The Gospel Comes With a House Key, by Rosaria Butterfield
A dear friend recommended this book to me. And though it took me longer than expected to get through it (I had to borrow it a few times on my Overdrive account), I was glad I did. The author talks about the life-giving, life-changing power of “radically ordinary hospitality”, sharing her own life-altering experience of receiving radically ordinary hospitality and how it led her to see this as a calling and to adopt this as a lifestyle. I was personally convicted by how she and her family welcomed the broken, the lost into their home.
The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas
After a nonfiction streak, I picked up this book truthfully not expecting much. But I could not put it down. A story about Starr Carter, a sixteen-year-old moving between two drastically different worlds, it tackles the challenging and complex issues of racism, prejudice, police brutality, “Black Lives Matter” that are so relevant in today’s society. As I read this book, I kept thinking about the term “cross-cultural code switching” that I learned during grad school. Code switching, the alternating the use of language depending on the social context and situation, was something that upon learning about, immediately resonated with me. Growing up as a Korean-American, I moved between different worlds: my affluent, predominantly white neighborhood and school and my Korean family and church. The author’s portrayal of Starr’s struggle with code switching and moving between her worlds is one that is complex and yet so real.
All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung
In this memoir, the author speaks about growing up Korean in her white family. With candor, she shares about feeling different in her adoptive family, the prejudice and challenges she uniquely faced as an adoptee. She begins to search for her birth family when she becomes pregnant, initially wanting to find out more information on her medical history. But along this journey, she shares with rawness the complexities of adoption- grief, loss, the longing for roots.