Nisrin's Hijab

Written by: Priya Huq

First line: Alright, big hand for Nicole!

Why you should read this book: Following a sudden, gruesome, and apparently racially motivated act of violence, Bangladeshi-American teen Nisrin chooses to wear a headscarf, although her family is secular and their reactions to her decision range from confusion to anger. In school, her hijab elicits aggression from teachers and students, made even more complicated by the fact that she knows very little about Islam (the narrative makes it seem like her choice is motivated by PTSD rather than religious sentiment, which is then further complicated by her family's experience of violence prior to Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971). By holding firm to ideas that she always feels but can't always express, Nisrim is able to find a new path forward while also repairing the relationships that suffered after her original ordeal. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: I wonder how a reader who wore a hijab for religious reasons would feel about this story, in which the hijab symbolizes many things, but not a submission to God.

Buy Piece by Piece the Story of Nisrin's Hijab here

Required Reading for the Disenfranchised Freshman

Written by: Kristen R. Lee

First line: The pizza drivers don't deliver here after seven.

Why you should read this book: Savannah Howard just wanted to attend the historically Black university ten miles away from the Memphis housing project where she grew up, but after years of sacrificing her social life for grades she finds herself the recipient of a full scholarship at an ivy league school, and her mother won't hear of her going anywhere else. From the moment she sets foot on the Wooddale campus, Savannah finds herself the target of multiple microaggressions, followed almost immediately by multiple incidents of overt racism, all of which is swept under the rug by an administration intent on protecting a white legacy student with his name on a brand new building. How much is Savannah willing to rock the boat in the pursuit of justice, what metric can she use to discern friend from foe, and will she ever feel comfortable on a campus where her voice and her truth seem so unwanted?

Why you shouldn't read this book: The racism starts out unpleasantly and escalates in alarming and increasingly terrifying ways.

Buy Required Reading for the Disenfranchised Freshman here

The Last Halloween 1: Children

Written by: Abby Howard

First line: Did he die?

Why you should read this book: This is another graphic novel that I originally read in webcomic form, and if you like weird-weird-weird and creepy comics, this is the story for you. The boundary between the worlds of humans and monsters has been breached, and 10-year-old Mona finds herself fighting for her life in the company of the undead just to survive the night and potentially put an end to the terror, but mostly just to not die. It's wacky, and contains graphic depictions of many humans, monsters, and undead creatures dying or being horribly maimed, and it's pretty much a very well illustrated and organized nightmare. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're not into dead, dying, and maimed humans, monsters, and undead.

Buy The Last Halloween 1: Children from Amazon here

Being a Human: Adventure in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

Written by: Charles Foster

First line: I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. 

Why you should read this book: A legal scholar and veterinary surgeon who teaches at Oxford and has a home and a family and all sorts of modern-day comforts intentionally shucks them all off in pursuit of an upper paleolithic consciousness, which he attempts to achieve by living in such a way as to summon the mindset of the earliest "behaviorally modern" humans. While many readers will find his methods insane, and his conclusions questionable (Foster uses the modern nonfiction literary technique of imagining in great detail things that he can't possibly know at all and then presenting his daydreams as fact, and sometimes of telling you later on that he made up part of the story because it would have been interesting if it had happened that way), this book does have the power to draw you in to its provocative thesis about our species' place in the order of the universe and our orientation to the natural world and all the things that are wrong with the civilization we've created in the last fifteen thousand years. It's not at all the book I thought it was going to be, but it's a pretty gripping book about a guy who feels out of sync with the world trying to synchronize himself with the planet and waking up certain parts of his mind while inadvertently removing himself even further from the world he started from.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You would consider a man voluntarily starving himself into hallucinations for eight days while lying outside in the snow and watching his young adolescent son eat road kill even though his friend's house is just a short walk away some form of child abuse.

Buy Being a Human from Amazon

Sheila Ray the Brave

Written by: Kevin Henkes

First line: Sheila Rae wasn't afraid of anything. 

Why you should read this book: Sheila Rae demonstrates her uncommon bravery in the face of common childhood terrors such as thunder and lightning and scary dogs, and even imagines scarier things when confronted with common objects. However, her commitment to proving her utter lack of fear leads to hubris and hamartia as she sets out to prove herself and ends up discovering the true meaning of fear. Fortunately, her little sister Louise has the solution, and the path out of fear. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's a cute book but apparently if you are a humorless puritan with zero imagination, you might find Sheila Rae's imagination unpalatable (always read the one-star Amazon reviews to locate the dregs of humanity). 

Buy Sheila Rae the Brave from Amazon.