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Start the conversation in your choice of over 70 world languages and dialects through courses crafted using conversational methodology. Every self-paced language course introduces the learner to cultural insights and grammatical nuances specific to their language of choice, delivered through native speaker dialogue, and created with each individual learner in mind.
1) See me
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 22
Language
English
Description
Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. At 28, he's focused only on walking a straight line - getting his teaching degree, working out at the gym religiously, and avoiding all the places and people that proved so destructive in his earlier life. The last thing he's looking for is a serious relationship. But when Maria Sanchez crosses paths with him on a rainswept night in North Carolina, his plans are upended in a way that will rattle...
3) The namesake
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 18
Language
English
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times)
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...
Author
Language
English
Description
"When U.S. troops occupy Germany, friends Jakob and Emmanuelle are saved from the terrible fate of so many in the camps. With the help of sponsors, they make their way to New York. In order not to be separated, they allow their friendship to blossom into love and marriage, and start a new life on the Lower East Side, working at grueling, poorly paid jobs. Decades later, through talent, faith, fortune, and relentless hard work, Jakob has achieved success...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
"Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken-with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity-is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There's Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through adulthood, and who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there's...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi, and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined...
Author
Publisher
Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone--from the city's first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples--could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"From former White House aide to President Obama and Harvard graduate, Alejandra Campoverdi, comes a riveting and unflinching memoir on navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina, offering a broad examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer. To be a First and Only in America is a delicate balancing act of surviving where you come from while acting like you belong where you're going. Alejandra Campoverdi has been...
Author
Publisher
Riverhead Books
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today.
14) I am golden
Author
Publisher
Feiwel and Friends
Pub. Date
2022.
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 3.3 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Description
This moving ode to the immigrant experience, as well as a manifesto of self-love for Chinese American children, is a jubilant celebration of accepting who you are.
15) Housegirl
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
A moving and unexpectedly funny exploration of friendship and family, shame and forgiveness, Michael Donkor's debut novel follows three adolescent girls grappling with a shared experience: the joys and sorrows of growing up. Belinda knows how to follow the rules. As a housegirl, she has learned the right way to polish water glasses, to wash and fold a hundred handkerchiefs, and to keep a tight lid on memories of the village she left behind when she...
Author
Publisher
William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"We Were Dreamers is the superhero origin story of Simu Liu, Marvel Cinematic Universe's first leading Asian superhero, who grew up torn between China and Canada, until he found the courage to dream like his parents before him. Witty, honest, inspiring and relatable, We Were Dreamers weaves together the narratives of two generations in a Chinese immigrant family who are inextricably tied to one another even as they are torn apart by deep cultural...
18) Tiger daughter
Author
Publisher
Delacorte Press
Pub. Date
[2023]
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 6
Language
English
Description
"Wen Zhou is a first-generation daughter of Chinese migrant parents. She has high expectations from her parents to succeed in school, especially her father, whose strict rules leave her feeling trapped. She dreams of creating a future for herself more satisfying than the one her parents expect her to lead. Then she befriends a boy named Henry who is also a first generation immigrant. He is the smartest boy at school despite struggling with his English...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"A stunning debut novel, from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Tope Folarin about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uneasy fit for Tunde Akinola's family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can't escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won't...
Author
Publisher
Scribner
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Omer Aziz was born to working-class Pakistani-Canadian parents in Toronto and was educated through scholarships at Queen's University, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the University of Cambridge, and Yale Law School. He worked for Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, and has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic. Through a powerful personal narrative, Omer Aziz delivers a memoir...
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