March Adult Reading Challenge
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Year of the Tiger
In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong. Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, and commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, she uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. Filled with incisive wit, joy, and rage, Wong’s Year of the Tiger will galvanize readers.
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Unbound
As a child, Tarana Burke reeled from her sexual assault, believing she was responsible. Unable to confess her experience for fear of shattering her family, her soul split in two between the curious, well-informed intellectual and the shame-ridden victim who blamed herself. Tarana fought to reunite her fractured self through organizing, pursuing justice, and supporting Black and brown girls. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help all on their journeys.
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Circling the Sun
This powerful novel transports readers to the breathtaking world of Out of Africa—1920s Kenya—and reveals the extraordinary adventures of Beryl Markham, a woman before her time. Headstrong young Beryl becomes caught up in a passionate love triangle with the irresistible safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and the writer Baroness Karen Blixen. Brave and audacious and contradictory, Beryl must conquer her own heart to embrace her true destiny: to fly.
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In the Shadow of the Mountain
A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately Silvia Vasquez-Lavado was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest. But Silvia didn’t go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her.
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The Doctors Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell's intelligence and intensity made her the first woman in American to receive an M.D. in 1849. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Together the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other.
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107 Days
From the chaos of campaign strategy sessions to the intensity of debate prep under relentless scrutiny and the private moments that rarely make headlines, Kamala Harris offers an unfiltered look at the pressures, triumphs, and heartbreaks of a history-defining race for President of the United States. With behind-the-scenes details and a voice that is both intimate and urgent, this is a chronicle of resilience, leadership, and the high stakes of democracy in action.
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The Frozen River
This novel reimagines the life of Martha Ballard, real-life midwife, healer, and diarist. When the Kennebec River freezes in1789, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Her record soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.
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Mean Baby
The first story Selma Blair Beitner ever heard about herself is that she was a mean, mean baby. Although Selma went on to become a celebrated Hollywood actress and model, she could never quite shake the periods of darkness that overtook her, and she secretly drank to escape. Over the course of this memoir, Selma lays bare her life filled with brutal violence, passionate love, true friendship, the gift of motherhood, and, finally, the surprising salvation of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
In this comprehensive, revelatory biography, historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story is her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world,” with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.
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The Great Mrs. Elias
Based on a true story, this novel relates the rise and downfall of Hannah Elias, one of the richest black women in America in the late 1800s. A murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias' mansion on Central Park West. Born in Philadelphia, Hannah slips on a new identity before relocating to New York City to become as rich as a robber baron through her wise investments. The murder investigation brings to light Elias' African-American background. When this truth is revealed, Mrs. Elias finds herself alone, ensnared in a scandalous trial, and accused of stealing her fortune from whites.
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Love, Queenie
Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Her nomination for "The Dark Angel" marked the first time the Academy recognized a performer of color. Oberon, born to a South Asian mother and white father in India, broke through a racial barrier-but no one knew it since she was "passing" for white. Against the backdrop of Hollywood's racially exclusionary Golden Age and the United States's hostile immigration policy towards South Asians in the twentieth century, Oberon rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite, all while keeping a secret that could have destroyed her career.
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No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel.
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Song of a Captive Bird
Inspired by trailblazer Forugh Farrokhzad's verse, letters, films, and interviews--and including original translations of her poems--this haunting novel uses the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran--and who continues to inspire generations of women around the world.
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The Soul of a Woman
As a child, Isabelle Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children without “resources or voice.” Isabel became determined to fight for the life her mother couldn't have. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the second wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists, Allende for the first time felt comfortable in her own skin, as they wrote “with a knife between our teeth” about women’s issues. She has seen what the movement has accomplished in the course of her lifetime and knows where, and what, feminism needs to be next.
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Becoming
Now in paperback—the intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States, featuring a new introduction by Michelle Obama, a letter from the author to her younger self, and a book club guide with 20 discussion questions and a 5-question Q&A
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WATCH THE EMMY-NOMINATED NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS
Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. In her memoir, the former First Lady invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address.
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Wuthering Heights
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he learns the tale of the intense love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrenders to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff visits the bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the the past.
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Tom Lake
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
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The Perigee Visual Dictionary of Signing
The Visual Dictionary to American Sign Language (ASL) is arranged in a straightforward, easy-to-use dictionary format. It includes more than 1,350 signs, detailed illustrations, memory aids, and sample sentences as well as number and fingerspelling. Helpful hints and a comprehensive index facilitate easier signing and clear cross-referencing.
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The Women
In 1965, twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother, who has shipped out to serve in Vietnam. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. But the real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.
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Return of the Spider
The book Along Came a Spider introduced Detective Alex Cross and his investigation of Gary Soneji, serial torturer and killer. But that wasn't their first meeting. Police discover that Gary Soneji kept a murder book, Profiles in Homicidal Genius, detailing his transformation from substitute teacher to hardened serial killer. It includes clues to missteps that Alex Cross made as a rookie homicide detective. Now, Alex must retrace the steps of that long-ago investigation and face the Return of the Spider.
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Nash Falls
Nash has a wife and a daughter and a very high-level position at Sybaritic Investments, where his innate skills and dogged tenacity have carried him to the top of the pyramid in his business career. Then Nash is approached by the FBI to become an 'inside man.' His purpose: To expose an enterprise, led by Victoria Steers, that is laundering large sums of money through Sybaritic. But when Steers discovers that Nash is working with the FBI, she turns the tables on him in a way he never could have contemplated.
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Daughters of Palestine
Leyla King braids matriarchal memory into a vivid saga of love and survival as her ancestors flee war and poverty. From Haifa to Ramallah, Damascus, Beirut, and finally Texas, Leyla makes global politics deeply personal as family squabbles, ambition, mental illness, romance, and religion shape their immigrant journey. Daughters of Palestine is both an urgent testimony from Palestinian Christians and a timeless story of resilience.
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Strangers in Time
Fourteen-year-old parentless Charlie Matters steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he's old enough to enlist to fight the Germans. Fifteen-year-old Molly Wakefield has just returned from evacuation to a devastating reality: neither of her parents are in London. Charlie and Molly find an unexpected ally and protector in Ignatius Oliver. As bombs continue to bear down on the city, Charlie, Molly, and Ignatius learn that trusting one another may be the only way for them to survive.
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All the Colors of the Dark
1975 is a time of change in America. In the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. Their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.
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The Seven Rings
Long ago, Arthur Poole built a grand house overlooking the turbulent ocean, in a Maine village that bore his name. Today, Sonya MacTavish lives in that house—a manor that has been cursed for generations. Within its walls, she has witnessed the deaths of seven brides and the thefts of seven wedding rings. And now, to break the curse and banish a malevolent spirit once and for all, a difficult task must be completed.
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The King's Ransom
Gabriela Rose, recovery agent extraordinaire, can’t seem to lose her gorgeous-but-infuriating ex-husband Rafer Jones. And now he needs her help. His cousin, Harley, is in trouble. As a bank president, he invested an astronomical amount of money in insuring some of the world’s most priceless artifacts at the urging of his board. Recently, these insured pieces started going missing and worse, there’s no paper trail of Harley being directed to make these risky investments. Unless the artwork can be recovered soon, it looks like Harley is going to be heading to jail as the fall guy for an ingenious crime.
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Nightshade
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective Stilwell has been "exiled" to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island. Then Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor, a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. He is convinced he is the only one who can bring justice to the woman known as "Nightshade." Soon, his investigation uncovers closely guarded secrets and a dark heart to the serene island that was meant to be his escape from the evils of the big city.
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Exit Strategy
First—a Baltimore coffee shop. A seat in the corner, facing the door. As he leaves, a young guy brushes against him in the doorway. Instinctively Reacher checks the pocket holding his cash and passport. Nothing is missing. Second—a store to buy a coat. As he pulls out his cash, he finds something new in his pocket. A handwritten note with a desperate plea for help.
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Nobody's Fool
Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up covered in blood with a knife in his hand. Beside him, the dead body of his girlfriend Anna. His screams drown out his thoughts and then he runs. Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes Anna at the back of the classroom. She bolts when they make eye contact. Kierce knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment.