Short on time? Check out one of these shorter stories that pack a big punch from our Amazing Book Challenge! With less than 300 pages, you’ll quickly cross another book off your list.
The Amazing Book Challenge encourages adult and teen readers to broaden their reading interests by discovering new subjects, series or authors. Readers are challenged to choose 12 books throughout the year from 12 different categories.
One of the categories is “Books Under 300 Pages,” and we have some recommendations here. For more information about the Amazing Book Challenge and its categories, go to www.naperville-lib.org/ABC.
“Heart Berries” by Terese Marie Mailhot (142 pages)
“Heart Berries” is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress and bipolar II disorders, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The result? A memorial to Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father ? an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist ? who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.
“A River in Darkness” by Masaji Ishikawa (159 pages)
Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing, the brutal 36 years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime and the challenges he faced returning to Japan.
“The Vegetarian” by Han Kang (188 pages)
Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, and as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy.
“Float Plan” by Trish Doller (257 pages)
Since the loss of her fiancé, Anna has been shipwrecked by grief — until a reminder goes off about a trip they were supposed to take together. Impulsively, Anna goes to sea in their sailboat, intending to complete the voyage alone. But after a treacherous night’s sail, she realizes she can’t do it by herself and hires Keane, a professional sailor, to help. Much like Anna, Keane is struggling with a very different future than the one he had planned. As romance rises with the tide, they discover that it’s never too late to chart a new course.
“What the Fireflies Knew” by Kai Harris (274 pages)
Eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice and her teenage sister, Nia, are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing. Over the course of a single summer, KB attempts to get her bearings in a world that has turned upside down — a father who is labeled a fiend; a mother whose smile no longer reaches her eyes; a sister who has crossed the threshold of adolescence and suddenly wants nothing to do with her; and a grandfather who is grumpy and silent. And all of them are keeping secrets.
“Tigers, Not Daughters” by Samantha Mabry (280 pages)
The Torres sisters dream of escape. Escape from their widowed father and from their San Antonio neighborhood. One summer, Ana, the oldest sister, falls to her death from her bedroom window. A year later, her three younger sisters, Jessica, Iridian and Rosa, are still consumed by grief and haunted by their sister’s memory. But then strange things start happening around the house: mysterious laughter, mysterious shadows, mysterious writing on the walls, the sisters begin to wonder if Ana is trying to send them a message and what exactly she’s trying to say.
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Ashlee Conour is the marketing specialist at Naperville Public Library.