This list is a great way to start your Westmont Reads experience. WPL librarians have selected titles for all ages by authors from a wide range of communities, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Pick one out today and start your Westmont Reads journey into One Community, Many Voices.


There There: A Novel by Tommy Orange

“Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle’s memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather. Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions — intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path.”

Available formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya

“Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. It was 1994, and in 100 days more than 800,000 people would be murdered in Rwanda and millions more displaced. Clemantine and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, ran and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries searching for safety. They did not know whether their parents were alive. At age twelve, Clemantine and Claire were granted asylum in the United States. Raw, urgent, yet disarmingly beautiful, this book captures the true costs and aftershocks of war: what is forever lost, what can be repaired, the fragility and importance of memory. A riveting story of dislocation, survival.”

Available formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook


New Poets of Native Nations by Heid Erdrich (editor)

“A landmark anthology celebrating twenty-one native poets first published in the twenty-first century”

Available Formats: Book


Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin Curtice

“Native is about identity, soul-searching, and the never-ending journey of finding ourselves and finding God. As both a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation and a Christian, Kaitlin Curtice offers a unique perspective on these topics. In this book, she shows how reconnecting with her Potawatomi identity both informs and challenges her faith. Curtice draws on her personal journey, poetry, imagery, and stories of the Potawatomi people to address themes at the forefront of today’s discussions of faith and culture in a positive and constructive way. She encourages us to embrace our own origins and to share and listen to each other’s stories so we can build a more inclusive and diverse future. Each of our stories matters for the church to be truly whole. As Curtice shares what it means to experience her faith through the lens of her Indigenous heritage, she reveals that a vibrant spirituality has its origins in identity, belonging, and a sense of place.”

Available Formats: Book


Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman

“A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.”

Available Formats: Book (Graphic Novel)


Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

“At the intersection of “Americanah” and “The Help” comes a riveting debut novel about two marriages – one immigrant and working class, the other from the top 1% – both chasing their version of the American Dream. In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Their situation only improves when Jende’s son Neni is hired as household help. But in the course of their work, Jende and Neni begin to witness infidelities, skirmishes, and family secrets. Then, with the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, a tragedy changes all four lives forever, and the Jongas must decide whether to continue fighting to stay in a recession-ravaged America or give up and return home to Cameroon.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook


The Round House by Louise Erdrich

“When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

“Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father-the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime. Devastated by Joy’s flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy’s and Pearls’ separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China’s history threatens their very lives.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

“In the mid 1930’s two well-educated sisters from Shanghai go to Los Angeles to become brides of the “Gold Mountain men” when their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. When the get there they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months. When one of the sisters becomes pregnant they vow that no one will ever know.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

“Minli, an adventurous girl from a poor village, buys a magical goldfish, and then joins a dragon who cannot fly on a quest to find the Old Man of the Moon in hopes of bringing life to Fruitless Mountain and freshness to Jade River.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


The Ritual Bath by  Faye Kellerman

“Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.

The crime was called in by Rina Lazarus, and Decker is relieved to discover that she is a calm and intelligent witness. She is also the only one in the sheltered community willing to speak of this unspeakable violation. As Rina tries to steer Decker through the maze of religious laws, the two grow closer. But before they get to the bottom of this horrendous crime, revelations come to light that are so shocking, they threaten to come between the hard-nosed cop and the deeply religious woman with whom he has become irrevocably linked.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


You’re the Only One I’ve Told : The Stories Behind Abortion by Dr. Meera Shah

“For a long time, when people asked Dr. Meera Shah what she did, she would tell them she was a doctor and leave it at that. But over the last few years, Shah decided it was time to be direct. I’m an abortion provider, she will now say. And an interesting thing started to happen each time she met someone new. One by one, people would confide at barbecues, at jury duty, in the middle of the greeting card aisle at Target that in fact they’d had an abortion themselves. And the refrain was often the same: You’re the only one I’ve told. This book collects those stories as they’ve been told to Shah to humanize abortion and to combat myths that persist in the discourse that surrounds it. An intentionally wide range of ages, races, socioeconomic factors, and experiences shows that abortion always occurs in a unique context.”

Available Formats: Book


Won’t Lose This Dream : How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System by Andrew Gumbel

“Won’t Lose This Dream is the inspiring story of a public university that has blazed an extraordinary trail for lower-income and first-generation students in downtown Atlanta, the birthplace of the civil rights movement.”

Available Formats: Book


The Stonewall Generation : LGBT Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging by Jane Fleishman

“Sexuality researcher Jane Fleishman shares the stories of nine fearless elders in the LGBTQ community who came of age around the time of Stonewall. In candid interviews, they lay bare their struggles, their strengths, their activism, and their sexual liberation in the context of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s and today”

Available Formats: Book


Lion: A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierly

“Describes how the author was accidentally separated from his family and home in India as a child, how he survived as an orphan in Kolkata, his adoption by an Australian family, and his search for his biological family as an adult.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishamel Beah

“This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook


Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller

“A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history”

Available Formats: Book


Aftershocks: a Memoir by Nadia Owusu

“Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook


An Unlikely Journey by Julian Castro

“In the spirit of a young Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, comes a candid and compelling memoir about race and poverty in America. In many ways, there was no reason Julian Castro would have been expected to be a success. Born to unmarried parents in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of a struggling city, his prospects of escaping his circumstance seemed bleak. But he and his twin brother Joaquin had something going for them: their mother. A former political activist, she provided the launch pad for what would become an astonishing ascent. Julian and Joaquin would go on to attend Stanford and Harvard before entering politics at the ripe age of 26. Soon after, Joaquin become a state representative and Julian was elected mayor of San Antonio, a city he helped revitalize and transform into one of the country’s leading economies. His success in Texas propelled him onto the national stage, where he was the keynote speaker at the 2012 DNC–the same spot President Obama held three conventions prior–and then to Washington D.C. where he served as the Obama Administration’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. After being shortlisted as a potential running mate for Hillary Clinton, he is now seen by many as a future presidential candidate. Julian Castro’s story not only affirms the American dream, but also resonates with millions, who in an age of political cynicism and hardening hearts are searching for a new hero. No matter one’s politics, this book is the transcendent story of a resilient family and the unlikely journey of an emerging national icon.”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook


Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz

“Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up as a queer biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. From her own struggles with depression and drug abuse to her experiences of violence to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism”

Available Formats: Book, Audiobook, eBook, eAudiobook


I’ll Never Change My Name by Valentin Chmerkovsky

“”Valentin ‘Val’ Chmerkovskiy has captivated viewers with his striking performances on Dancing with the Stars since his first step, season after season. His raw talent, dashing looks, and genuine kindness have made him an instant, beloved star. Now, for the first time ever, viewers will have an all-access pass to Val’s life–and in [this book], Val bares his soul, illuminating the thoughtful person he is both on and off the stage. In this revealing memoir, Val opens up about his life and career so far–where he’s come from and where he hopes to go. He shows the reader some of the most notable moments from his childhood in Odessa, Ukraine, and his tight-knit family’s immigration to the United States–including his struggles learning English as a stranger desperate to fit into a different culture, how he worked to become a premiere ballroom dancer, and, of course, the collaborations and competitions with his brother and fellow DWTS sensation, Maksim ‘Maks’ Chmerkovskiy. After years of practice and discipline, Val, along with his older brother Maks, have reached the pinnacle of success, but it took a great deal of hard work and gratitude to get there. Sharing at times intimate and at times entertaining moments with early dance partners all the way up through celebrity dance partners such as Laurie Hernandez, Zendaya, Kelly Monaco, and Rumer Willis on Dancing with the Stars, Val expresses his enduring gratitude for the opportunities America has afforded him and his family, and for everything this country represents–offering hope not only to fans, but everyone with at dream.”

Available Formats: Book, eBook, eAudiobook


 

We love helping people find books, movies, and more.

Tell us about your preferences, and our librarians will create a list of titles selected specifically for you.