Sometimes you don’t need to be enticed with romance, fantasy, or current events. Sometimes you just need a reason to feel and let tears flow. For when you feel that you need an excuse, or need to blame the book for your tears, check out these titles:
To start us off, try out The Leaving Room by Amber McBride. Gospel is a Keeper of the Leaving Room, where she helps children that don’t want to, and who often aren’t ready, to pass on into the afterlife and accept their fate. Keepers aren’t supposed to interact with one another’s domain, but Melodee goes into Gospel’s Leaving Room, and both of their souls start to intertwine and romance begins to bloom.
In Estela, Undrowning by René Peña-Govea, Estela enters a Latine poetry contest and ends up getting second place to a non-Latine student. Her dilemma gets attention across San Francisco and a debate on merit and diversity heats up across the city. At the same time, Estela is dealing with teachers at her school that don’t believe that she deserves to be there, and her family is on the edge of being evicted.
Few Blue Skies by Carolina Ixta starts with Paloma’s recent breakup turned into a fight over corporate control over her town. Paloma rallies her community against the new warehouse, Selva, a massive conglomerate corporation that is set to worsen pollution and their hometown. All the while, her town’s mayor is working towards Selva’s plans–against the community’s needs and wants.
In My Friends, Federick Backman packs a heart wrenching story of friendship. When Louisa is gifted a painting, the story of its creation fascinates her. It’s a story of four struggling friends that made each other’s lives worth living. Through their bond and their stories, they get through fighting, needing pills to get by, abandonment, and loss of a father back in their home lives. As Louisa pieces together their stories through the painting, she learns about friendship, art, and life.
For Lamb by Lesa Cline-Ransome brings us into Lamb’s Black family life in 1930s Jackson, Mississippi. Lamb has a brother who got a full ride scholarship, but is very impulsive, and Lamb’s mom is hiding her romantic partnership with her best friend, Myrtle. While Lamb is connecting with her estranged father, she meets and befriends a white girl named Marny, which puts Lamb’s family under the town’s eye and the realities of living as a Black family are put in the limelight.
In the star-crossed romance Don’t Let Me Go by Kevin Christopher Snipes, Riley Iverson can’t believe that he’s found himself crushing on the totally straight, sporty Jackson Haines. Riley can’t deny that he feels a connection to Jackson, one that brings both boys vivid dreams of them being in love in a past life, lives that always end in tragedy. Riley and Jackson find themselves in an impossible situation, questioning if they should stay apart and keep on living, or experience a once in a lifetime love, but with death’s hands grabbing them soon.
~posted by Alicia G.
