This year, our theme is “Walk A Mile In My Shoes.” The idea that you can’t understand someone (and shouldn’t judge them) until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes is a pretty common sentiment. And research has shown that reading fiction is one way to really get such a walk going. So, that’s what we are going to do this year: use fiction (and some nonfiction when we just can’t resist) to take walks in someone’s shoes. We hope you lace up those sneakers and join our journey. For June, our theme is culture bumps, particularly regarding immigration and emigration.
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter touches on many aspects of contemporary Marshallese life, including the experience of forced migration to the United States. She incorporates traditional Marshallese legends with her own experiences in her rich poems.
Harmony Verna’s historical novel Beneath the Apple Leaves reaches back in time to tell an earlier immigration story–this time, chronicling the experience of German immigrants who move to rural Pennsylvania right in time for WWI to erupt.
And of course for as much as dialogue about immigration in this country focuses on people moving to the US, there’s also emigration to another country, which is so poignantly captured in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, the chronicle of a family’s ill-fated missions trip to the Congo in the 1960s.
And there’s also the stories of people whose migration history never has anything to do with the US, such as in Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea. In this novel, a young couple who marries for survival rather than love flee Spain in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and find themselves in exile in South America.
We also have a lot of children’s books that deal with culture bumps thoughtfully.
Thanhhà Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again is a really lovely novel in verse about the author’s experiences as a child refugee from Vietnam that we read several years ago in our tween book club.
Shirley Marr’s A Glasshouse of Stars is also based on the author’s personal experiences of moving to Australia from China as a child. This coming-of-age novel for tweens with a magical realism twist chronicles the experiences of Meixing as she moves to the New House in the New Land and seeks solace in the greenhouse in the backyard.
For younger kids, we have Anne Sibley O’Brien’s I’m New Here, which depicts the experiences of three immigrant kids from Guatemala, South Korea, and Somalia as they adjust to school in America, as well as Irena Kobald’s My Two Blankets about a child moving from Somalia to Australia.
If you prefer nonfiction, you might enjoy Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. Hinojosa draws on both her childhood experiences as a Mexican immigrant in Chicago and her long reporting career for the book.
Jason DeParle’s A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century is a nonfiction family saga that profiles the experiences of one Filipino family as they find work across the globe and then face their own struggles once they finally reunite in Texas.
House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family by Hadley Freeman is also a family saga, though its presentation of culture bumps is dual nature since it covers the author’s grandmother’s experiences first assimilating into French society as a young Polish Jewish immigrant and then relocating to America on the eve of WWII as her family stays behind in France.
What’s your favorite book about culture bumps? What have you read lately that helped you walk in someone else’s shoes? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on any of these items or to place them on hold.
Berryville Book Buzz 