Staff Picks - LibGuides at Boulder Public Library

Syd recommends Hula by Jasmin Iolani Hakes

12/06/2025

adult fiction, .Syd's reviews, equity, multicultural, religiously diverse

Book cover for Hilo native Jasmin 'Iolani Hakes spins a multigenerational story of a Hawaiian family fighting to keep their traditions alive through the discipline and sacrifice of hula dancing. When family secrets are exposed, everything the Naupaka family has built is in danger of being swept away by the rising tide of colonialism. A beautifully written book that explores the connections between culture, hula, family, land, and what it means to be truly Hawaiian.

Publisher's description:
Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there's a lot she doesn't understand. She's never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history. In hula, Hi'i sees a chance to live up to her name and solidify her place within her family legacy. But in order to win the next Miss Aloha Hula competition, she will have to turn her back on everything she had ever been taught, and maybe even lose the very thing she was fighting for. Told in part in the collective voice of a community fighting for its survival, Hula is a spellbinding debut that offers a rare glimpse into a forgotten kingdom that still exists in the heart of its people.

Find Hula in our online catalog

Cheryl R recommends Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time by Jennifer Wright

11/22/2025

adult nonfiction, lived experiences, teen nonfiction, equity, .Cheryl R's reviews

Book cover for Mamie Fish, last seen on The Gilded Age, was a grande dame of New York and Newport society who flaunted conventions and opened up the stuffy 400 of Mrs. Astor. Learn more about how America evolved from the Puritans who didn't celebrate Christmas to a society of the well-to-do willing to spend their wealth to purchase their way into titled families in Europe. Fish set the pace in fashion, parties, and tweaking expectations of who women should be (and not heard).

Publisher's description:
From the author of Madame Restell and Get Well Soon, a biography of Mamie Fish that explores how women used parties and social gatherings to gain power and prestige. Marion Graves Anthon Fish, known by the nicknames "Mamie" and "The Fun-Maker," threw the most epic parties in American history. This Gilded Age icon brought it all: lavish decor; A-list invitees; booze; pranks; and large animal guest stars. If you were a member of New York high society in the Peak Age of Innocence Era, you simply had to be on Mamie Fish's guest list. Mamie Fish understood that people didn't just need the formality of prior generations - they needed wit and whimsy. Make no mistake, however: Mamie Fish's story is about so much more than partying. In Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time, readers will learn all about how Fish and her friends shaped the line of history, exerting their influence on business, politics, family relationships, and social change through elaborate social gatherings. In a time when women couldn't even own property, let alone run for office, if women wanted any of the things men got outside the home - glory, money, attention, social networking, leadership roles - they had to do it by throwing a decadent soiree or chairing a cotillion. To ensure people would hear and remember what she had to say, Mamie Fish lived her whole life at Volume 10, becoming famous not by playing the part of a saintly helpmeet, but by letting her demanding, bitchy, hilarious, dramatic freak flag fly. It's time to let modern readers in on the fun, the fabulousness, and the absolute ferocity that is Ms. Stuyvesant Fish - and her inimitable legacy.

Find Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time in our online catalog

Matthew recommends Passing by Nella Larsen

11/15/2025

Melissa Holladay

adult fiction, equity, Black

Book Cover What does it mean to belong and at what cost? Nella Larsen explores race, identity, and societal expectations between two childhood friends, Clare and Irene. Both are light skinned Black women living in 1920s Harlem, but one chooses to "pass" as white, while the other remains in her community. When the two reunite after many years, both women will challenge each other's life choices. Larsen's book addresses racial identity, friendship, class, social status, repression, freedom, and security.

Publisher's description:
Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. Fair, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family's happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they have told others -- and the secret fears they have buried within themselves.

Find Passing in our online catalog

Cheryl recommends Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time by Jennifer Wright

11/10/2025

adult nonfiction, lived experiences, teen nonfiction, equity

Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time: How Mamie Fish, Queen of the Gilded Age, Partied Her Way to Power: Wright, Jennifer: 9780306834608: Amazon.com: Books Mamie Fish, last seen on The Gilded Age, was a grande dame of New York and Newport society who flaunted conventions and opened up the stuffy 400 of Mrs. Astor. Learn more about how America evolved from the Puritans who didn't celebrate Christmas to a society of the well-to-do willing to spend their wealth to purchase their way into titled families in Europe. Fish set the pace in fashion, parties, and tweaking expectations of who women should be (and not heard).

Publisher’s description:
From the author of Madame Restell and Get Well Soon, a biography of Mamie Fish that explores how women used parties and social gatherings to gain power and prestige. Marion Graves Anthon Fish, known by the nicknames "Mamie" and "The Fun-Maker," threw the most epic parties in American history. This Gilded Age icon brought it all: lavish decor; A-list invitees; booze; pranks; and large animal guest stars. If you were a member of New York high society in the Peak Age of Innocence Era, you simply had to be on Mamie Fish's guest list. Mamie Fish understood that people didn't just need the formality of prior generations - they needed wit and whimsy. Make no mistake, however: Mamie Fish's story is about so much more than partying. In Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time, readers will learn all about how Fish and her friends shaped the line of history, exerting their influence on business, politics, family relationships, and social change through elaborate social gatherings. In a time when women couldn't even own property, let alone run for office, if women wanted any of the things men got outside the home - glory, money, attention, social networking, leadership roles - they had to do it by throwing a decadent soiree or chairing a cotillion. To ensure people would hear and remember what she had to say, Mamie Fish lived her whole life at Volume 10, becoming famous not by playing the part of a saintly helpmeet, but by letting her demanding, bitchy, hilarious, dramatic freak flag fly. It's time to let modern readers in on the fun, the fabulousness,and the absolute ferocity that is Ms. Stuyvesant Fish - and her inimitable legacy.

Find Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time in our online catalog.

Christian recommends The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

01/20/2025

Boulder Library

adult nonfiction, history, sociology, immigrants, racism, equity, Black, .Christian's reviews

This book explores how American cities were intentionally built to segregate minorities and discourage investment in their neighborhoods, creating urban blight and sustained poverty. The consequences of this de facto apartheid are still felt today and contribute to continued discrimination.

Publisher's description:
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know.

Find The Color of Law in our online catalog

Saoirse recommends The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi

11/08/2024

Boulder Library

history, lived experiences, equity, Arab, multicultural, multiracial, religiously diverse, refugees, .Saoirse's reviews

Palestinian historian Khalidi writes a nuanced and lived experience history that explores the historic and present experiences of Palestinians. It is fundamentally a critique of imperialism, Southwest Asian geopolitics, Israel, the United Sates, Western Europe, and Palestinian political leadership. I've wanted to know more about Palestine and Israel for a long time. Palestinian historian Khaldidi's account of 1917-2017 in the region is a deeply engaging and informed critique not often heard in the U.S. Most especially his experience of 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut personalized this history. Highly recommend listening to on audiobook.

Publisher's description:
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

Find The Hundred Years' War on Palestine in our online catalog.

Melissa recommends Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

08/07/2024

Boulder Library

adult fiction, mystery, .Melissa's reviews, equity, BIPOC

This book sucked me in with the first sentence and pulled me through to the last word. Interesting layered characters navigate complicated community relations in small East Texas towns. Texas Ranger Darren Matthews investigates two murders, encountering racially motivated roadblocks.

Publisher description:

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.

Find Bluebird, Bluebird in our online catalog

Syd recommends Lone Women by Victor LaValle

04/24/2024

Boulder Library

adult fiction, historical fiction, .Syd's reviews, equity, BIPOC, Black

Adelaide Henry is a bit of an unusual sight: a lone black woman attempting to stake a homesteading claim in the wilderness of Montana. Even more unusual is the impossibly heavy old trunk that appears to be her only baggage... An engaging blend of horror, western, and historical fiction.

Publisher description:

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear... The year is 1914, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of the "lone women" taking advantage of the government's offer of free land for those who can cultivate it-except that Adelaide isn't alone. And the secret she's tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing keeping her alive.

Find Lone Women in our online catalog

Jason recommends The Fraud by Zadie Smith

11/08/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, historical fiction, equity, BIPOC, multicultural, multiracial, .Jason's reviews

Zadie Smith doesn't disappoint with her new novel set in Victorian England. Its focus is a real-life trial that went on for years, but it's also about much more: race, class, gender, and sexual politics. Smith plays with structure in interesting ways, and her observations are trenchant and insightful.

Publisher description:

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper–and cousin by marriage–of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of façades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The "Tichborne Trial"--wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title--captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task.

Find The Fraud in our online catalog

Syd recommends Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert

10/02/2023

Boulder Library

adult nonfiction, autobiography, art, lived experiences, artists, .Syd's reviews, equity, BIPOC, Black

A powerful memoir of an artist born into Jim Crow-era Georgia. Winfred Rembert faced an attempted lynching and imprisonment in a chain gang for almost a decade for daring to march for his own civil rights. He turned to art to deal with his trauma through vibrant paintings of Black life in the south.

Publisher's description: A self-taught artist's odyssey from Jim Crow era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery-a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. Winfred Rembert grew up as a field hand on a Georgia plantation. He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh start at the age of 52, he discovered his gift and vision as an artist, and using leather tooling skills he learned in prison, started etching and painting scenes from his youth. Rembert's work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, profiled in the New York Times and more, and honored by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. In this book, he relates his life in prose and paintings--vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and night clubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love, and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly.

Find Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South in our catalog.