BYL Reading Challenge discussion

Own voices means that the author is writing about the topic from firsthand experience.

Recommendations:

Written in the Stars - Aisha Saeed (teen/adult)
The Three Body Problem - Liu Cixin (teen/adult)

Thank you for the recommendation, Emily! I just finished Written in the Stars by Aisha Saeed. It was eye opening as an own voices book. Easy to read,/well written even though it covered a tough topic.

Not super sure if I am quite right in thinking it is an own voices novel, but I think Pachinko works!

The author was born in Korea, lived there for several years, is also a first generation immigrant to the US and spent some years living in Japan. All these places are included in Pachinko and immigration is a huge central theme in the novel.

While she admits being a bit uneducated about the true history and experiences of Korean immigrants to Japan during WWII prior to writing the completed novel, due to growing up largely in the United States, I do believe her own early experiences in her life, experiences with immigration and her ancestral experience all mixed in with her obviously in depth research fit the bill. At least some kowledge of WWII is pretty commonly understood in the US education system, but Pachinko was an eye opening look at a stories of an entire group of people I never had the chance to learn about before, both during WWII as well as prior to that during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the postwar fallout as Korea split into two. Beautiful and tragic.

I read The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi.