Spring 2022
In Other Lands
by Sarah Rees Brennan | 2017 | Read the eBook
The Borderlands aren't like anywhere else. Don't try to smuggle a phone or any other piece of technology over the wall that marks the Border — unless you enjoy a fireworks display in your backpack. (Ballpoint pens are okay.) There are elves, harpies, and — best of all as far as Elliot is concerned — mermaids.
Elliot? Who's Elliot? Elliot is thirteen years old. He's smart and just a tiny bit obnoxious. Sometimes more than a tiny bit. When his class goes on a field trip and he can see a wall that no one else can see, he is given the chance to go to school in the Borderlands.
It turns out that on the other side of the wall, classes involve a lot more weaponry and fitness training and fewer mermaids than he expected. On the other hand, there's Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, an elven warrior who is more beautiful than anyone Elliot has ever seen, and then there's her human friend Luke: sunny, blond, and annoyingly likeable. There are lots of interesting books. There's even the chance Elliot might be able to change the world. - Publisher's description
“I have rewritten the first paragraph of this review a half-dozen times, trying to find some way to make clear that Sarah Rees Brennan has created a nearly perfect YA fantasy without gushing. I can’t do it. In Other Lands is brilliantly subversive, assuredly smart, and often laugh-out-loud funny. It combines a magic-world school setting with heaps of snark about everything from teen romance to gender roles, educational systems and serious world diplomacy.” ― Locus
“Snarky, self-aware, smart, funny, and tremendously sweet, In Other Lands works equally well for adults and genre-versed young adults.” ― Borderlands Books
Supplementary Reading
Summer 2021
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
by Janet Mock | 2014 | Read the eBook
Meeting date: July 13, 2021
Mock, a trans woman of Hawaiian and Black descent, relays her experience growing up in Kalihi, on Oʻahu. She imparts hardships she experienced--poverty and complex parents with addictions--as well as moments of light, like finding support in Hawaiian culture for māhū, and the embrace of family and friends.
Throughout her narrative, Mock offers accessible language and insight on an underrepresented and marginalized population, while recognizing that her journey is unique to her. Ultimately, Redefining Realness is Mock's story of achieving self-realization and practicing authenticity.
* This memoir includes Mock's personal recollections of sexual abuse and sex work.
** This ebook is available for three simultaneous readers. If you try to access it and it is in use by three readers already, please try again later.
"A classic American autobiography. Like Richard Wright and Maya Angelou, Janet Mock brings us into a world we may not know and with breathtaking insight, courage, and masterful craft makes her story universal." - Barbara Smith
"Told with a spirit of raw honesty that moves beyond confession to redemptive revelation, this book is a life map for transformation — for changing minds. A heart-rending autobiography of love, longing, and fulfillment." - bell hooks
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Spring 2021
An Unkindness of Ghosts
by Rivers Solomon | 2017 | Read the eBook
Meeting dates: March 30 and April 1, 2021
Odd-mannered, obsessive, withdrawn, Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, as they accuse, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remained of her world, save for stories told around the cookfire. Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, who they consider to be less than human. When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter-century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sewing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it. (Publisher's Description)
"Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts is the kind of novel I need to describe in terms of what it did to me. Reading it, I felt it carving out a vastness inside me, pouring itself into me like so many stars, and the more I read the bigger I felt, falling down a rabbit-hole of sky and wanting only to go deeper and farther with every page." - Amal El-Mohtar for NPR*
Supplementary Reading
Fall 2020 B
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi
by Haunani-Kay Trask | Read the eBook
Meeting date: November 18, 2020
Since its publication in 1993, From a Native Daughter, a provocative, well-reasoned attack against the rampant abuse of Native Hawaiian rights, institutional racism, and gender discrimination, has generated heated debates in Hawai'i and throughout the world. This 1999 revised work includes material that builds on issues and concerns raised in the first edition: Native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawai'i; the master plan of the Native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahui Hawai'i and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty; the 1989 Hawai'i declaration of the Hawai'i ecumenical coalition on tourism; and a typology on racism and imperialism. Brief introductions to each of the previously published essays brings them up to date and situates them in the current Native Hawaiian rights discussion. (Publisher's description)
"One of the strongest and most influential texts of the sovereignty movement." - The Nation
Supplementary Reading
Fall 2020 A
Celestial Bodies
By Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth | Read the eBook
Meeting date: September 16, 2020
In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer. (Publisher's description)
"“Celestial Bodies,” written from within a largely poetic tradition by a woman who is a scholar of classical Arabic poetry, seems to break free of narration as it is commonly understood in Western fictional literature. The leaps and swerves seem closer to poetry or fable or song than to the novel as such." - James Wood
Supplementary Reading
Summer 2020
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
By Caroline Criado Perez | Read the eBook
Meeting date: July 8, 2020
Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women--diving into women's lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor's office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world. (Publisher's description)
"Criado Perez doesn’t set out to prove a vast conspiracy; she simply wields data like a laser, slicing cleanly through the fog of unconscious and unthinking preferences." - Eliane Glaser
Supplementary Reading
Spring 2020
Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
By Octavia Butler, Damian Duffy, and John Jennings | Read the eBook
Meeting Date: April 30, 2020
Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, first published in 1979, follows the story of Dana, a young black woman, who finds herself inexplicably shuttled through time between her present day 1979 Los Angeles, and a plantation in pre-civil war Maryland. As Dana, a late twentieth century woman, witnesses antebellum slavery, her character brings stark themes into sharp relief: the accurate (though mitigated in violence) depiction of slavery in America and its indelible legacy; race as a social construct; relational power dynamics; intersectionality; and black women's empowerment.
Because of its time travel element, Kindred is characterized as science fiction, though it combines the historical, the fantastic, and the literary, and is considered a cornerstone of Afrofuturism.
In Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, academics and artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings render Butler's masterpiece in stunning visual format. Introduced by Nnedi Okorafor, it is celebrated as a true-to-the-original retelling; a must-read for those who are returning to the narrative after first reading Kindred, and for those delving into Dana's paradigm for the first time.
"Duffy’s words, coupled with Jennings’ brutally jagged, disorientating, gothic, and impactful art allows their adaptation to be two things: A graphic adaptation of a beloved novel, and an amplification of said novel. Reading them together illuminates Butler’s work from angles I never thought possible.” — Nerds of Color
Supplementary Reading