Scholars Lewis and Ardizzone write a deeply researched but popularly written non-fiction account of a major 1924 scandal: the marriage of a wealthy white scion of a prominent New York Family to a “colored” woman, who works as a servant.

The trial of the title is one in which the new husband, prodded by his father, sues his wife for annulment, charging that she deceived him about her racial identity.

It is clear she didn’t, but will his money and position dictate the trial’s results? The book probes deeply into racial identity, how it’s defined, and what it means to be Black, white—or ambiguously both.

A page-turner I read in a day and a half.

The Same Country is a gripping story from beginning to end, through the eyes of so many vivid characters, at one of the most explosive times in America for race relations.

The main character Cassie is a white journalist returning home to see the Black Lives Movement play out before her very eyes. A mystery dictates the effects of it on her and all around her and transports back and forth to a past not different but silenced.

Carole Burns makes you feel as if these people from an American cross-section really know each other. Or maybe I, being from a similar American cross-section, just knew them well. I loved this novel.

We love this memoir that reads like a mystery story.

E. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a Black father and white mother who fell in love in Indianapolis in the 1940s, when Indiana still enforced anti-miscegenation laws. Her mother “disappeared” so that she could flee to NY with the African American man she loved and marry there. Dolores’s birth certificate listed her as Black (the “one drop” of Black blood rule); she grew up in a Black family and lived in a Black neighborhood. Her mother never spoke of her white family.

The book resonated with us for both its graphic details about the racism Dolores and her African husband endured as highly educated corporate executives, including a cross-burning on their front lawn, and poignant description of her journey to find her white family and understand her biracial identity. Her mother’s response when Dolores says she is going to… show more.

While published as an Image comic series, Saga is best approached in its collected graphic novels. I particularly love taking in the ebook version’s artwork on my iPad. This space opera vs. fantasy epic is beautifully scaled down by both its illustrated panels and its close focus on a family of characters through which we encounter a surreal and hostile universe. Hazel, the unlikely daughter of the series’ leading couple, steps in to provide memoir-esque insights from time to time and serves as something of an (adorable) cipher for her parents’ cross-genre Romeo and Juliet arc. Conceived “to do absolutely everything [the author] couldn't do in a movie or a TV show,” Saga pushes both genre envelopes.

This book gets triple points in my opinion, as it specifically addresses adoption by two dads who are an interracial couple. There are very few children’s books that cover all of these topics and even fewer that do it as simplistic and easy as this one. We have this one in our personal library and it has been one of our go-to books for helping our own daughter who my husband and I adopted.  

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All portrays the contact between seeming opposites: the author who grew up in Boston and traveled to New Zealand when she was a graduate student in Australia and the Maori man she met there and married; the “colonizers” who were her direct ancestors and the “natives” her husband descended from; the history of the encounters between the two groups (including the story of Captain Cook).  At the heart of this complex, mesmerizing, and unflinching story is the couple’s devotion to their three sons—boys growing up in a Boston suburb and navigating their identities as “a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized” as Ms. Thompson explains to them in a letter she tucks into the folder containing her life insurance policy.

Birdie and Cole are sisters with biracial parents on the brink of danger during the turbulent 1960s.

Despite their attempts to cling to each other, their parent’s involvement with a violent anti-establishment group will eventually separate them: Cole with her dark-skinned father and Birdie with her white mother.

The girls' desperate attempt to remain together and later find each other is heartbreaking and encouraging. This book made me cry.

As a woman, I have experienced my share of sexism but it dims in comparison to what Lester faced in the 1950s and 1960s. When applying for a job at a bookstore, a young Lester is told the store can’t hire girls because they only have one toilet. Her plucky response—she could use the same toilet as the men—is one reason I enjoyed this book so much. 

Lester is repeatedly pushed to the sidelines even as she takes up the fight for civil rights, devoting herself to bettering the lives of others while setting aside her own dreams—for a time. Luckily Lester never completely loses her nerve. Her second act is a fun adventure to follow for those who have faced their own setbacks, no matter their gender.

I contributed an essay to this collection and there’s quite a few writers I admire in this book, as well.

It’s refreshing to see other people’s perspective on what can feel like an albatross around your neck. Some of the essays are humorous, others are more poignant, but they all work together to show that a single life can look and feel a bazillion different ways—yours will be what you make it.

Highly-acclaimed and inspirational, Elaine tells her personal story and her personal struggles and self-reflection as a Black woman.

She goes into great detail about what she could have done differently – and she’s only in her 30s. She is the first Black person to be named Editor-in-Chief at Teen Vogue at the tender age of 29.

This one will make you think, better understand the Black point of view and lift you up.