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The Friends

Rosa Guy · 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
❤️

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistComing of AgeNew York City
❤️

Esperanza Rising

Pam Munoz Ryan · 262 pages

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistComing of AgeCultural Identity
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American Born Chinese

Gene Luen Yang · 240 pages

Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture. Presented in comic book format.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistComing of AgeCultural Identity
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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.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistComing of AgeCultural Identity
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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationComing of AgeNew York City
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Lucky Broken Girl

Ruth Behar · 243 pages

In 1960s New York, fifth-grader Ruthie, a Cuban-Jewish immigrant, must rely on books, art, her family, and friends in her multicultural neighborhood when an accident puts her in a body cast.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistNew York CityCultural Identity
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Sour Heart

Jenny Zhang · 310 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityComing of Age
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Wait for Me

An Na · 169 pages

As her senior year in high school approaches, Mina yearns to find her own path in life but working at the family business, taking care of her little sister, and dealing with her mother's impossible expectations are as stifling as the southern California heat, until she falls in love with a man who offers a way out.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityTeen Protagonist
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The Sun Is Also a Star

Nicola Yoon · 384 pages

Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story. Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityNew York City
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In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson

Bette Bao Lord · 169 pages

In 1947, a Chinese child comes to Brooklyn where she becomes Americanized at school, in her apartment building, and by her love for baseball.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityComing of Age
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityNew York City
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Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

Immigrant ProtagonistNew York CityComing of AgeImmigration
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Brown Girl, Brownstones

Paule Marshall · 310 pages

"Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, this is the story of a Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants. She is caught between the struggles of her hard-working, ambitious mother, who wnats to "buy house" and educate her daughters, and her father, who longs to return to the land in Barbados. Selina seeks to define her own identity and values as she struggles to surmount

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistNew York CityComing of Age
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Lovetorn

Kavita Daswani

Having just moved from India to Los Angeles for two years, sixteen-year-old Shalini struggles to fit in at school and to keep house for her clinically-depressed mother, but the real challenge comes when she begins falling in love with an American boy despite being engaged since the age of three. Includes glossary.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityTeen Protagonist
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The Interpreter

Suki Kim · 294 pages

"Suzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean-American interpreter for the New York City courts. During one court case she inadvertently makes a startling and ominous discovery about her family's history that will send her on a chilling quest. Five years earlier, her parents - hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children's gain - were brutally murdered in an apparent

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityCultural Identity
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith · 443 pages

The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchant

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationComing of AgeNew York City
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Threads and Flames

Esther M. Friesner

After recovering from typhus, thirteen-year-old Raisa leaves her Polish shtetl for America to join her older sister, and goes to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityTeen Protagonist
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North of Beautiful

Justina Chen

As he continued to stare, I wanted to point to my cheek and remind him, But you were the one who wanted this, remember? You're the one who asked-and I repeat-Why not fix your face? It's hard not to notice Terra Cooper. She's tall, blond, and has an enviable body. But with one turn of her cheek, all people notice is her unmistakably "flawed" face. Terra secretly plans to leave her stifling small

Immigrant ProtagonistComing of AgeCultural IdentityTeen Protagonist
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The Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker · 512 pages

In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityNew York City
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Fresh Off the Boat

Melissa de la Cruz · 243 pages

When her family emigrates from the Philippines to San Francisco, California, fourteen-year-old Vicenza Arambullo struggles to fit in at her exclusive, all-girl private school.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityTeen Protagonist
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Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903

Kathryn Lasky · 190 pages

New dreams and old traditions flourish and clash when a Jewish girl and her family emigrate from Russia to America.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityNew York City
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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 ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityCultural Identity
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Across the Mekong River

Elaine Russell · 243 pages

In a California courtroom, seventeen-year-old Nou Lee reels with what she is about to do. What she must do to survive. She reflects on the splintered path that led to this moment, beginning twelve years ago in 1978, when her Hmong family escaped from Laos after the Communist takeover. The story follows the Lees from a squalid refugee camp in Thailand to a new life in Minnesota and eventually Calif

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationComing of AgeCultural Identity
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Habibi

Naomi Shihab Nye · 265 pages

When fourteen-year-old Liyanne Abboud, her younger brother, and her parents move from St. Louis to a new home between Jerusalem and the Palestinian village where her father was born, they face many changes and must deal with the tensions between Jews and Palestinians. Fourteen-year-old Liyana Abboud loves to hear her father call her habibi--Arabic for "darling". But she's not prepared for her fami

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationTeen ProtagonistCultural Identity
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