We have deeply enjoyed hosting the Tiger’s Choice, the PaperTigers’ online bookgroup, over the past year–it introduced us to a number of interesting books, a group of authors whom we hadn’t read before, and a collection of new friends from around the globe who joined in our discussions.

Nancy Farmer, Uma Krishnaswami, Ken Mochizuki, Minfong Ho, Jane Vejjajiva, Julia Alvarez, John Boyne,  Katia Novet Saint-Lot are all authors whom we plan to return to again and again for reading that expands our cultural horizons. As their body of work increases, the Tiger’s Bookshelf will be there–to read, to praise, to cheer them on.

We will however be doing this in another form rather than through the Tiger’s Choice. As exciting and rewarding as it has been to explore books through this avenue, we have new plans for the Tiger’s Bookshelf that do not include our bookgroup. We thank all of you who have read this portion of our blog, and who have joined in the discussions, and hope that you will continue to be part of the ongoing conversation that will take place on the PaperTigers Blog, and through the Tiger’s Bookshelf!

Young Milly is the heroine in Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles, which was featured as our Tiger’s Choice last month. Born Milagros, and adopted by an American couple from an unnamed country in Latin America, Milly is in many ways a typical high school girl grappling with issues of identity. As Janet points out in her review of the book, “In her journey to learn how to be Milagros as well as Milly, this extraordinary young woman learns that family is an expandable concept.”

Whereas Milly’s tale isn’t “about adoption,” Julia Alvarez sensitively weaves in the theme around the book’s other topics—which makes it a very timely read for National Adoption Awareness Month, when we celebrate adoption as one of the special ways in which families are formed.

Adoption added complexity and depth to Milly’s journey of self-discovery, as it did to Joseph Calderaro’s personal quest in Rose Kent’s Kimchi & Calamari, about a Korean teen who was adopted as a child by Italian-American parents. Whereas Finding Miracles and Kimchi & Calamari don’t deal exclusively with issues of adoption, by portraying well-rounded, well-adjusted adopted teens they emphasize the true, positive nature of adoption and help dispel the stereotypes that abound in literature and the media. For these and many others reasons, I highly recommend them.

Click here for ideas on how to celebrate and advocate for children who have yet to find a loving family to be a part of, and check out Marjorie’s The Ties of Love post for more book ideas and resources on the theme. You don’t need be a member of the adoption community to appreciate and enjoy this celebration!

Within the opening chapters of Finding Miracles, readers soon realize that within a conventional high school setting, a young girl who does her best to appear conventional is under tremendous pressure to maintain that appearance. Milly is pretty, smart, popular, and plagued by a skin allergy that breaks out when “her real self” threatens to emerge.

At first this book seems as though it will be a typical high school “girl meets boy” story, but Julia Alvarez is far too skillful a novelist to stick to this well-worn territory. Swiftly the reader is drawn into Milly’s expanding world, as she reveals her adoption to her friends, begins to explore her origins through her friendship with Pablo and his parents, and learns that her most distinctive feature, her beautiful eyes, are inherited from the women of Los Luceros, a village in her home country. (more…)

Although the Tiger’s Choice, the PaperTigers’ online reading group, selects books that are written for children but can be enjoyed by adults as well, National Reading Group Month has brought to mind those books written for adults that younger readers might adopt as their own favorites, and that could launch impassioned discussions between parents and children, teachers and students, or older and younger siblings.

The books on this week’s list are books recommended for teenagers, with content that may be beyond the emotional grasp of pre-adolescents. All of them are available in paperback and in libraries.

1) Ricochet River by Robin Cody (Stuck in a small Oregon town, two teenagers find their world becomes larger and more complex when they become friends with Jesse, a Native American high school sports star.)

2) The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle (Alice is twelve, growing up on a modern-day Wyoming ranch with a mother who rarely leaves her bed, a father who is haunted by the memory of Alice’s rebellious and gifted older sister who ran off with a rodeo rider, and an overly active imagination.)

3) Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod by Gary Paulsen (The author of Hatchet tells the true story of how he raced a team of huskies across more than 1000 miles of Arctic Alaska in what Alaskans call The Last Great Race.)

4) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (This autobiography of a young girl growing up in revolutionary Iran and told in the form of a graphic novel is rich, original, and unforgettable.)

5) From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe (An amazing odyssey of a boy from the jungles of Burma who became a political exile and a Cambridge scholar, this Kiriyama Prize winner is a novelistic account of a life filled with adventures and extraordinary accomplishments.)

6) In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (The Mirabal sisters were beautiful, gifted, and valiant women who were murdered by the Dominican Republic government that they were committed to overthrow. Their true story is given gripping and moving life by their compatriot, Julia Alvarez.)

As the weather becomes colder and the days grow shorter, find your favorite teenager, choose a book, and plunge into the grand adventure of reading and sharing!

Finding Miracles

Milly Kaufman is the typical American high school girl, pretty, popular, part of a happy family in a small town. So why, when asked to write two truthful details about herself, does she say, “I have this allergy where my hands get red and itchy when my real self’s trying to tell me something,”  “My parents have a box in their bedroom we’ve only opened once. I think of it as The Box,” and why does the appearance of Pablo, a new student from Latin America make her feel so uncomfortable? What is Milly’s secret–the one she has divulged only to her best friend?

Julia Alvarez, long acclaimed as an outstanding novelist for adult readers, turns her focus upon a young adult audience in Finding Miracles with the same skill that has made both In the Time of the Butterflies and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents modern classics. While exploring Milly’s odyssey from the security of the family and community that she knows and loves to the unknown territory of a whole new world, Julia Alvarez creates a character and a novel that extends beyond age categories into the realm of fiction unlimited, while sensitively examining issues of identity and culture.

Please join us this month as we read and discuss Finding Miracles.

During “Banned Books Week” in the US (Sep 28-Oct 4) people across the country celebrate their freedom to read. They display banned books and publicize the absurdity of allowing some to dictate what others are or aren’t allowed to read. Once you ban one book, banning season is open.

Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is an example of a book that was taken off the shelves for having “inappropriate language and sexual scenes. About a year ago it was banned from Johnston County’s libraries, in North Carolina, as a result of a formal complaint filed by the parents of a 15-year-old high school student. In García Girls, a semi-autobiographical novel for young adults, four sisters from a Dominican family recently arrived in New York face many challenges in adapting to American culture. The book is also the story of a family in search of freedom: they left their native Dominican Republic to escape a dictatorship.

The García Girls’ coming-of-age story was chosen by librarians as one of “21 classics for the 21st century.” It was also one of the four titles selected for “A Latino National Conversation,” a national project sponsored by the Great Books Foundation.

Alvarez, who received a Latina Leader Award in Literature in 2007 from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, remarked on the banning of her book: “This isn’t just an issue of my particular novel’s merit, but a bigger one about the curtailment of civil liberties.” Through her stories Julia Alvarez has quite masterfully created worlds that we all—but for a fearful few—cherish. In an essay titled “I, too, Sing América,” published before the ban on her book, she writes, “It was through the wide open doors of its literature that I truly entered this country, and that I began to dream that maybe I, too, could create worlds where no one would be barred.”

Check out The Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the National Coalition Against Censorship which offers support, education, and advocacy to people facing book challenges or bans, and engages local activists in promoting the freedom to read. We must keep the doors of literature wide open, so that our children can enter whichever one is right for them.