7 Books You Should Have Read in High School Instead of Romeo and Juliet

Diverse perspectives and stories are the essence of literature. We as humans create, we tell stories, we have an innate need to communicate. But what good is that ability if we hear the same story over and over again? It’s no secret the U.S. education system lacks diverse curriculum. The absence of this diversity echoes through nearly every class but is exceptionally deafening within literature classes. Books that depict experiences different from our own open up our world. They build bridges. They give platforms to the voiceless and ignored. They allow those individuals to speak for themselves and say what their experience is, not the other way around. It is so easy to get stuck in our own little worlds without realizing it, especially during this time of isolation. So, if you are feeling like your world is a bit small right now, here are 7 beautiful books depicting life outside a white picket fence.

1. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi

Description: “Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminated slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed – and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.” (Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. 2016, Penguin Random House.)

Importance: Homegoing is one of the most beautifully depicted generational novels I have ever read. As it follows the lineage of two half-sisters through eight generations it intimately depicts each life so that reader develops an ingrained connection with each individual. Not only does it show the power history has to shape an individual, but the power it has to echo through generations. Ultimately this book is one of identity, belonging, and the human search for love even and perhaps especially, during times of hardship.

2. In the Time of the Butterflies – Julia Alvarez

Description: “It is November 25,1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their death as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas – the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters – Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and the survivor Dede – speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of a life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage, love, and the human cost of political oppression.” (Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. 1994, Chapel Hill Publishing.)

Importance: In the Time of the Butterflies is a moving historical fiction novel that showcases the true story and depth of feminine strength, endurance, and love. It depicts the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo and trauma so unimaginable it could only have been pulled from human history. The four sisters life plans were snatched away by the escalating war, yet their decision to defend their people while continuing to search for a life well lived, is one of the most pivotal and factual coming of age stories documented. Their internal and external rebellion speaks to their unbreakable spirits and familial bonds. This story of hope and resilience made this book an inspiration that continues to echo through generations. It shone a light on the story of the Mirabal sisters, or as they were code named las mariposas, the butterflies.

3. Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Description: “Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post- 9/11 America is closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel of race, love, and identity written by the award-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” (Adichie, Chimamanda N. Americanah. 2013, Anchor Books.)

Importance: Americanah is an adult coming of age novel that finds its roots within a story of love, race, and reckoning with one’s past. As the lives of Ifemelu and Obinze ebb and flow together and apart, we see them clutching to dreams of a better life yet thrown into a world of American poverty and struggle. It expertly navigates topics of immigration, poverty, and race within America and just how those issues differ in other parts of the world. While their pain and longing is raw at times, it gives the reader the same hope and determination that sustains these characters while trying to find themselves and their way back to each other.

4. Wild Swans – Jung Chang

Description: “The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history… An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.” – GoodReads

Importance: Wild Swans is another skillfully depicted generational novel. It weaves together the stories of a grandmother, mother, and daughter to expose how history shaped their lives. Themes of love, endurance, pain, and knowledge are laced throughout this book. It is written by Jung Chang the third generation in this story who expertly illustrates the lives and decisions of her mother and grandmother from a position of startling familial clarity and acceptance.

5. Citizen: An American Lyric – Claudia Rankine

Description: “What does it mean to be a black citizen in the US of the early twenty-first century? Claudia Rankine’s brilliant, terse, and parabolic prose poems have a shock value rarely found in poetry. These tales of everyday life – whether from the narrator’s or the lives of young black men like Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson – dwell on the most normal exteriors and the most ordinary of daily situations so as to expose what is really there: a racism so guarded and carefully masked as to make it all the more insidious… Citizen is an unforgettable book.”-Marjorie Perloff

Importance: Citizen is a critical read for everyone! It is a mulitgenre book that uses poems, prose, paintings, photos, lists, etc. to depict the lives and experiences of Black Americans. It is intimate, visceral, and moving. It challenges microaggressions and misconceptions through its depiction of real-life situations so minute any marginalized individual can relate. But told in such a way that any reader is put in the victim’s shoes. It does not leave the reader with a sense of disempowerment, but quite the opposite. It arms the reader with the intimate knowledge and perspective that makes change possible.

6. Whereas – Layli Long Soldier

Description: “Whereas, the need to poet is carried from one generation to the next. Whereas, those of us who have gone before keep watch to see who will emerge to take on the burden of history, to make poems of blood and love. Whereas, we need poems through the broken places in our gutted imagination.  Whereas, Layli Long Soldier is one of the finest singers of her generation to be called through the doorway of poetry. Whereas, in the first collection she has made a stunning poetry of tribal-personal awareness, injustice, and words tightened with the sinew of truth. Whereas, these poems are a young Oglala Lakota poet taking her place, as she follows in the path of the buffalo, horses, Indian cars, and patient ancestors. Whereas, we are in a century still drenched in gunshot and longing. Whereas, these poems are the songs you need to make it through the other side.” – Joy Harjo

Importance: Whereas is a book of poetry written by Layli Long Soldier from her perspective as an Oglala Lakota poet. The Native Americans are one of, if not the most overlooked and silenced minority group in the United States. Thus, this book, where every word has an artful purpose and every poem describes one person’s experience as well as the hushed history of the oppressed, drips with crucial knowledge, importance, and humanity.

7. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquirel

Description: “Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks. In desperation, Pedro marries her sister Rosaura so that he can stay close to her, so that Tita and Pedro are forced to circle each other in unconsummated passion. Only a freakish chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally reunite them against all the odds.” – GoodReads

Importance: This book was my first encounter with the classically Mexican genre of magical realism. It meshes reality with moments of fantasy to depict a world in which imagination prevails or explains the unexplainable. It is a story of love, loss, and human growth. It follows the main character Tita over a lifetime showcasing her rises and falls, and the power struggle of an irrepressible spirit and positions of disempowerment.