The Good Country by Laleh Khadivi

This was such an interesting and important book.  How does a upper middle class AMERICAN young man of Iranian descent become radicalized?  He has everything going for him. Good looks, excellent academics, acceptance into UC Berkeley, a beautiful girlfriend, and great parents who love him and give him everything he wants.

From Kirkus: 

At first, Rez is a “typical” American teenager, blissfully numbing himself with surfing and drugs to the complexities of his life and world. But after the Boston Marathon and another massacre closer to home, Rez can’t ignore the fact that he is treated with suspicion and prejudice by the same white community with which he has spent his entire life.

His girlfriend is first attracted to some friends who are becoming fundamentalist and draws Rez into it. But he is the one who takes them on a journey to Syria to join the movement.

More from Kirkus:

His radicalization takes place gradually, the result of a countless number of small intertwining factors rather than one overwhelming reason. That makes Rez’s journey believable, his psychological transition vivid and real. You’ll sympathize with Rez even as you find yourself devastated by his ultimate choices. Khadivi’s feat is a crucial one, especially at this moment in time, when young Muslim men are dehumanized by white Americans far more often than they are understood to be complicated, and individual, human beings.

It's such a powerful book with such an important message. I highly recommend it. She's an excellent writer, too!

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

After reading Anything is Possible, I felt that I HAD to ready Lucy Barton again and I just did. Now I feel like I have to ready Anything is Possible again
She is an amazing writer! Theses two books are interconnected in really interesting ways.

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

What a beautiful book!  As soon as I finished it, I started My Name Is Lucy Barton all over again. This novel, Anything is Possible has the same characters as Lucy Barton. I just HAD to go back and remind myself about who they are, how they are connected, etc.
So, that is what I will write about next!

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

I heard about this book on my beloved podcast, All the Books by Liberty and Rebecca. They are so much fun and I like a lot of the books they recommend.
So, I reserved this from the Library and read it in just a few days!
Here is the Kirkus Review:

A Chinese woman who works in a New York nail salon doesn’t come home one day; her young son is raised by well-meaning strangers who cannot heal his broken heart.
We meet Bronx fifth-grader Deming Guo on the day his mother disappears without a trace. From there, the story moves both forward and backward, intercutting between the narrative of his bumpy path to adulthood and his mother’s testimony. Gradually the picture comes together—Deming was conceived in China and born in America because his unmarried mother, Peilan, decided she would rather borrow the $50,000 to be smuggled to America than live out her life in her rural village. After her baby is born she tries to hide him underneath her sewing machine at work, but clearly she cannot care for him and work enough to repay the loan shark. She sends him back to China to be raised by her aging father. When Deming is 6, Yi Ba dies, and the boy rejoins his mother, who now has a boyfriend and lives with him; his sister, Vivian; and her son, Michael. After Peilan disappears, Deming is shuffled into foster care—his new parents are a pair of white academics upstate. Ten years later, it is Michael who tracks down a college dropout with a gambling problem named Daniel Wilkinson and sends a message that, if he is Deming Guo, he has information about his mother. The twists and turns continue, with the answers about Peilan’s disappearance withheld until the final pages. Daniel’s involvement in the alternative music scene is painted in unnecessary detail, but otherwise the specificity of the intertwined stories is the novel’s strength. Ko’s debut is the winner of the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Prize for Fiction for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, chosen by Barbara Kingsolver.
This timely novel depicts the heart- and spirit-breaking difficulties faced by illegal immigrants with meticulous specificity.