Why am I passionate about this?

Jenny Jaeckel is the award-winning author and illustrator of several books including her historical fiction companion novels House of Rougeaux and Boy, Falling, a collection of illustrated short fiction entitled For the Love of Meat, and the graphic novel memoir Spot 12: Five Months in the Neonatal ICU. She has a special passion for coming-of-age stories for their power in capturing the stories of life that are the most specific and most vivid. When not writing, Jaeckel works as an editor and translator. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her family. Eighteen is her third novel. 


I wrote

Eighteen

By Jenny Jaeckel,

Book cover of Eighteen

What is my book about?

Arriving in a rain-swept city after a solo bus journey, eighteen-year-old Talia’s world breaks wide open. Soon she is chasing…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Complete Persepolis

Jenny Jaeckel Why did I love this book?

Marjane Satrapi’s powerful graphic novel memoir is one of my all-time favorite books in any genre. The stories that comprise her young life during Iran’s cultural revolution, her eventual solitary exile in Europe, and her post-war return, are riveting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and unforgettable. Illustrated in stunning black and white drawings, Persepolis blends Satrapi’s inner and outer experience of events and characters with such sublime artistry that her story will (if I can predict it) become instantly lodged in your heart. 

By Marjane Satrapi,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Complete Persepolis as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran. • "That Satrapi chose to tell her remarkable story as a gorgeous comic book makes it totally unique and indispensable" —TIME

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both…


Book cover of The House on Mango Street

Jenny Jaeckel Why did I love this book?

A celebrated modern classic, The House on Mango Street unfolds in a series of intimate vignettes told to us by Esperanza, a young girl growing up amid the color and chaos of her Latinx Chicago neighborhood, with all its striking loves and pains. Esperanza brings the reader into the heart of her family, and into her personal dreams that strive to live in a place where so many dreams are crushed. Mango Street is an intimate story infused with love, humor, sadness, and hope.

By Sandra Cisneros,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked The House on Mango Street as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

“Cisneros draws…


Book cover of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Jenny Jaeckel Why did I love this book?

Maya Angelou’s famous memoir captures her childhood in rural Arkansas and wild adolescence in California with extraordinary sensitivity and insight, and rich, evocative detail. Every character, from her powerful grandmother, tumultuous parents, dear brother Bailey, and a panoply of others, fairly roar off the page, illuminating the wondrous, weird, tragic, and punishingly ordinary events of Angelou’s often heroic young life. 

By Maya Angelou,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.


Book cover of Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir

Jenny Jaeckel Why did I love this book?

Like all the young girls in this shortlist of coming-of-age stories, Ashley C. Ford (one of Angelou’s literary children) is a survivor hell-bent on finding a life better than the one she was handed, and, like the others, she is remarkably sensitive, imaginative, and able to paint her world for us in the most tender and unique shapes and colors. How does a young girl weather such brutal realities, experience beauty, and splice together a space for her soul? Ford’s memoir is one such contemporary story. 

By Ashley C. Ford,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Somebody's Daughter as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NBCC John Leonard Prize Finalist
Indie Bestseller

“This is a book people will be talking about forever.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

“Ford’s wrenchingly brilliant memoir is truly a classic in the making. The writing is so richly observed and so suffused with love and yearning that I kept forgetting to breathe while reading it.” —John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author

One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her…


Book cover of The Color Purple

Jenny Jaeckel Why did I love this book?

The Color Purple, another of my all-time favorite books, is an unusual coming-of-age story in that it tells the life of one remarkable young person’s journey into maturity and self-possession far beyond her youth. Surviving the injustices and vicious circumstances of her young life as an impoverished Black girl in the rural south in the early 20th century, Celie discovers herself through forbidden love and the loves that others tried to steal from her.  

By Alice Walker,

Why should I read it?

16 authors picked The Color Purple as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug…


Explore my book 😀

Eighteen

By Jenny Jaeckel,

Book cover of Eighteen

What is my book about?

Arriving in a rain-swept city after a solo bus journey, eighteen-year-old Talia’s world breaks wide open. Soon she is chasing chickens, telling bad jokes to a prospective boss, and fielding a roommate’s insults about her décor, all the while homesick for a place that never existed. Funny, harsh, touching, and uniquely observant, Talia speaks to the reader as if to a best friend. 

In a chance encounter, Talia meets George, a young man whose passion for building sailboats sparks a conversation that leads to much more. When a sailing job takes George away to Mexico, Talia struggles with ghosts from her troubled past until a growing faith in herself brings her to take a bold decision, stepping into the unknown in a way she never has before.

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The Bloomsbury Photographs

By Maggie Humm,

Book cover of The Bloomsbury Photographs

Maggie Humm Author Of Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Woolfian Gym devotee World-traveller

Maggie's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays.

The Bloomsbury…

The Bloomsbury Photographs

By Maggie Humm,

What is this book about?

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group's key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs

Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are…


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