Here are 100 books that The Sun Is Also a Star fans have personally recommended if you like
The Sun Is Also a Star.
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Ever since I was a kid, Iâve been more drawn to nonfiction than fiction. I remember spending hour after hour with my motherâs World Book Encyclopedias, memorizing breeds of dogs, US state capitals, and how to sign the alphabet. I loved reading books to learn about all kinds of things, and still do. But when it comes to fiction, unless the words are arranged like musical notes on the page, I struggle to read past chapter three. I need the narratorâs voice to make my brain happy and interested. While reading, I need to feel something deeplyâto laugh, cry, or have my thoughts dance so rhythmically I find myself fast-blinking.
I love the narration of this book. It is rich, lush, and vibrant. Each scene is painted like the sky at sunrise. The main character Esperanzaâs journeyâfrom riches to rags, from pampered to grateful, from fearful to hopefulâis very satisfying.
Seeing the world through Esperanzaâs viewpoint was heart-wrenching and eye-opening. The ending contains a delightful surprise, which, in my opinion, also makes for a great read.  Â
Esperanza Rising joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!
Esperanza thought she'd always live a privileged life on her family's ranch in Mexico. She'd always have fancy dresses, a beautiful home filled with servants, and Mama, Papa, and Abuelita to care for her. But a sudden tragedy forces Esperanza and Mama to flee to California and settle in a Mexican farm labor camp. Esperanza isn't ready for the hard work, financial struggles brought on by the Great Depression, or lack of acceptance she now faces. When Mama gets sick and a strikeâŠ
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist momâs unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellieâs gymnastics andâŠ
From an early age, I was steeped in stories. My mother is a great storyteller and would tell vivid and exciting stories of her childhood, giving me a great sense of my own life as a part of the story of generations. We moved around a lot for my fatherâs job, which was sometimes disorientating and could lead to loneliness, and I took refuge in libraries and in writing stories of my own. By the time I left school, literature was my big love and mainstay, and I took a degree in English and later taught it in schools. Reading and writing stories has since become my life.
I honestly felt my life had more meaning after I first read this book, as it touched on so much that was close to my heart.
I totally identified with the protagonistâs emotional journey: a childhood imbued with a sense of things lost and hidden, which, in adulthood, he tries to quell with erudition before the past erupts and he learns the truth of his tortured origins.
I found it really haunting and more in touch with the truth about the human condition than most books Iâve read. Iâve read it three times, once with my reading group, and Iâm sure Iâll read it again.Â
This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebaldâs celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a manâs search for the answer to his lifeâs central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world heâŠ
I love wordless books immoderately, and I also love books that have meta, surreal, or magical realism elements. This list combines these two features! I was personally so happy that The Red Book was described in a review as âa wordless mind trip for tots,â and I think all the books on this list would perfectly fit that description (and much, much more!) too.
I will remain forever astonished at the epic feat of world-building in The Arrival. It thoroughly pulls me into an immersive experience where I am learning along with the main character how to navigate the new world into which he has immigrated. As he learns, we learn. I find myself so emotionally involved with his success in his hopeful new reality. The art is amazingly detailed and conveys the complex and richly visual world, yet also sets a strong emotional tone that brings us into the action.
What drives so many to leave everything behind and journey alone to a mysterious country, a place without family or friends, where everything is nameless and the future is unknown. This silent graphic novel is the story of every migrant, every refugee, every displaced person, and a tribute to all those who have made the journey.
THE ARRIVAL has become one of the most critically acclaimed books of recent years, a wordless masterpiece that describes a world beyond any familiar time or place.
Sited as No 35 in The Times 100 Best Books of all time. It has sold overâŠ
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist momâs unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellieâs gymnastics andâŠ
My family came to the United States as undocumented immigrants from Guatemala. There is a lot of negative rhetoric being shared about undocumented immigrants. There are many reasons why people make the impossible decision to leave their native countries and travel to the United States. Reading books about these experiences creates empathy, compassion, and understanding.
Indivisibletells the story of Mateo Garcia and his little sister. Their parents are picked up by immigration officials. His school life is interrupted by this terrible event. Mateo has to help take care of his sister while not knowing what is going to happen to his parents. As a daughter of immigrants, I felt very drawn to the story. I understand what a difficult decision it is for parents to make to leave behind their home countries to try to make a better life for their children.
There is a word Mateo Garcia and his younger sister Sophie have been taught to fear for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade to the back of their minds. And why wouldn't it, when their Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they're hard workers and good neighbors?
When two ICE agents come asking for Pa, the Garcia family realizes that the lives they've built areâŠ
My family came to the United States as undocumented immigrants from Guatemala. There is a lot of negative rhetoric being shared about undocumented immigrants. There are many reasons why people make the impossible decision to leave their native countries and travel to the United States. Reading books about these experiences creates empathy, compassion, and understanding.
In Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet, Penelope Prado has a dream of opening a bakery. While working in her fatherâs restaurant, she meets Xander, a good-looking boy whose immigration status leaves him in jeopardy. This book really resonated with me because Xander is dealing with a consequential issue of facing deportation. Thatâs a very scary thing to face at such a young age, and I think a lot of youth are in similarly precarious situations.
As an aspiring pastry chef, Penelope Prado has always dreamed of opening her own pasteleria next to her father's restaurant, Nacho's Tacos. But her mom and dad have different plans -- leaving Pen to choose between disappointing her traditional Mexican-American parents or following her own path. When she confesses a secret she's been keeping, her world is sent into a tailspin. But then she meets a cute new hire at Nacho's who sees through her hard exterior and asks the questions she's been too afraid to ask herself.
Xander Amaro has been searching for home since he was a littleâŠ
I am convinced that my life would be better if I had read more books by Latina/Latine authors while growing up. To be able to see oneself in a story is powerful. I didnât have that for a long time. It made me feel invisible. It made me feel like being an author was as realistic as becoming an astronaut or a performer in Cirque du Soleil. Now, as a professor of Creative Writing and author of several books (and more on the way!), I dedicated my life to writing the books I needed as a young Latina. I hope others find something meaningful in my stories, too.
Oh my goodnessâthis book! I couldnât see the pages in those final chapters because I was crying for these characters and all they went through crossing the southern border into the United States.
To this day, I still remember vivid images and moments from the novel. I wonât spoil the story for you, but hereâs one: a female character wearing a baseball cap and jacket and pretending to be a male because the journey north is often much harder and riskier for women. I know I will think about this trio of characters for a long time.
My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
This book is about a young couple who fall in love in a city gripped by war, and step through a magic door which transports them to a different life.Â
It is a careful study of how their relationship slowly changes, their love morphing into something else.
Hamid is a master stylist, and while this book is not ostensibly about metamorphosis, it spoke directly to the three main questions I ask in my own book: Where did we come from? Where are we going? And what is the self?
A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick - Booker Gems
THE NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
'Astonishing' Zadie Smith 'Stunning' Spectator 'Extraordinary' TLS
An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
All over the world, doors are appearing. They lead to other cities, other countries, other lives.
And in a city gripped by war, Nadia and Saeed are newly in love. Hardly more than strangers, desperate to survive, they open a door and step through.âŠ
Stories of migration journeys and their knock-on impact through the generations are part of my family history. Like Jacques, the key protagonist in Austerlitz, I too wasnât told the whole story of my familyâs past. Stumbling on stories of colonialism, migration, and racism as an adult has opened up an understanding of a very different world to that of my childhood. The books I have recommended are all excellent examples of migration stories and through the use of beautiful prose pack a punch in a âvelvet gloveâ.
This really is a gem of a book. The reader is left guessing whether it is a memoir, auto-fiction, or stand-alone fiction. From its deceptively simple beginning, it cleverly deals with so many of life's big issues with a thoughtful lightness of touch. The book is written from the perspective of grown-up Michael, but Ondaatje explores the confusion and frustration of the child who was made to sail halfway around the world to a new home and the subsequent impact the journey has on the adult Michael.Â
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England - a 'castle that was to cross the sea'. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly 'Cat's Table' with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, 'bursting all over the place like freed mercury'. And at night, the boys spyâŠ
Marita Golden is an award-winning author of over twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include the novel The Wide Circumference of Love and the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons, and Donât Play in the Sun One Womanâs Journey Through the Color Complex. She is the recipient of many awards including the Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble and Poets and Writers, an award from the Authors Guild, and the Fiction Award for her novel After, from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, been featured as a question on Jeopardy!, and is a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee.
This memoir informed me of the psychological price of immigration and displacement on young children in ways that were searing and deep because of Wangâs mastery of the childâs perspective.
She lived in New Yorkâs Chinatown with her parents two professionals who immigrated from China and experienced poverty, isolation, fear of deportation, working in a sweatshop. She was saved by her love of books and reading, and her motherâs determination to realize the life she left China to have. Wang creates innocence and trauma with a deft, poetic skill that makes this a classic.Â
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK, OBAMA 2021 BOOK PICK and INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness.'
In China she was the daughter of professors. In Brooklyn her family is 'illegal.'
Qian is just seven when she moves to America, the 'Beautiful Country', where she and her parents find that the roads of New York City are not paved with gold, but crushing fear and scarcity. Unable to speak English at first, Qian and her parents must work wherever they can to survive, all whileâŠ
As a Jamaican migrant, I often read Jamaican fiction to feel recognized, but I struggle with the word âbest,â so consider this an exceedingly tentative ranking. I read each of these texts to learn about what it means to be a part of the Jamaican diaspora and to write a Jamaican novel, and each one elicited in me something that I often did not know about myself. Their attention to gender, to migration, to family, and more are as enlightening as they are captivating. And if that is not enough, then come for the plots, all of which are gripping, and the prose, all of which delights.
If you have not yet read Patsy, just read it. I wonât regale you with tales of its critical and commercial success, as you may already have heard about it. What I will say is that this is a book that will stick with you. Its portrait of longing, of love, of motherhood, and of childhood is so attentive to the thought of its central two charactersâa mother and childâthat they will feel so real to you that you will think of them when you encounter their facsimiles in your own life.Â
Heralded for writing "deeply memorable . . . women" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times), Nicole Dennis-Benn introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine for our times: the eponymous Patsy, who leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her oldest friend, to New York. Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession and peppered with lilting patois, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses, bravely putting herself first. But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny, while back in Jamaica herâŠ
