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The Land of Forgotten Girls

Erin Entrada Kelly · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages

Absent ParentImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle GradeContemporary Fiction
❤️

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersContemporary FictionImmigration
❤️

Heat

Mike Lupica · 220 pages

**Michael Arroyo has a pitching arm that throws serious heat. But his firepower is nothing compared to the heat Michael faces in his day-to-day life. Newly orphaned after his father led the family's escape from Cuba, Michael's only family is his seventeen-yearold brother Carlos. If Social Services hears of their situation, they will be separated in the foster-care system—or worse, sent back to Cub

Absent ParentImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle GradeImmigration
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Let Me Explain You

Annie Liontas

Sending a scathing email to his family members after becoming convinced he will die within days, a proud Greek immigrant garners laughter and scorn from his recipients, who are dismayed when he promptly disappears.

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersImmigrationContemporary Fiction
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Dream On, Amber

Emma Shevah · 267 pages

Amber's Japanese father left when she was little, and her sister Bella was just a baby, so now she fills in the frustrating gap in her life with imagined conversations, and writes letters to Bella that seem to come from their father.

Absent ParentSistersMiddle GradeContemporary Fiction
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Apple and Rain

Sarah Crossan · 344 pages

Absent ParentSistersMiddle GradeContemporary Fiction
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Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · 670 pages

Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices. When first published, the novel was on The

Immigrant ProtagonistAbsent ParentImmigrationContemporary Fiction
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No Small Thing

Natale Ghent · 245 pages

Life hasn't been easy for Nathaniel and his two sisters, Queenie and Cid, ever since their father left them. Now living with their single mother, they all want something to make them the happy family they used to be. Then one day, Nathaniel, Cid and Queenie see an ad for a free horse in the newspaper. They can hardly believe it. However, they're hesitant to say anything to their mother because the

Absent ParentMiddle GradeSistersContemporary Fiction
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Making Pretty

Corey Ann Haydu · 360 pages

Montana and her sister, Arizona, are named after the mountainous states their mother left them for. But Montana is a New York City girl through and through, and as the city heats up, she's stepping into the most intense summer of her life. With Arizona wrapped up in her college world and their father distracted by yet another divorce, Montana's been immersing herself in an intoxicating new friends

Absent ParentSistersContemporary FictionToxic Family Dynamics
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Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

Faiza Guene · 179 pages

Struggling with an overworked mother, an absent father, and the challenges of life within the infamous Paradise projects of suburban Paris, fifteen-year-old French Muslim Doria endures a parade of social workers, experiences a first kiss, and assumes a philosophical outlook regarding her circumstances.

Absent ParentImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationContemporary Fiction
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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersContemporary FictionToxic Family Dynamics
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The Bamboo Stalk

Saud Alsanousi, s`wd lsn`wsy · 377 pages

Josephine escapes poverty by coming to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a maid, where she meets Rashid, an idealistic only son with literary aspirations. Josephine, with all the wide-eyed naivety of youth, believes she has found true love. But when she becomes pregnant, and with the rumble of war growing ever louder, Rashid bows to family and social pressure, and sends her back home with her

Immigrant ProtagonistAbsent ParentContemporary FictionImmigration
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You Bring the Distant Near

Mitali Perkins · 303 pages

From 1965 through the present, an Indian American family adjusts to life in New York City, alternately fending off and welcoming challenges to their own traditions.

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersContemporary FictionImmigration
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Drown

Junot Diaz · 176 pages

Originally published in 1997, Drown instantly garnered terrific acclaim. Moving from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey, these heartbreaking, completely original stories established Diaz as one of contemporary fictions most exhilarating new voices.

Immigrant ProtagonistAbsent ParentContemporary FictionImmigration
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Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersImmigrationToxic Family Dynamics
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A Faraway Island

Annika Thor · 247 pages

In 1939 Sweden, two Jewish sisters wait for their parents to join them in fleeing the Nazis in Austria, but while eight-year-old Nellie settles in quickly, twelve-year-old Stephie feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who is as cold and unforgiving as the island on which they live.

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersMiddle Grade
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Sound of One Hand Clapping

Richard Flanagan · 425 pages

In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present - changing forever his livin

Immigrant ProtagonistAbsent ParentImmigrationToxic Family Dynamics
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One Crazy Summer

Rita Williams-Garcia · 232 pages

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the pas

Absent ParentSistersMiddle Grade
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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez · 304 pages

It\'s a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it\'s the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi\'s old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.

Immigrant ProtagonistSistersContemporary FictionImmigration
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Gaby, Lost and Found

Angela Cervantes · 220 pages

Gaby enjoys working at the local animal shelter and wants to adopt a cat but is unsure of her own living situation when her mother is deported back to Honduras. When Gaby's mother is deported, Gaby is stuck living with her inattentive dad. Her world brightens when her class begins a project at an animal shelter, but worrying about her mom and taunts from classmates makes her long for a real famil

Absent ParentMiddle GradeContemporary FictionImmigration
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler · 336 pages

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister."

Absent ParentSistersToxic Family DynamicsContemporary Fiction
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Wishing Day

Lauren Myracle · 332 pages

On the third night of the third month after a girl s thirteenth birthday, every girl in the town of Willow Hill makes three wishes. The first wish is an impossible wish. The second is a wish she can make come true herself. And the third is the deepest wish of her secret heart. So Natasha goes to the willow tree at the top of the hill on her Wishing Day, and she makes three wishes. What unfolds is

Absent ParentSistersMiddle Grade
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Drita, My Homegirl

Jenny Lombard · 139 pages

A poignant story about the difficulties of leavingeverything behind and the friendships that help you getthrough it Fleeing war-torn Kosovo, ten-year-old Drita and herfamily move to America with the dream of living atypical American life. But with this hope comes thestruggle to adapt and fit in. How can Drita find herplace at school and in her new neighborhood whenshe doesn't speak any English? Me

Immigrant ProtagonistMiddle GradeContemporary FictionImmigration
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Identical

Ellen Hopkins · 624 pages

Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place? Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a

Absent ParentSistersContemporary FictionToxic Family Dynamics

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