Adult Summer Reading 2024: Coming-of-Age

A black woman recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.

From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention for readers of Kristy Harvey Woodson, Donna Everhart, Sue Monk Kidd, Jeannette Walls, and Rita Mae Brown. Drawing on the little-known true story of one tragic night at an Ozarks dance hall in the author's Missouri hometown, this beautifully written, endearingly nostalgic novel picks up 50 years later for a folksy, character-driven portrayal of small-town...

""The word 'masterpiece' has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one." --Stephen King A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul. Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander...

Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women's movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer- madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can't quite place- feels her inner...

"A powerful novel about five young people, struggling to replace the homes they have lost with the one they have created together, from the internationally bestselling author of A Long Way Gone. Hidden away from a harsh and chaotic outside world, five young people have cobbled together a home for themselves in an abandoned airplane, a relic of their country's tumult. At seventeen, Elimane, the bookworm, is as street-smart as he is wise: the group's...

"Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese American girl in New Jersey, Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly white school, and too white to speak to the few Asian kids around. After her parents' early divorce, they both remarried and started new families, and Willa grew up feeling outside of their new lives, too. For years, Willa does her best to stifle her feelings of loneliness, drifting...

Southern Appalachia. He was born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Damon braves the perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes...

As a senior in high school Quentin Coldwater became preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. After graduating from college and being admitted into a highly exclusive, secret society of magic in upstate New York, he makes a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin's fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined for his childhood dream...