Jenny Jaeckel is the award-winning author and illustrator of several books including her historical fiction companion novelsHouse of RougeauxandBoy, 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. Eighteenis her third novel.
I wrote...
Eighteen
By
Jenny Jaeckel
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 Books I Picked & Why
The Complete Persepolis
By
Marjane Satrapi
Why 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.
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The House on Mango Street
By
Sandra Cisneros
Why this book?
A celebrated modern classic,The House on Mango Streetunfolds 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.
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
By
Maya Angelou
Why 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.
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Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir
By
Ashley C. Ford
Why 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.
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The Color Purple
By
Alice Walker
Why 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.
