. I was left wondering: How do you find the bravery and determination to risk your own life in order to save someone else’s?

Great adventure doesn’t always mean jungles, star-wastes, or derring-do. The human heart – what one poet called "the wilderness behind the eyes" – can be as electrifying as any firefight. In this tradition, Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lives of Girls and Women is her second novel, and like all great adventure stories will tell you more about yourself than you ever suspected. As Sir Walter Scott said of Jane Austen: "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life."

A scientist discovers that his invention, a defoliant, has contributed to exterminating an entire native reserve in British Columbia, causing the birds and turtles to leave. The battle is on between nature and science to restore the balance. But all is not well in the corporation, for the scientist’s boss has become a shopaholic to compensate for his lonely life and wonders why his wife wants to divorce him. The characters are enjoyable, the action circular, and our current political considerations are tackled in a non-didactic fashion. And the human spirit triumphs despite the chemical overload! Throughout the novel, King makes searing one-liners about unbridled capitalism: “capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”

Ken Dryden is a lawyer, a politician, and a gifted writer. He also happens to be one of the most important goaltenders in Canadian hockey history.

Armed with such lived experience and trained in a variety of disciplines as he has been, Dryden provided hockey with its central and perhaps most enduring literary work. Unlike some of our other choices, The Game is less about larger socio-cultural trends (though there is some of this, especially when he recounts his crucial role in the famous Summit Series against the Soviets in 1972), but rather more about the inner dynamics of a team and what it means to win or lose together in professional sport.

Dryden’s work is, yes, historical, but also highly philosophical; his unique position in goal gave him an ice-level perspective that few enjoy (his iconic stance, gloves atop stick, ever-observing play at the opposite end has already… show more.

Maybe, this book seems tangential to put on the list. It’s about the struggle to maintain legal authority over ancestral land in a part of what is today called eastern “Canada”. The scare quotes are there because older nations still live on this land and have not ceded their authority. The book shows how the very same problems Gardiner detailed are actually the result of the colonial order that has shaped our international politics and its capitalist system. The book also suggests a way out through an “ontology of care” for the land.

Bill Mason was a legend in the world of paddling. He was old-school: red and black plaid wool shirt, wood-and-canvas canoe, canvas lean-to-style tent. His sojourns in the North Woods inspired me in my own explorations of the Deep South. When he paddled Lake Superior, I thought of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Swamp. When he canoed the Hood River, I thought of Mississippi's Pascagoula.

This book combines in-depth advice on wilderness travel with accounts of some of Bill's own journeys. He was also an artist and filmmaker. His documentary, Waterwalker, is a must-see classic for anyone who loves adventure on the water. 

I love this book’s choc-a-block presentation of actual archival fragments from Jewish life in the British colonies that would eventually become Canada.

I also like that the book’s husband-wife, antiquarian, author team aimed to fuse together two objectives in one book: on the one hand, to paint a relatable picture of what Jewish life looked like during this period when Upper Canada was still being formed, and on the other hand, to account for the step-by-step process of Jews gaining civil rights in the new world.

When I teach Canadian Jewish history, I not only read this book with my students but also bring them into the archives that contain Godfrey’s trove of archival fragments of early Jewish Canadiana, which they collected before and while writing the book.