Exploring Biracial & Multicultural Identities: Fiction Books/eBooks

Set in the suburbs and cities of the Midwest, Mid-South, and Texas, these stories explore the lives of characters biracial, black, white, and all sorts of in-between. The intersections and collisions of contemporary life are in full effect here, where the distinctions between fast food and fine art, noble and naked ambitions, reality and reality shows have become impossible to distinguish.

A novel on children of mixed marriages. The protagonists are two sisters in Boston, daughters of a black professor and a white woman. One daughter passes for black and attends black school, while her sister passes for white and attends white school. But the classmates know and when it comes to bigotry, equality reigns among the races.

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party...

After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

Jessamy "Jess" Harrison, a racially-mixed child, is growing up feeling that she is caught between two different worlds, until she is sent to visit relatives in Nigeria, where she comes face to face with a mysterious new friend.

Scenes are modern Manhattan and China. The story stresses Biracial problems and Binational cultures.

The third collection by the prize-winning Asian American poet Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes is a sequence of lyrical, personal narratives that continue Pineda's exploration of his biracial identity, the haunting loss of his sister, and the joys -- and fears -- of fatherhood. With a title inspired by Emily Dickinson, Little Anodynes offers poems as "respites," as breaks in the reader's life that serve as opportunities for discovery and healing.

The rivalry and love of two high school girls playing basketball in Los Angeles. One is a shy Japanese-American, the other an aggressive African-American, and both are lesbian. Their relationship receives a new twist when the mother of the African-American moves in with the father of the Japanese-American and the girls begin living under one roof.

Lara Jean has never openly admitted her crushes. Instead, she wrote each boy a letter about how she felt, sealed it, and hid it in a box under her bed. But one day Lara Jean discovers that somehow her secret box of letters has been mailed, causing all her crushes from her past to confront her about the letters: her first kiss, the boy from summer camp, even her sister's ex-boyfriend, Josh. As she learns to deal with her past loves face to face, Lara Jean discovers that something good may come out of these letters after all.

With a roster of acclaimed fiction writers, Mixed explodes expectations of what it means to be multiracial. The complexion of the world is changing. People can trace their lineage to Native American, black, Asian, Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican heritage- sometimes all in the same person. The United States counts over twenty million people of multiracial descent, and the number is growing. This book gives narrative voice to the multiple identities of the rising generation.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high. Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Intellectually and athletically gifted, T.J., a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.