Reading Adventures 2024 - SER


Showing 1 - 20 of 30  There are a total of 409 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Brother alive"
Star rating for Brother alive
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Description:
"In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island's most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees...
Book cover for "California golden"
Star rating for California golden
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Southern California, 1960s: endless sunny days surfing in Malibu, followed by glittering neon nights at Whisky A-Go-Go. In an era when women are expected to be housewives, Carol Donelly is breaking the mold as a legendary female surfer struggling to compete in a male-dominated sport--and her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, bear the weight of her unconventional lifestyle. The Donnelly sisters grow up enduring their mother's absence--physically, when...
Book cover for "Calling Ukraine"
Star rating for Calling Ukraine
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday in 2018, John Turner accepts a job offer from an old college friend to move to Ukraine to teach customer service agents there how to sound American, but with no knowledge of the language and struggling to understand the culture and customs, he finds himself in a romantic entanglement with disastrous consequences.
Book cover for "City of laughter"
Star rating for City of laughter
Description:
"A rich and riveting debut marrying centuries-old folklore to twenty-first-century queer literary fiction, City of Laughter spans four generations of Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years. Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an eighteenth century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to bring laughter to the...
Book cover for "Cold victory"
Star rating for Cold victory
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Helsinki, 1947. Finland teeters between the Soviet Union and the West. Everyone is being watched. A wrong look or a wrong word could end in catastrophe. Natalya Bobrova, from Russia, and Louise Koski, from the United States, are young wives of their country's military attachés. When they meet at an embassy party, their husbands, Arnie and Mikhail, both world-class skiers, drunkenly challenge each other to a friendly-but secret-cross-country wilderness...
Book cover for "Enter ghost"
Star rating for Enter ghost
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"A bold, evocative new novel from the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 and Betty Trask Award winner Isabella Hammad that follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers...
Book cover for "The fires"
Star rating for The fires
Description:
When a series of volcanic eruptions threaten most of Iceland's population, volcanologist Anna Arnardóttir, caught between the safety of a nation and her feelings for her children, her lover, and her past, embarks on a dangerous journey to saves the lives of the people she loves.
Book cover for "The garden of broken things"
Star rating for The garden of broken things
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Genevieve, a single mother, flies to Port-au-Prince with her teenage son, Miles. The trip is meant to be an education for Miles--a chance to learn about his family's roots while coming to terms with his father's departure--but it's also an excuse for Genevieve to escape the city, where her life is dominated by her failed marriage and the daily pressures of raising Black children in America. For Genevieve, the journey is also a homecoming of sorts:...
Book cover for "The great divide"
Star rating for The great divide
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"A novel about the construction of the Panama Canal, following the intersecting lives of the local families fighting to protect their homeland, the West Indian laborers recruited to dig the waterway, and the white Americans who gained profit and glory for themselves"--
Book cover for "The island"
Star rating for The island
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they're deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom. When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking...
Book cover for "The Lincoln Highway"
Star rating for The Lincoln Highway
Author:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon...
Book cover for "The most secret memory of men"
Star rating for The most secret memory of men
Description:
"In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book in Paris, published in 1938 and entitled Le labyrinthe de l'inhumain (The Maze of Inhumanity). No one knows what happened to the author, once referred to as the "Black Rimbaud," after his book created a scandal. Diégane is fascinated and decides to look for the mysterious T.C. Elimane. On his path, he confronts the great tragedies of history such as colonialism...
Book cover for "Moth"
Star rating for Moth
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"The saga of one family's trials through India's tumultuous partition-when Pakistan split from India-exploring its impact on women, what it means to be othered, and the redemptive power of family"--

14. Nevada

Book cover for "Nevada"
Star rating for Nevada
Description:
"A beloved and blistering cult classic finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip"--
Book cover for "Patience is a subtle thief"
Star rating for Patience is a subtle thief
Description:
"For as long as she can remember, Patience Adewale has been waiting for confirmation that she is loved, that there is a place where she truly belongs. The eldest daughter of Chief Kolade Adewale, Patience lives a sheltered life in Ibadan, but within the walls of their mansion, her distant father and stepmother Modupe offer no comfort. Her only ally in the house is her younger sister, Margaret, but Margaret can only do so much. More than anything,...
Book cover for "Peach blossom spring"
Star rating for Peach blossom spring
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"It is 1938 in China and, as a young wife, Meilin's future is bright. But with the Japanese army approaching, Meilin and her four year old son, Renshu, are forced to flee their home. Relying on little but their wits and a beautifully illustrated hand scroll, filled with ancient fables that offer solace and wisdom, they must travel through a ravaged country, seeking refuge. Years later, Renshu has settled in America as Henry Dao. Though his daughter...
Book cover for "The peacock and the sparrow"
Star rating for The peacock and the sparrow
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Stationed in Bahrain for his final tour, world-weary CIA spy Shane Collins is ready to return home until he meets a beautiful and enigmatic artist, but before he can win her love, he is caught in the crosshairs of a revolution and must use his skills to navigate a bloody uprising.
Book cover for "Planet of clay"
Star rating for Planet of clay
Description:
"Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she's crazy, but she is no fool--the madness is in the battered city around...
Book cover for "Poland, a green land"
Star rating for Poland, a green land
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"A Tel Aviv shopkeeper visits his parents' Polish birthplace in an attempt to come to terms with their complex legacy-and is completely unprepared for what he finds there. Yaakov Fine's practical wife and daughters are baffled by his decision to leave his flourishing dress shop for a ten-day trip to his family's ancestral village in Poland. Struggling to emerge from a midlife depression, Yaakov is drawn to Szydowce, intrigued by the stories he'd heard...
Book cover for "River spirit"
Star rating for River spirit
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"A spellbinding new novel from New York Times Notable Author and Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela about an embattled young woman's coming of age during the Mahdist War in nineteenth-century Sudan. The latest novel by "versatile prose stylist" (New York Times) Leila Aboulela is an enchanting story of the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, and a deeply human look at the tensions between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam,...