Fourteen Cows for America

Erin's post made me ponder my love of books about Africa. This is a book my school librarian handed me one day when I was boredly babysitting the kids in the library. It is a children's book, and I love it.

For anyone who was alive and aware for September 11, this book will probably make you cry a little, even if you're reading it in front of 30 teenagers. The story is about a poor Kenyan tribe giving a gift to the United States. The coolest part about it is that it's a true story, the thing that makes me sad is that not many people know about it. Read it! Read it!

Chains

Middle school book club success! I'm always happy to read books that have received the Scott O'Dell book award, I feel like you can't go wrong. This is a good young adult fiction book about slavery during the Revolutionary War. It was an interesting take, because usually you don't learn about those two things together, slavery goes with the Civil War. I also liked it because as a slave, the main character heard a lot from both sides of the conflict and really neither side truly supported what she really needed in life- freedom. I believe it's the first book in a series, and I liked it well enough to hopefully read the next one(s).

The Power of One

Oh my goodness I loved this book. It's probably going into my list of top 5 if you take out all the Harry Potter books. It's about a boy growing up in South Africa, starting when he's five years old in about 1935 and taking the reader through his childhood and teenage years. It's historical fiction, so you learn about the Apartheid and WWII, but I mostly loved it because of the great characters that are portrayed. There are so many people to love and hate! Read it, please do.

Disclaimer though... this has terrible language. Bad enough that I can't actually recommend it to anyone without putting that out there. I almost feel like a heathen for loving the book so much.(but let's justify it here: it's a cultural thing, not an "I'm the author and I just want to swear" thing)

Another thought- The book is 500 pages long, which to me is super long, but not a hard read. However, there is a young reader edition you could look into that doesn't have the swearing (or half the story).

Brooklyn

I realized that I was reading two similar...but opposite books at the same time. Shanghai Girls was about immigrants to the San Francisco area and this book, Brooklyn, was about a girl who immigrated to New York from Ireland. It took me a  long time to read because it wasn't exactly a page turner, but once I finally got into it I really liked it. I would put it in the same category as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (oh, duh. Brooklyn), but not as great. Definitely worth reading for something calm and sorta feel-good (but also sorta tragic). Okay I'm not doing a very good job selling this, but I really did like it. My only complaint was that the time period wasn't totally clear. Sometime between 1915 and 1935 is my guess. Who knows, maybe it said it somewhere and I missed it!

Shanghai Girls

I'm going to start this out like a church talk: For those of you who don't know me, I'm Emily, Erin's friend. I finally finished a book, so I finally get to blog about it! (yes, I accidentally blogged about not a book the other day, if you saw a phantom blog post in your feed)

Shanghai Girls is about two sisters who grow up in China and emigrate to the United States. The story goes from the 1930s to the 1950s. I would say that the book is primarily about the relationship between the two sisters and their families, but it also is really interesting historically.  Overall I loved it, but I would warn anyone who doesn't like sad stories- China, immigration and communism are no picnic! It's not a very happy book, but a good one that makes you thankful. (Or as The Costco Connection said, "A powerful new story!")

I'd also warn that it gets pretty graphic at one point, which it pretty important to the story, but if you want to skip over it you'll still get the gist. There were some pretty annoyed ladies at the teacher book club who didn't like it, but it's not romance novel graphic, it's "horrible, awful, things happen to people and I feel bad for them" graphic.