AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Perfect Gentleman: A Muslim Boy Meets the West

Imran Ahmad · 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
❤️

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Marjane Satrapi · 187 pages

187 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmGN500L Lexile

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyComing of AgeReligious Identity
❤️

How to Make White People Laugh

Negin Farsad · 244 pages

"Negin Farsad is an Iranian-American-Muslim female stand-up comedian who believes she can change the world, one joke at a time. In HOW TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE LAUGH, Farsad shares her personal experiences growing up as the "Other" in an American culture that has no time for nuance. Writing bluntly and hilariously about the elements of race we are often too politically correct to discuss, Farsad takes

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyReligious Identity
❤️

Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh · 144 pages

"At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States began their invasion in Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American so

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
❤️

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

Cultural IdentityComing of AgeAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
❤️

The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood

Richard Blanco · 260 pages

A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities. Richard Blanco’s childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents’ nostalgic w

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
❤️

Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life

Melody Moezzi · 288 pages

"With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity. Melody Moezzi was born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland. When at eighteen, she began battling a severe physical illness, her community stepp

AutobiographyCultural IdentityMemoir & BiographyReligious Identity
❤️

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · 384 pages

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish im

AutobiographyReligious IdentityComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
❤️

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages

"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyReligious IdentityMemoir & Biography
🙂

Love in a Headscarf

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed · 267 pages

'At the age of thirteen, I knew that I was destined to marry John Travolta. One day he would arrive on my North London doorstep, fall madly in love with me and ask me to marry him. Then he would convert to Islam and become a devoted Muslim.' Shelina is keeping a very surprising secret under her headscarf - she wants to fall in love and find her faith. Torn between the Buxom Aunties, romantic comed

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyReligious Identity
🙂

Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

Adeline Yen Mah · 224 pages

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother

AutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & BiographyCultural Identity
🙂

The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

G. Willow Wilson · 304 pages

Documents the author's conversion from all-American atheist to Islam, a journey marked by her decision to relocate to Cairo, romance with a passionate young Egyptian, and her efforts to balance the virtues of both cultures.

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyReligious Identity
🙂

West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

Tamim Ansary, Mir Tamim Ansary · 292 pages

"The day after Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an anguished e-mail to twenty friends, discussing the attack from his perspective as an Afghan American. That message, spreading via the Internet, reached and touched millions of people around the world." "Now Ansary gives us West of Kabul, East of New York, an account of a life lived in two very

AutobiographyCultural IdentityMemoir & BiographyReligious Identity
🙂

Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad

Firoozeh Dumas · 240 pages

In the bestselling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in Laughing Without an Accent, sharing stories both tender and humorous on being a citizen of the world, on her well-meaning family, and on amusing cultural conundrums, all told with insights into the universality of the

AutobiographyCultural IdentityMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
🙂

Reaching Out

Francisco Jimenez · 196 pages

Leaving his home in a migrant community, Francisco sets off for college, carrying memories of years of poverty and prejudice.

AutobiographyCultural IdentityComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
🙂

Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

Ozge Samanci · 190 pages

In her unpredictable and funny graphic memoir, Ozge recounts her story using inventive collages, weaving together images of the sea, politics, science, and friendship.

AutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & BiographyCultural Identity
🙂

Do They Hear You When You Cry?

Fauziya Kassindja, Layli Miller Bashir, Fauziya Kasinga · 518 pages

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyCultural IdentityReligious Identity
🙂

Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx

Sonia Manzano · 267 pages

Set in the 1950s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. Emmy award-winning actress and writer Sonia Manzano plunges us into the daily lives of a Latino family that is loving--and troubled. This is Sonia's own story rendered with an unforgettable narrative power. When readers meet young Sonia, she is a child living amidst the squalor of a boisterous home that is filled with noisy r

AutobiographyCultural IdentityComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
🙂

Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

Elva Trevino Hart · 236 pages

Autobiography. Latino/a Studies. BAREFOOT HEART is a vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. Elva Trevino Hart was born in south Texas to Mexican immigrants and spent her childhood moving back and forth between Texas and Minnesota, eventually leaving that world to earn a master's degree in computer science/engineering. This is a

AutobiographyCultural IdentityComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
🙂

The Dark Child

Camara Laye · 188 pages

"The Dark Child is a ... memoir of Camara Laye's youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea, a place steeped in mystery. Laye marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood. ... More than the autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a mod

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
🙂
AutobiographyComing of AgeCultural IdentityMemoir & Biography
🙂

Colored People

Henry Louis Gates Jr. · 216 pages

AutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & BiographyCultural Identity
🙂

Down These Mean Streets

Piri Thomas · 317 pages

The story of a Puerto Rican boy, oldest of seven children, who was born and brought up in Spanish Harlem.

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyComing of AgeMemoir & Biography
🙂

Ordinary Light

Tracy K. Smith · 349 pages

"A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"-- "From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly

Coming of AgeAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyReligious Identity
🙂

On the Outside Looking Indian: How My Second Childhood Changed My Life

Rupinder Gill · 264 pages

There is a phenomenon in Amish culture called Rumspringa, where Amish adolescents are permitted to break free from the traditional lifestyle to indulge in taboo activities. At the end they decide if they will return to join the church. In that spirit, 30-year-old Rupinder Gill decided to explore a life she never knew growing up in a traditional Indian household, and explore a more 'tradition' Nort

Cultural IdentityAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗