Showing results for "Becoming" in Coming of Age

It's unprecedented, even in the 21st century, for a young Sicilian woman to incur infamy and defy the centuries old mandate, “Family is everything!” Twenty-two-year old Mariella Russo is desperate to flee Sicily, that, while her lifelong home, has become a claustrophobic island. She’s being relentlessly coerced into an engagement with her wealthy college sweetheart from a prominent, powerful, family, and her envious and erratic mother hopes the match will increase her own ignominious social status. To fight for independence and escape entrapment, Mariella flees to San Francisco.

There is a place in modern-day America with no electricity, no plumbing, and no modern conveniences. In this place there is no room for dreams, no space for self-expression, and no tolerance for ambition. In this place there is a boy with the body of a god and the heart of a warrior. He is strong and faithful and serves his family honorably. But he dares to dream of more.

Thanks to her wealthy and well-connected family, twenty-six-year-old Marta is used to getting whatever she wants. And what she wants is a good time. That is, until her father's wife - the woman who raised her - becomes ill. Beautiful young Marta is forced to witness her unfaithful, brutish father abandon her adoptive mother in her final moments. After her father's swift remarriage, Marta is surprised to discover that she is now the sole heir of her late mother's sizeable estate.

Tough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will enlighten and uplift the listener.

A spirited debut of a rising basketball star wrestling with his town’s outsized expectations and his family’s complicated legacy Everyone seems to know Jimmy “Kamikaze” Kirkus, the half-white, half-Asian basketball sensation from small town Oregon. College coaches flood his mailbox with...