Islandborn

From New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz comes a debut picture book about the magic of memory and the infinite power of the imagination. A 2019 Pura Belpré Honor Book for Illustration Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else. Hers was a school of faraway places. So when Lola's teacher asks the students to draw a picture of where their families immigrated from, all the kids are excited. Except Lola. She can't remember The Island—she left when she was just a baby. But with the help of her family and friends, and their memories—joyous, fantastical, heartbreaking, and frightening—Lola's imagination takes her on an extraordinary journey back to The Island. As she draws closer to the heart of her family's story, Lola comes to understand the truth of her abuela's words: “Just because you don't remember a place doesn't mean it's not in you.” Gloriously illustrated and lyrically written, Islandborn is a celebration of creativity, diversity, and our imagination's boundless ability to connect us—to our families, to our past and to ourselves.

The memoir, ISLAND BORN, challenges what is possible in love and nature. The author and his partner (and soon-to-be-wife), from vastly different backgrounds in Los Angeles, resolve to follow an intuition and sail "the wrong way around the world" - eastward across the Arabian Sea. Pitted against treacherous conditions that included the volatile social and political situation of the world ashore, they discover what it takes, and what it means, to surpass all previous personal and cultural expectations so that they might truly live, and in the end, truly die. Twenty-one years old, Gayle becomes pregnant in the middle of their sailing adventure, but her pregnancy does not make them retreat to Los Angeles where they began. They discover a tiny uninhabited island in a remote atoll, as barely discernible as a shake of pepper in the vast blue of their Indian Ocean chart. There they decide to give up their dream ship, and begin a real life journey neither of them could have ever imagined. With the help of an old chief on a nearby island, they build a thatched family home with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, no address, no bills, and no neighbors. ISLAND BORN seeks to answer the question of whether it is still possible to voyage to an unspoiled place, not only on the globe, but within ourselves. In meeting this risk head on, Frank and Gayle's voyage takes them to a reality of themselves that confirmed the bare whisper of that initial intuition. Together, they pull up anchor from the seabed of their culture and travel to a place where their determination, their romance, and their lives are challenged beyond the limits of each horizon, but they keep going.

From the Creators of Hair Like Mine, Skin Like Mine is a fun, easy-to- read for beginners as well as advanced readers. An entertaining yet creative way to address and celebrate diversity among young children. Guaranteed to make you smile and a bit hungry.

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

"Miles Away In The Caribbean" is a poetically written story about a Canadian boy named Miles. In his magical spaceship, he visits Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. Miles highlights magnificent landmarks and enjoyed his cultural adventures.

A young girl and her family arrive in an airport in a new country. They are refugees, migrants who have travelled across the world to find safety. Strangers greet them, and one of them gives the little girl a doll. Decades later, that little girl is grown up and she has the chance to welcome a group of refugees who are newly arrived in her adopted country. To the youngest of them, a little girl, she gives a doll, knowing it will help make her feel welcome. Inspired by real events.

Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award A Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012 Finalist for the 2012 Story Prize Chosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The LA Times, Newsday, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes bookstore, and many more... "Electrifying." –The New York Times Book Review “Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize… Díaz’s prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic.” –O Magazine From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, these stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”

In this sweet and brightly illustrated picture book, Amy Wu must craft a dragon unlike any other to share with her class at school in this unforgettable follow-up to Amy Wu and the Perfect Bao. Amy loves craft time at school. But when her teacher asks everyone to make their own dragon, Amy feels stuck. Her first dragon has a long, wingless body, stag-like horns, and eagle claws, but her friends don’t think it’s a real dragon. Then she makes dragons like theirs, but none of them feels quite right...None of them feels like hers. After school, a story from Grandma sparks new inspiration, and Amy rounds up her family to help her. Together, can they make Amy’s perfect dragon?