Books for Dealing With Your Challenges

A teenage Jewish girl must go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Nazi occupation. She struggles to make peace with her identity, to get along with the small group of others whose behavior is difficult under the extreme stress they experience, and her own physical and emotional changes as she grows into adolescence.

This author offers painful childhood memories of straddling two different cultures — black Bohemia and Jewish suburbia.

When her parents brought her from war-ravaged Krakow in 1959 to Vancouver, Eva was thirteen years old. She endured the painful pull of nostalgia and struggled to express herself in a strange new language.

Esperanza Cordero does not want to belong to the rundown neighborhood of harsh realities in which she lives. Dismissing the low expectations the world has for her, she invents a different life for herself as she comes into her own power.

A young girl grows up with an alcoholic father, brilliant, charismatic and destructive. Her mother, a free spirit, abhors domesticity and responsibility. It is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption within a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant.

Born of a black father and white mother, a boy must face the challenges of being abandoned by his father and whose mother, though caring and loving, moves to Indonesia to establish another family. Shuttled between his mother and grandparents and struggling to understand his identity, this boy becomes the president of the United States.

In the slums of Dublin in 1953, Evelyn Doyle's mother ran off with a lover, abandoning her family and leaving Evelyn's father to care fir six children. Placed in church-run industrial schools, Evelyn discovered the crisp, clean joys and lonely sorrows of life in the care of nuns.

A young foster child in Nazi Germany scratches out a meager existence by stealing when she discovers something she can't resist — books. It is an unusual story about the ability of books to feed the soul.

A very young child loses both her eyesight and hearing. Her remarkable story of learning to deal with these challenges made her one of the most famous people of her time.