"We dance because we cannot fly." — Shooting Up Note:   I received an advance review copy (ARC) of this book. Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction  will be published by Little, Brown on February 19, 2026 . Summary and Background Jonathan Tepper's Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction  is not the book you think it is. Yes, it's about heroin addiction . Yes, it's about AIDS during the darkest years of the epidemic. And yes, it's about grief and loss on

“Simply to endure is to triumph.” - Sold Summary and Background Book Cover (Source: Amazon) Patricia McCormick's Sold is a sad but very realistic book narrated by Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old Nepali country girl. Her existence is that of poverty , but also of routine and familiarity . She cares for goats, works on her family's little patch of land, and hopes to have a tin roof someday so the rain no longer seeps through the thatch. Lakshmi’s world, though simple, is colored

“ There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Summary and Background Book cover of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Source: Amazon) Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is her first autobiography , which was published in 1969, and it traces her childhood through to her teenage years. It begins when three-year-old Maya (who was then named Marguerite) and her brother are shipped off by themselve

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them.” – Tara Westover, Educated. Book cover of Educated (Source: Amazon) Summary and Background Tara Westover’s Educated  is the memoir of a woman who grows up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho, isolated from the outside world. Her father, Gene, was a man filled with fear and distrust of the government, formal education, and modern medicine. As a result, Tara and her siblings were kept out of school, and their