By: Camila Sanchez Bolaño
When I was a child I read for fun and as a teenager I started to do so to escape from my own reality. Now, I read because letters have become the most effective balm for my heart. There are books that entertain and amuse; there are those that bring tears to our eyes and there are also those that leave us with a knot in our stomach. There are books that inspire us to change the world and others that give us hope for a better life. In these texts of literary recommendations you will find titles for all souls and wounds.
- The Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villanda
Camila Sosa is an Argentine transgender author, actress, and playwright. Her novel Las Malas won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2020. The work is an autobiographical fiction that reveals the transgender experience to the reader from two different angles: the personal one, where the narrator talks about her own gender identity, and that of the family, when a community of trans women who prostitute themselves in Sarmiento Park come together to form a new family nucleus different from the one where they were born and –sometimes– reborn. The book touches on, and encourages incredible transformations to happen in the reader, such as changing hatred into tenderness and transmuting violence into love.
- Polish boxer Eduardo Halfon
Halfon is a Guatemalan writer and professor who received the National Literature Prize in Guatemala in 2018. In El boxeador helado (The Polish Boxer), Halfon brings together nine stories under the same guiding thread. The stories are narrated by three main characters: Eduardo Halfon in a kind of fictionalized autobiography exercise, Milan Rakic, a Serbian pianist who seeks to vindicate his gypsy ancestry, and a Polish grandfather who tells for the first time the story of the number he has tattooed on his forearm. This is a travel book that tells of a route that is navigated between self-confidence and confusion.
Free and happy childhoods
- What a pity! by Rémi Courgeon
This children's book is a great way to teach children the value of oneself. Noemí is a mixed-race girl who feels great sadness because she wants to be white! White like her father, who, upon hearing his little girl's concern, tells her the story of Mina, a black kitten who wanted to be white and everything that happens to her before she can accept herself as she is. The illustrations are very moving and the text is easy to understand. Literary recommendations by Una Boutique de Libros
