The Fifth Season
N.K. Jemisin
The Broken Earth Series by N. K. Jemisin fits the theme, is an engaging and thought-provoking piece of fantasy, and has incredible world building that I constantly envy. I think incoming students would enjoy it and I’d recommend starting with the first in the series, The Fifth Season.
JACK ESPINOZA
Film and Media Studies Major
Class of 2023
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
Alysia Abbott
Two decades after her father’s death from AIDS-related complications, Alysia Abbott wrote Fairyland, a memoir of her father in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s. She recounts their lives together as her father raises her as a single, gay parent after Abbott’s mother suddenly dies in a car accident. They move from apartment to apartment in Haight Ashbury, surrounded by a community of people including poets, drag queens, boyfriends, and roommates. Her father’s parenting skills are unconventional and imperfect, their community eccentric and chaotic; but through this instability and loneliness, her life is interspersed with abiding love, creativity, and responsibility. By reading her father’s journals after his death, and in the process of writing this book, she learns of unexpected truths, one that has helped her to reconstruct her own truth and “rules” of what family, parenting, and love should look like.
CHISAKO COLE
Lecturer
College Writing Programs