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Happy Litsyversary 🥳🎉🤩 to one of my favorite Littens! Thanks for hosting a giveaway! Impossible to choose my two favorite non fiction books but here are two I think about and recommend often. I also really enjoyed the discussion between these two authors at a book event back when I used to get to go to those live and in person.

Check out @vivastory ‘s #VivaNonfiction post for all the giveaway details.

“People migrate now for the same reason they always have: for survival.” This book is literally torn from the headlines and digs deeper into one family‘s trials and tribulations. These are ordinary and extraordinary struggles told through beautiful reporting that brings the story of immigration into sharp personal focus. Read this book.

So I'm working on my first book speed dating project of the year and will probably record a bonus episode about it. What would you want to know?

A good mix of the intimate personal story of a family‘s struggle for survival and the larger political and economic factors that drive illegal immigration.

The narrative is centered on the Flores family, who sends Wilbur Jr. north from their family farm in El Salvador to seek a better life in the United States. Not too much later, gangs threaten Ernesto and Raúl (they are twins) and they leave to join their older brother.

“A 2010 Amnesty International Report cited research that six out of ten migrant women and girls were sexually assaulted en route to the United States—other estimates are even higher. It‘s just considered part of the payment, the paralegal says, of the passage north.”

This remarkable true story of twin teenagers fleeing gang violence in El Salvador follows the boys through their harrowing journey across the border into the U.S. and the hardships they face once they arrive. Markham, who meets the twins at the Oakland, CA high school where she works, highlights, through their personal experiences, the emotional and physical toll that immigrants and refugees face.

This might not seem like a beach read, but I'm finding it a perfect book to read while I'm sitting at the water park while my youngest daughter and her friends have fun. An amazing nonfiction account of twin El Salvadoran brothers who were unaccompanied minors embarking on life in El Norte when one of them finds himself on the wrong side of the law.

Lunchtime thunderstorm #bookmail from hogarth books - one fiction, one non-fiction, both are about refugees.