#44 & #45, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ten Things I Hate About Me, Does My Head Look Big in This?:

Both books deal with Australian Muslim girls who are trying to figure out how to reconcile their religion with their lives, in different ways. In Ten Things I Hate About Me, Jamie dyes her hair blond and wears blue contacts at school in order to hide her ( Read more... )

13. Walter Dean Myers, Riot.

Yanno, when I heard Myers was going to do a YA about the 1863 Draft Riots, I had a hard time waiting for it, I was so excited. Myers! 1863 Draft Riots! When it finally came out and started getting poor reviews, my faith was still unshaken. They just don't get Myers, I told myself ( Read more... )

'Jupiter Amidships' is a sequal to 'Jupiter Williams', which I reviewed here. This time, the arrogant young hero of Jupiter Williams finds himself press ganged into naval service, and serves on board a British naval ship around the turn of the 18th/19th century ( Read more... )

25) Toni Morrison's Jazz, which... I think it's probably the most pleasurable and satisfying reading experience I've had to this point on 50books_POC, which makes it an appropriate halfway marker ( Read more... )

#29: Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping PointGladwell proposes here that ideas, information, and behaviors act like an epidemic, starting small and spreading until they reach a certain threshold, the "tipping point". Although I enjoy Gladwell's clear, conversational writing and thought he had some interesting ideas, I was less taken with this than I was ( Read more... )

32. Geling Yan, The Lost Daughter of Happiness, translated by Cathy Silber ( Read more... )

30. Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

I adored this book. It's a non-fiction book detailing Islam as a religion; about half of it is devoted to an incredibly detailed description of life and culture in the Arabian peninsula immediately before and during Mohammad's life. The second half of the book lays out ( Read more... )

 #23.  Bayou, Vol. 1,  Jeremy Love (writer, illustrator) with Patrick Morgan (colors)
2009, Gettosake and ZudaComics.com (online), D.C. Comics (print version)

A shoutout to  ( Read more... )

29. Shan Sa, Empress. Translated from French by Adriana Hunter ( Read more... )

28. Sherri L. Smith, FlygirlA YA novel. Ida Mae is a young woman working as a maid in Louisiana in the early years of America's participation in WWII. Her father taught her how to fly planes before he died, but as a black woman, she's been unable to get a pilot license of her own. When she hears about the Women Airforce Service Pilots (a government ( Read more... )