Algonquin Young Readers and Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill are excited to partner with Bookclubs for the Girlhood Around the World Book Club. Inspired by Girlhood by Masuma Ahuja, each month will feature a book that showcases the unique experiences of girls growing up across the world. From novels to memoirs to essay collections written by all-star authors like Tayari Jones, Yamile Saied Mendez, and Julía Alvarez, these page-turning reads will be sure to spark conversation about the fascinating differences and similarities of teenage girls no matter where they are.
Furia
This powerful, #ownvoices YA novel introduces us to Camila, a rising soccer star in Argentina who must put everything on the line—including her blooming love story—to follow her dreams. A Reese’s Book Club YA Pick, this story of a girl’s journey to make her life her own will have you cheering her on.
Girlhood: Teens around the World in Their Own Voices
What does a teenage girl dream about in Nigeria or New York? How does she spend her days in Mongolia, the Midwest, and the Middle East? Thirty girls in twenty-seven countries share diary entries and photographs in this celebration of the day-to-day lives of ordinary girls around the world.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
After the García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their parents flee the Dominican Republic, they try to find new lives in the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., and their parents try to hold on to their old way.
How to Build a Heart
All Izzy Crawford wants is to feel like she really belongs somewhere. When Izzy’s family has been selected by Habitat for Humanity to build and move into a brand-new house. Izzy is this close to the community and permanence she’s been searching for, until all the secret pieces of her life begin to collide.
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a Black G.I., is the sole survivor of a family tragedy. Now she must move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, and learn to deal with society’s ideas of race and identity.
In the Neighborhood of True
New York transplant Ruth Robb hides her Jewish identity to fit into the segregated Atlanta of the 1950s, until a hate crime forces her to come to face the whole truth about the choices she’s made, the boy she might love, and the true cost of living only in the neighborhood of true. Inspired by a real-life event.
The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert
Shugri Said Salh, now a nurse in California, tells her unforgettable true story: When she was six years old, Shugri was sent to live with her nomadic grandmother in the Eastern African desert, becoming the last of her family to learn a once-common way of life.
If You Could Be Mine: A Novel
In Iran, it’s a crime punishable by death to be gay. Sex reassignment surgery, however, is considered a way to fix a “mistake.” Sahar has been in love with her best friend, Nasrin, since they were six. But when Nasrin’s parents announce that her arranged marriage will be in a matter of months, Sahar must decide the lengths she’ll go to for love.
Clover
Clover Hill is ten years old when her father, the principal of the local elementary school, marries a white woman. Just hours later, an automobile accident compels Clover to forge a relationship with the new stepmother she hardly knows in this award-winning novel about a family lost and found.
Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World
Forty-four writers, actors, artists, and more contribute essays, lists, poems, and illustrations about everything from body positivity to romance to gender identity to intersectionality to the greatest girl friendships in fiction. Together, they share diverse perspectives on and insights into what feminism means and what it looks like.
A People's History of Heaven
Young women and girls—including a graffiti artist, a transgender Christian, a blind dancer, and the queer daughter of a hijabi union leader—come together to wage war on the bulldozers that would bury their homes in a Bangalore, India, slum called Heaven.
Silver Sparrow
With the novel’s opening line, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle.