50books_poc | Entries tagged with identity

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42. Diana Abu-Jaber, Origin

Abu-Jaber is totally my new favorite author. She has an amazing, vivid way of describing things, particularly places, which I adore. In this book, the setting is Syracuse, New York in the middle of winter, and everything about that is so exactly described: the particular blues and white of winter light, early twilights, lead-colored skies, too much wind, the look of snow falling in the early morning, black ice on the streets, the feelings of isolation, claustrophobia, and loneliness that winter often inspires, cold air in your lungs.

The plot is about Lena, who works as a fingerprint examiner in a police office. There's a case involving a dead baby that the medical examiner ruled to be SIDS, but which the mother swears was a murder, saying that she heard footsteps in her empty house just before finding that her baby had died. Meanwhile, Lena has been doing research into her own past: she was adopted at three, and has only strange, vague memories of the time before that- rain forests, monkeys, a plane crash- and no one seems to know if these memories are real, metaphorical, or just a three-year-old's daydreams.

Everything eventually turns out to be connected, of course, but the revelations still surprised me. This novel is completely different in voice from everything else Abu-Jaber has written; it's almost a thriller, with a tense, brooding tone that fits perfectly with the mysteries and the cold winter. Highly recommended.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: "Poor Man's Grey" Matthew Good

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28. Sherri L. Smith, Flygirl

A YA novel. Ida Mae is a young woman working as a maid in Louisiana in the early years of America's participation in WWII. Her father taught her how to fly planes before he died, but as a black woman, she's been unable to get a pilot license of her own. When she hears about the Women Airforce Service Pilots (a government operation that flies non-combat missions), Ida Mae decides to join. But she has to pass as white to have a chance.

This was a great novel. It did a wonderful job of dealing with both sexism and racism (and the intersection between the two), while keeping the situation complicated and letting the characters be individuals. There aren't any easy answers here, though I felt the tone of the book was ultimately uplifting. (Though there were some scenes that broke my heart, like when Ida Mae's mother comes to see her during pilot training.) This book is very well-written, fast-paced, and I couldn't stop reading. Very recommended.

Current Mood: bored

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9. Tanita S. Davis, A La Carte

Lainey is a typical high school girl (if a bit shy) who dreams of being the first African-American vegetarian chef to have a TV show. Sim, a white boy who was her childhood best friend, has grown up to be the cool, rebellious kid. This book is about their relationship, and the ways it affects Lainey's relationship with her family and other friends, in between lovely descriptive passages of food porn. The book even includes recipes! Which look easy and tasty, and though I haven't tried out any yet, I very much plan to.

This book was very well-written, particularly in its depictions of characters and their connections. Everyone seemed wholly realized, with more depth than is typical in novels. The resolution of the book was not what I expected, but was realistic and complicated and honest and really fantastic. Very recommended.

10. Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ten Things I Hate About Me

At home, Jamilah is the youngest daughter of a Lebanese Muslim family living in Australia, with a hijab-wearing activist older sister, a high school drop-out older brother, and a heavily-accented, taxi-driving father. At school, blonde-haired (it's dyed) and blue-eyed (contacts) Jamie is very much not one of the "ethnics". The book is about the stress and emotions of maintaining this double-life, and how to find a resolution between the two.

I really, really, really liked this book. It was much more complicated than Does My Head Look Big In This? (if less funny), and it raised much more difficult questions. I loved the real problems Jamilah had to deal with, and the directions this book went. So good.

Current Mood: cheerful

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( Why Don't You Stop Talking: Jackie Kay )

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2. Ten Things I Hate About Me by Randa Abdel-Fattah

Randa Abdel-Fattah also wrote 'Does My Head Look Big In This?', which I know is very popular and has won various awards. So when I saw 10 Things I Hate About Me I had to buy.

Jamilah is a Muslim teen who's proud of her Lebanese heritage and enjoys going to madrasa and playing the darabuka. However, at school she's known as Jamie, and dies her hair blonde and wears blue contact lenses to fit in. She keeps 'Jamilah' secret, afraid of being bullied or not fitting in.

I loved this book. I loved how painfully real I found Jamilah, torn in two between her pride in her identity, and her desperation to fit in and avoid to notice of the popular kids. She's clever and funny, but also insecure and lacking in confidence. This being YA chick lit, it all gets complicated when boys get involved. I saw the twist coming from very early on, but it didn't spoil it much. There's a good cast of well-rounded secondary characters, all with their own issues (and I love Jamilah's sister embroidering 'Save the Forests' onto her hijab). I also loved the ending: it wasn't what I'd expected, but given how Jamilah's character grew over the book, it also made perfect sense, and I think left me happier than if it had ended in a more conventional way.

3. Jupiter Williams by S. I. Martin

This has previously been reviewed by

puritybrown here. It's YA historical fiction, set in London 1800, focusing on Jupiter Williams and his brothers. They were born free in Sierra Leone, but sent to the African Academy in London for their education. When Jupiter's brother Robert disappears, Jupiter goes to try and find him.

This is good - I enjoyed reading about the African community in London at a time when most books would have you believe it was all white. It left me wanting to find out more. Jupiter is definitely a strong character, if not a likeable one, and the author doesn't shrink back from describing the nastiness and horror of the time.

But I couldn't help feeling something was missing. At the end I was left thinking, But what happens next? I'm not normally a huge fan of epilogues, but I think that something was needed to make it feel a little more finished. There was no sense of resolution, or at least for me it didn't feel like there was. But I enjoyed it, and it intrigued me enough that I want to find out more about the African community in Britain at that time.

sage

"Real" Indians and Others : Mixed-blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood by Bonita Lawrence

( This book is a study of 29 individuals in the Toronto Native community identifying as mixed race. )

eta: Just for the record, the author is part Mi'kmaq and undertook the study as part of her own attempts to understand and validate the range of urban mixed-race Aboriginal experience.

sophinisba

Hi everyone, I'm new and my goal is to read 50 books by people of color this calendar year and post reviews once a month. So far I'm a little ahead with reading and a little behind with posting. These are the books I finished in January:

1. Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 2004
This is a novel made up of linked short stories about Haitian and Haitian American characters, most of them somehow related to stories of political violence, especially the torture of prisoners. It's not clear until the end how the different parts relate to each other and at times I felt a little lost as far as that goes, but all the characters felt very real and all their stories were interesting and moving, even when I wasn't sure what year I was in, and even though I know very, very little about Haitian history. I liked that there were characters from different social positions and different sides of the conflict but they were all sympathetic, all presented as human beings. I liked that one of the women had an ex-girlfriend and this was part of her character but not the point of it. Mostly I just loved Edwidge Danticat's prose! I hadn't read anything of hers before but I've got the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory out from the library now and I'm also very interested in I will definitely be reading the memoir Brother, I'm Dying, which was reviewed here.

2. Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro, 1899
I had to read this for school, but I enjoyed it anyway. :) Most critics and regular Brazilians consider Machado to be the greatest Brazilian writer of all time, and this is one of his most important books. This is a novel about a friendship, courtship, and marriage in which the husband, Dom Casmurro, is the unreliable narrator. In some ways it's incredibly frustrating that we never get to hear the woman's side of the story, but that's also what's so fascinating about it, that the book is partly about her being silenced, and over a hundred years later readers continue to argue about what actually happened in the story. The writing is also just fun, with lots of crazy asides in which the narrator addresses the reader or talks about the construction of the novel. ( Read more... )

3. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother, 1997
I was excited to read this because back in college I'd been blown away by Kincaid's novel Lucy and her essay A Small Place. My Brother is a memoir about the author's younger brother dying of AIDS in Antigua in the 1990s. What I liked about it was one of the things I loved about those other books – the raw honesty of it. Kincaid doesn't hide her anger at her mother for the way she treats her children, at her brother for being careless about his own and others' lives, at Antiguans in general for trying to ignore this disease, and for not taking care of people who are sick and suffering. I liked this book, I got sucked into it and read it quickly and found it very affecting, but it I wouldn't recommend it as readily as I do those other two. (I'm also planning to read her novel Annie John soon.) To me this read like something Kincaid had to write in order to deal with this horrible event in her life, but where she wasn't really thinking that much about the reader, or that's my explanation for why I didn't connect as much with this one.

4. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993
I know a lot of you have read this already and it's been reviewed in the comm before, so I won't summarize here. I had a little trouble getting into this at the first but I loved the second half and I'm looking forward to reading Parable of the Talents. ( Read more... )

5. Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, 1998
I know some Asian American readers have had strong negative reactions to this book and others have loved it. It seems to work for most people as a memoir, as one guy talking about his experience as a Chinese American, deciding (or having his parents decide for him) how much his Chineseness is going to be part of his life and his identity. I really like how honest and thoughtful he is, that he not only acknowledges that his Chinese language skills are not good or that some Asian Americans would call him a "banana" because he "acts white", but that he really talks about different sides of what that means. I also like that he talks about people he knows who've experienced being Asian American in completely different ways, and he talks about how his own attitude has changed throughout his life, or sometimes how it changes in the course of one conversation.

Some people don't like the parts of this book that go into bigger generalizations about history and assimilation and the meaning of race and ethnicity in the US. But I really loved these parts too! I figure it's not that you need to agree with him on everything, but he's putting out some really interesting ideas and the writing is elegant; it was a real pleasure for me to read.

oyceter

Hrm, since I usually write things up on my LJ, I figure I will try to do compilation posts here each month. Also, I'll link my manga write ups here as well, though I won't be counting those toward my own 50 books (partly out of embarrassment of my total manga tally each year...).

Chu, Carl - Chinese Food Finder: The Bay Area and San Francisco
I am generally leery of English-language write-ups of Chinese food; in my experience, they tend to portray Chinese food as something exotic and foreign at worst and as something non-normative at best. More importantly, the Chinese food that they talk about is not my Chinese food, which is normal, everyday and comfortingly familiar. Also, either I can't figure out what the books are talking about because the names are funny transliterated English (ex. "Dragon Phoenix Soup") that make sense in Chinese but not really in English or because they're talking about stuff that I don't eat very often (ex. banquet food from the seventies). (more)

Zia, Helen - Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People
Contrary to expectation, this is not actually a history of Asian Americans. For that, I would grab Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore. Instead, this is a history of the politicization of Asian Americans as a group and the formation of an "Asian-American" identity, as opposed to many separate groups (Chinese Americans, Cambodian Americans, Thai Americans, etc.). (more)

Manga