Refugee/Immigrant Memoir
Here are some suggestions for your 2024 Book Bingo NW category: Refugee/Immigrant Memoir. Book Bingo is our annual adult summer reading program presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures. Annotations with attribution. GN=Graphic Novel
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Replay
GN. How do you hold a family together in the face of generational trauma and rapidly changing technology? [Mechner] traces his family's history of living through WWI and becoming refugees fleeing the Nazi regime in WWII and how this history lives on in his own struggles. (Booklist)
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
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The Dragons, the Giant, the Women
Spanning her years adjusting to life in Texas as a black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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From Here
In her coming-of-age memoir, refugee advocate Luma Mufleh writes of her tumultuous journey to reconcile her identity as a gay Muslim woman and a proud Arab-turned-American refugee. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Slow Noodles
Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone…everything but the memories of her mother's kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Owner of A Lonely Heart
Owner of a Lonely Heart is "a portrait of things left unsaid" (The New York Times), a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth's relationship with her mother. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Asylum
Asylum is Edafe's eye-opening, thought-provoking memoir and manifesto, which documents his experiences growing up gay in Nigeria, fleeing to America, navigating the immigration system, and making a life for himself as a Black, gay immigrant. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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My Boy Will Die of Sorrow
Olivares, a human rights lawyer and immigration policy expert for the Texas Civil Rights Project… alternates between his own story--a Mexican American immigrant and first-generation college student who endured childhood separation from his own father--and the heartbreaking stories of his clients. (Library Journal)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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In Order to Live
Park skillfully details the total mind control, fear and starvation which constitute the nightmarish daily life under North Korea's Kim dynasty. Park's important memoir showcases the strength of the human spirit and one young woman's incredible determination to never be hungry again. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Worm
Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells a story of a boyhood in the midst of the Cold War, a family's displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for those they left behind. Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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You Don't Know What War Is
12-year-old Skalietska shares her experience of being caught in Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A firsthand account of life in a war zone, fleeing one's home, and the way war forever alters the lives of children and families. Skalietska's book is empathetic and sympathetic reading. (Library Journal)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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