Every coming of age book we've recommended, in one place.
Ford grew up in Indiana writing letters to a father in prison, without knowing what he had done. The book is about that answer and everything her body and her mother carried in the meantime.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Free-born in Reconstruction Brooklyn, Libertie is expected to become a doctor like her mother and does not want to. She marries and moves to Haiti instead. A novel about a daughter refusing the life she was handed.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
An eleven-year-old on a Barbados sugar plantation is chosen as assistant to his master's brother, an eccentric scientist, and escapes by hot air balloon. It goes stranger and further than that. Won the Giller Prize.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
A Himba girl leaves home to be the first of her people at the galaxy's best university, carrying her otjize and her math, and something goes very wrong on the ship. A novella you can read in an evening. Won the Hugo and the Nebula.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
A grieving sixteen-year-old at UNC stumbles into a secret society descended from King Arthur's knights and discovers her own family line has older magic. Southern Black rootwork against Arthurian legend, and rootwork holds its own.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Two Black teenagers in Portland, one of them a siren hiding what her voice can do in a city that polices Black girls for less. The magic is a metaphor and Morrow never pretends otherwise. It works.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
A seventeen-year-old in East Oakland becomes the witness in a police sex scandal she is also the victim of. Mottley wrote it at seventeen herself. Hard, and the writing is remarkable.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Adunni is fourteen, sold into marriage in rural Nigeria, then into domestic work in Lagos, and determined to get an education anyway. Written in her own English, which takes ten pages to settle into and then sings.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Her first novel, about a girl who prays for blue eyes because she has correctly understood what the world rewards. Brutal and brief. Morrison's afterword about why she wrote it is worth the price by itself.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Barbadian Brooklyn in the 1930s, a daughter caught between a mother chasing property and a father dreaming of going home. One of the first novels to put Caribbean immigrant life in America on the page.
Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
One email a month with every new list we publish.