Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Emmy Award-winning NPR journalist Maria Hinojosa shares her personal story interwoven with American immigration policy's coming-of-age journey at a time when our country's branding went from "The Land of the Free" to "the land of invasion." (Description from catalog.)

The journalist and immigration-rights activist presents a memoir relating how he was sent from the Philippines to the U.S. as a child, his discovery of his undocumented status as a teenager, and his decision to reveal his immigration status publicly in 2011. (Description from NoveList)

Exploring separation, generational trauma and the toll of the American dream, the author recounts what happened when, at age 15, her parents were forced back to Mexico, leaving her and her brother to fend for themselves as underage victims affected by broken immigration laws.
(Description from NoveList)

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.
(Description from catalog)

An engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
(Description from catalog)

An instant American icon--the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court--tells the story of her life before becoming a judge in an inspiring, surprisingly personal memoir. (Description from catalog)

A former Border Patrol agent's haunting experience of an unnatural divide and the lives caught on either side, struggling to cross or to defend it. (Description from catalog)

This book weaves together two stories: the story of a courageous mother, and the story of the rise of drug cartels and of violence in Mexico. The story begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the U.S. Miriam Rodriguez is stalking one of the men who murdered her daughter. He is a member of the Zeta drug cartel that now controls what was once Miriam's quiet hometown of San Fernando, near the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red and wearing a disguise, Miriam single-handedly orchestrates the arrest of this man, one of the many men she has targeted and gotten arrested for the murder of her daughter, Karen.
(Description from catalog)

Diane Guerrero, actress from Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just fourteen years old when her parents and brother were arrested and deported to Colombia while she was at school. Born in the U.S., Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family. In the Country We Love is a moving, heartbreaking story of one woman's extraordinary resilience in the face of the nightmarish struggles of undocumented residents in this country. (Description from catalog)

A debut memoir by the son of working-class Mexican immigrants describes his upbringing in Washington State, membership in the Peace and Dignity Journeys movement and competition in the Native American cultural marathon from Canada to Guatemala.
(Description from NoveList)

With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his fathers deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry. (Description from catalog.)

An unflinching account of growing up as a queer biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction.
(Description from catalog)