Read Around North America Challenge

Read at least one book by an author from each country in North America.

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Recommended Challenge Books (392)
301.
The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison EN

Rating: 3.5     110 Votes
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its... continue

302.
Night of the Living Rez

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty EN

Rating: 4.6     9 Votes
Description:
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a de... continue

303.
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) : Poetry by Barbara Kingsolver EN

Rating: 3.9     4 Votes
Description:
In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous. In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all... continue

304.
Brown Girl Dreaming

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson EN

Rating: 4     87 Votes
Description:
A New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson, the acclaimed author of Red at the Bone, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for... continue

305.
Crazy Brave

Crazy Brave : A Memoir by Joy Harjo EN

Rating: 4.6     8 Votes
Description:
A “raw and honest” (Los Angeles Review of Books) memoir from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart nec... continue

306.
Legendborn

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn EN

Rating: 4.5     13 Votes
Description:
An Instant New York Times Bestseller! Winner of the Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe for New Talent Author Award Filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn’s YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of City of Bones with a modern-day twist on a classic legend and a lot of Southern Black Girl Magic. After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a m... continue

307.
Rubyfruit Jungle

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown EN

Rating: 3.6     29 Votes
Description:
Classic modern American novel orig. pub. 1973. Celebrates lesbian sexuality.

308.
My Monticello

My Monticello : Fiction by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson EN

Rating: 4     8 Votes
Description:
A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America. Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlotte... continue

309.
The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton EN

Rating: 3.5     33 Votes
Description:
Engaged to marry socialite May Welland, Newland Archer meets Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal, and is forced to decide between happiness and the social code that has ruled his life.

310.
The Seed Keeper

The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson EN

Rating: 4.4     9 Votes
Description:
"Compelling . . . The Seed Keeper invokes the strength that women, land, and plants have shared with one another through the generations." --ROBIN WALL KIMMERER