Happy Saturday, Casa Family!

Now might be the perfect weekend to snuggle up with a book. We wanted to share with you 5 interesting books detailing the immigrant experience. As a whole, the immigrant experience is deeply personal and the stories shared by immigrants are incredibly unique – but can also fundamentally be similar when it comes to the shared immigrant struggle.

Here are 5 books that might spark your interest:

  1. Chulito – Charles Rice-González 

This book details the story of a Puerto Rican American boy growing up in the Bronx in New York City and the struggles he faces in his community. “”A tremendous debut…full of heart and courage and a ferocious honesty.” — Junot Díaz

 

 

 

2. Olive Witch – Abeer Y. Hoque 

“In her new memoir, Olive Witch, Abeer Y. Hoque delves into her childhood as a Bangladeshi girl growing up in small-town Nigeria, and then into her move to Pittsburgh at 13. She describes her feeling of being an outsider, and her eventual move back to Bangladesh on her own.”

3.  Ghana Must Go – Taiye Selasi

Ghana Must Go is about a Nigerian-Ghanaian family that finds themselves falling apart between Ghana and the United States. ““He drove without looking, without needing to, from memory. Seeing instead of looking. He drove home by heart.”

 

 

4.  Good Girls Marry Doctors – Piyali Bhattacharya

 

 

“An essay collection by 27 South Asian American women from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, with Hindu, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Muslim backgrounds.”

“There’s something about knowing someone else has been through what you have that makes you not feel not so crazy, selfish, ungrateful, rude, unreasonable, political, brazen, and all the other things that we’re often accused of—not just the South Asian daughters, but immigrant daughters. Not just immigrant daughters, but all daughters. We know this as women. The pressures of conforming are enormous, fatal even.”

 

 

 

 

5. Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vuong 

A beautiful poetry collection by Vietnamese American author, Ocean Vuong. “His poems are gutting, mythic, wanton, vulnerable, sharp, fine, and full of beauty. The point of view could be anyone, from Vuong himself, to his mother or father, to a gun, to a ghost.”

 

 

 

 

 

There are also plenty of CHILDREN’S BOOKS about the immigrant experience. Happy reading!