Posts tagged with: racism

The Castaways by Rob Vollmar

It is the height of the Depression, and thirteen-year-old Tucker Freeman’s father is gone for good. To survive, he and his family move in with the Widow, his father’s humorless and ultra-religious older sister. Convinced by the Widow that he isn’t pulling his weight on her farm, she hands him fifteen cents and tells him …read more…

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Update as of 26 October 2011: This book continues to be controversial. Only this past spring, I was asked to help fight a push to not just remove this book from the twelfth grade curriculum of a public high school, but to remove the book from the school library, as well. The irony is that …read more…

Angry Management by Chris Crutcher

In this engaging trilogy of novellas, Chris Crutcher has taken a handful of characters from his earlier works—Sarah Byrnes, Angus Bethune, John Simet, Matt Miller, and Montana West—and imagined them “living outside of their original times and in some cases outside of their original settings” as he describes in his introduction (n. pag.). If you’ve …read more…

Brothers by Yin

In this sequel to Coolies, Shek and Wong’s younger brother Ming arrives in San Francisco from China to stay with his brothers and work in their store. Although he is admonished not to leave Chinatown, he eventually does, making his way to the local school. He meets the irrepressible Patrick, an Irish immigrant his own …read more…

Coolies by Yin

As this book opens in modern times, a young unnamed boy hears the story of his ancestors, Shek and Wong, as they came to the United States from China and worked on the railroads in California, experiencing long hours, hard work, and over racism, while at the same time managing to hold on to their …read more…