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Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

BildungsromanCultural IdentityReligious IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin · 226 pages

In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power

BildungsromanReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenCultural Identity
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · 228 pages

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, feeling different from the other boys. His childhood and adolescence are shaped by bullying, his father's weaknesses and the growing realization that in order to make his way in the world he must reject a conventional life and boecome an artist. Penguin Popular Classics are the perfect introduction to the world-famous Penguin Classics series — which encompass

BildungsromanReligious IdentityLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 130 pages

Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.

BildungsromanReligious IdentityAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

BildungsromanChild NarratorCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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In the Castle of My Skin

George Lamming · 313 pages

George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, through the eyes of a young boy, Lamming portrays the social, racial, political and urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence

BildungsromanChild NarratorCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

Magical RealismCultural IdentityReligious IdentityAtmospheric
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This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 256 pages

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the

BildungsromanLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Black Swan Green

David Mitchell · 344 pages

A novel. From hardcover: "Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen l

BildungsromanChild NarratorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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We the Animals

Justin Torres · 144 pages

"An exquisite, blistering debut novel. Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmake

BildungsromanChild NarratorCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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Dreams of My Russian Summers

Andrei Makine · 241 pages

A Frenchwoman's account of Russia before and after the 1917 revolution. She is Charlotte who came as a nurse in World War I and married a Russian lawyer. The story is told by her grandson who listened to her tales, fascinated by her power of observation.

BildungsromanCultural IdentityLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages

Child NarratorCultural IdentityReligious IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

Magical RealismCultural IdentityReligious IdentityLyrical Prose
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Villette

Charlotte Bronte

BildungsromanReligious IdentityAtmosphericCultural Identity
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Magical RealismCultural IdentityReligious IdentityLyrical Prose
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Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 307 pages

“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded fro

BildungsromanReligious IdentityLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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Anita and Me

Meera Syal · 336 pages

BildungsromanChild NarratorCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Land of Decoration

Grace McCleen · 305 pages

Judith and her father don't have much but Judith sees the world with the clear Eyes of Faith, and where others might see rubbish, Judith sees possibility. Bullied at school, she finds solace in making a model of the Promised Land - a world of wonder that Judith calls The Land of Decoration. Perhaps, she thinks, if she makes snow indoors there will be no school on Monday. Sure enough, when Judith o

Child NarratorMagical RealismReligious IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

Magical RealismCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 544 pages

A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare t

BildungsromanCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Sag Harbor

Colson Whitehead · 288 pages

The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in AmericaThe year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his

BildungsromanCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Magical RealismChild NarratorCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

Cultural IdentityReligious IdentityAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Magical RealismCultural IdentityAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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