I’m graduating this year, so this month, I wanted to do something special for my last book nook! Here are my all-time favorite book recommendations.
We’ll start with nonfiction. My favorite nonfiction book is called “She, He, They, Me” by Robyn Ryle. The book is written in a choose-your-own-adventure style, and it reads like a story, but it’s very educational and eye-opening. You essentially get to choose-your-own gender adventure— you’ll learn not just the differences between being a boy and being a girl, but how gender has been seen across time periods, look between the gender binary, and think about how intersectionality can affect the LGBTQ+ community. The best part is you don’t even have to read it once; you can read it several times and get a different story each time.
The next nonfiction book to make the list is “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. Similarly to “She, He, They, Me” the book is told in a storytelling style. It tells the story of HenriettaLacks, a woman whose cells were stolen for the purposes of medicine without her permission. Her cells are still alive today, but her story is not well-known. Skloot attempts to share her life with the world— not just how her cells were harvested, but her childhood, her children, and her grandchildren as well.
The first fiction book to make the list is called “When Women Were Dragons” by Kelly Barnhill. In a fantasy world where women can become dragons, young woman Alex Green is faced with hundreds of questions about what the truth is behind these dragons. But the idea of them is soterrifying, so feminine, that it’s taboo to mention it. The book features a queer protagonist, found family, and speaking out against oppression and discrimination, and is one of my favorite reads.
The next books to make the fiction list are “The War That Saved My Life” and “The War I Finally Won” by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. I read these books in fifth grade, and it has remained one of my favorites since then. Ada and Jamie live in London in 1939, when rumors
of a war run rampant around the city. Ada was born with a clubfoot, which is a kind of disability where a foot is born turned inward and downward. Her mother hides her in the apartment until Jamie is given the chance to leave as an evacuee to escape the incoming war. Ada sneaks out with him, and the two end up in the care of a woman named Susan. The last thing Susan wants is children to take care of, but she reluctantly takes them in, and they eventually grow close enough to become a family.
The final books to make the list are also a series: the Arc of a Scythe series by Neal Shusterman. It is a trilogy that currently has one companion book with another unconfirmed one in the works. Scythe features a utopia where the world is governed by an AI that has solved almost every problem in the world, and has decided there are only two acts it cannot control: the creation of life, and its taking. This forms the scythedom, where scythes are charged with keeping the world’s population in order. However, the scythedom is changing in large ways— potentially dangerous ways, for both scythesthemselves and the rest of humanity.
