Books like The Moon from Dehradun: A Story of Partition
By Shirin Shamsi
For families ready to talk about history through one child's eyes, this book turns an enormous, difficult event into something small enough for a child to hold onto — a doll, a train, a home left behind. Tender, lyrical, and quietly heartbreaking, with moments of hope threaded through loss.
A young girl is separated from her mother at the last moment and must sail to America alone, only to discover the address for her family in New York has smudged into illegible ink.
A young man leaves Japan to explore California, falls in love with both places, and spends his life torn between two homelands he can never fully choose between.
A determined mountaineer dreams of climbing despite being told no by men, sponsors, and gear made only for men's hands — so she leads an all-women team up Everest, battling avalanches and icy crevasses along the way.
A young Armenian boy leaves behind his home and everyone he has known to search for refuge, carrying his story until he finally finds the courage to share it.
A four-year-old boy and his Japanese American family are forced from their California home into incarceration camps during World War II, moving through three different sites over three years while his parents work to keep the family safe.
In 1967 Nablus, a young girl who loves harvesting olives with her mother must flee her home when war returns, and makes a quiet promise to keep her family's trees alive in memory.
In 1707, an eight-year-old girl travels into the Connecticut wilderness with her father to build a new home, then must find her courage when he leaves her with their Indian neighbors.
A biography of Wilma Mankiller, who was forced from her Cherokee Oklahoma home as a child, found community in San Francisco, and returned home to become the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation.
A boy who's passed his swim test insists he's ready to jump off the diving board, then finds himself stalling with stretches and stories while working up the nerve to actually do it.
A young girl rides the Silver Meteor train north during the Great Migration, watching cotton fields give way to city lights, and telling her journey stop by stop in poems.
A young girl emigrates from Taiwan to America with her family, leaving behind her beloved popo, and stays connected across the ocean through visits, calls, and memories as she grows up.
A young girl leaves her grandmother's house in Mexico to join her parents and brother in New York, facing a new language, unfair accusations, and the slow work of calling a new place home.
