Asian Heritage Month Reads

Best friends Sophie and Agatha discover their true identities when they enter The School for Good and Evil, a school where ordinary boys and girls are trained to be fairy tale heroes and villains.

Yusuf is excited to start middle school in his small Texas town, but with the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks coming up, suddenly it feels like the country's same anger and grief is all focused on his Muslim community.

When a cyberbully sends the entire high school a picture of basketball hero Bijan Majidi, photo-shopped to look like a terrorist, the school administration promises to find and punish the culprit, but Bijan just wants to pretend the incident never happened and move on.

Shy twelve-year-old Nisha, forced to flee her home with her Hindu family during the 1947 partition of India, tries to find her voice and make sense of the world falling apart around her by writing to her deceased Muslim mother in the pages of her diary.

A 14-year-old girl living in the Jakarta slums who longs to be a writer sees an opportunity to raise money for school fees when she survives a minibus accident and the locals begin saying she has magical good luck. But when the crowd turns against her and she discovers her father's plan to marry her off to an older man, she must summon courage and conviction to write her own story.

As features editor of her school newspaper, thirteen-year-old Jameela Mirza wants to impress her father by writing a spectacular story about the new student, but a misunderstanding and family illness complicate matters.

Mickey faces a lot of challenges when starting seventh grade, but an instant connection with new student Sun Joo improves her outlook until Sydney, popular and mean, decides to make Sun Joo her friend.

Knowing very little English, eleven-year-old Jingwen feels like an alien when his family immigrates to Australia, but copes with loneliness and the loss of his father by baking elaborate cakes.

Twelve-year-old Henry Khoo embarks on a forbidden journey from Australia to Singapore to prove his independence to his overprotective family, while working out some problems with friends.

When the Arab Spring arrives at Yara's doorstep in Syria the regime's reaction to it is worse than anyone imagined. After a violent attack on her family's home, she emerges to a changed world. Her parents and nana are gone, and her brother, Saad, can't speak-- struck silent by everything he's seen. Now, with her friend Shireen and Shireen's brother, Ali, Yara must try to find a way to safety.

In Pakistan, Amal holds onto her dream of being a teacher even after becoming an indentured servant to pay off her family's debt to the wealthy and corrupt Khan family.
(Also available as an eBook and audiobook on Sora).

When her ailing father is conscripted to fight invaders from the north, Mulan dresses as a man to take his place in the army, but an old enemy and an attraction for her troop's commander complicate her mission.

Mia Tang thinks she's going to have the best year ever. She and her parents are the proud owners of the Calivista Motel, Mia gets to run the front desk with her best friend, Lupe, and she's finally getting somewhere with her writing! But as it turns out, sixth grade is no picnic.

Recently estranged from her best friend and weeks away from shifting from only child to big sister, seventh grader Beatrix Lee consoles herself by writing haiku in invisible ink and hiding the poems, but one day she finds a reply--is it the librarian with all the answers, the editor of the school paper who admits to admiring her poetry, an old friend feeling remorse, or the boy obsessed with visiting the local labyrinth?

In 1926 Shanghai, eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, heir of the Scarlet Gang, and her first love-turned-rival Roma Montagov, leader of the White Flowers, must work together when mysterious deaths threaten their city.

Lara Jean writes love letters to all the boys she has loved and then hides them in a hatbox until one day those letters are accidentally sent.

Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle. She lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her one hundredth marriage proposal. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn't want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. She is irritatingly attracted to someone who looks down on her choices and dresses like he belongs in the seventh century.
(Also available as an eBook on Sora).

Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali is looking forward to going to Caltech and getting away from her conservative Muslim parents' expectation that she will marry, especially since she is in love with her girlfriend Ariana--but when her parents catch her kissing Ariana, they whisk Rukhsana off to Bangladesh and a world of tradition and arranged marriages, and she must find the courage to fight for the right to choose her own path.

Clinically-depressed Darius Kellner, a high school sophomore, travels to Iran to meet his grandparents, but it is their next-door neighbor, Sohrab, who changes his life.
(Also available as an audiobook on Sora).

Ah-Kim Chang and her mother immigrate to Brooklyn, where they work for Kim's Aunt Paula in a Chinatown clothing factory earning barely enough to keep them alive; however, Kim's perseverance and hard work earns her a place at an elite private school where she is befriended by Annette, who helps her adjust to American culture.

1954, in San Francisco's Chinatown, seventeen-year-old Lily Hu falls in love with Kathleen Miller.

In a dark future, when North America has split into two warring nations, fifteen-year-old Day, a famous criminal, and prodigy June, the brilliant soldier hired to capture him, discover that they have a common enemy.

When teenage coder Emika Chen hacks her way into the opening tournament of the Warcross Championships, she glitches herself into the game as well as a sinister plot with major consequences for the entire Warcross empire.

It's 2002, a year after 9/11. It's an extremely turbulent time politically, but especially so for someone like Shirin, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl who's tired of being stereotyped. Shirin is never surprised by how horrible people can be. She's tired of the rude stares, the degrading comments--even the physical violence--she endures as a result of her race, her religion, and the hijab she wears every day. So she's built up protective walls and refuses to let anyone close enough to hurt her. Instead, she drowns her frustrations in music and spends her afternoons break-dancing with her brother. But then she meets Ocean James. He's the first person in forever who really seems to want to get to know Shirin. It terrifies her--they seem to come from two irreconcilable worlds--and Shirin has had her guard up for so long that she's not sure she'll ever be able to let it down.

When Lei, seventeen, is stolen from her home to become one of nine Paper Girls, the Demon King's concubines, she proves to be more fire than paper.

Two entrepreneurial Korean-American teens butt heads-and fall in love-while running competing Korean beauty businesses at their high school.

High school senior Frank Li takes a risk to go after a girl his parents would never approve of, but his plans will leave him wondering if he ever really understood love--or himself--at all.

The death of her father leads a teenage girl in seventeenth-century Iran to go live with her mother as a servant in the home of her uncle, a wealthy rug designer in the court of the Shah, where she is able to develop her talent for rug design--a skill that becomes vital to her survival after her lack of a dowry forces her into a contract marriage, renewable every three months, with the son of a horse trader.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him. In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy's life and of how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety.

In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. What Junie doesn't know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three members of the family before Junie's birthday - even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.

(Also available as an eBook on Sora).

Two couples living in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban find their lives destroyed by the tyrannical government.

Envisioning a summer vacation in the humble Singapore home of a boy she hopes to marry, Chinese American Rachel Chu is unexpectedly introduced to a rich and scheming clan that strongly opposes their son's relationship with an American girl.

Follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.

With a magnificent narrative sweep and compassionate realism, Rohinton Mistry's internationally acclaimed bestseller captures all the sweetness and sorrow of India, its cruelty and corruption, its strength and dignity. The time is 1975, the place an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a state of emergency. And in its wake, four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the violence of their native village--are thrust together by events, forced to share a cramped apartment and an uncertain future. Through days of darkness and despair, but also hope and laughter, their lives become inextricably linked in unforeseen ways, as they move from distrust to friendship, and friendship to love.

A collection of intertwined stories built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical.

Chen Zhen, a student in the 1960s in Beijing, is sent to be a shepherd in Inner Mongolia where he learns about the Mongols' view of triangular balance between the earth, the wolves, and man, and attempts to raise a wolf pup, but the Han Chinese arrive, threatening the balance in the steppes with their promise of modernity.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety--in search of meaning, and of love. In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight. In a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. At the Jannat Guest House, two people who have known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they have just met. A braided narrative of astonishing force and originality, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once a love story and a provocation--a novel as inventive as it is emotionally engaging.

A bold and bittersweet story of secrets and sacrifice, love and betrayal, prejudice and passion, China Dolls reveals a rich portrait of female friendship, as three young women navigate the "Chop Suey Circuit"--America's extravagant all-Asian revues of the 1930s and '40s--and endure the attack on Pearl Harbor and the shadow of World War II"-- Provided by publisher.,"In 1938, Ruby, Helen and Grace, three girls from very different backgrounds, find themselves competing at the same audition for showgirl roles at San Francisco's exclusive "Oriental" nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family who have deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. At times their differences are pronounced, but the girls grow to depend on one another in order to fulfill their individual dreams. Then, everything changes in a heartbeat with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the government is sending innocent Japanese to internment camps under suspicion, and Ruby is one of them. But which of her friends betrayed her?

Finally joining their father in America, Ajay and Birju enjoy their new, extraordinary life until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother incapacitated and the other practically orphaned in this strange land.

Through the linked destinies of a family of characters, the novel takes its inspiration from historical events, including Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975, and the remarkable growth of the nail salon industry, dominated by Vietnamese expatriates all over the world. From the rubber plantations of Indochina to the massacre at My Lai, Kim Thúy extricates the layers of pain and trauma from stories we thought we knew, and reveals transcendent moments of grace behind the still images from the twenty-year conflict.

A Chinese man goes on a journey of self discovery in the distant regions of contemplating the disparaging effects of the cultural revolution.