Welcome Readers!

Our 2026 Online Reading Challenge is … KNOW YOUR HISTORY! Each month we will be reading about a different observance month and highlighting a main title about that month.

For September, we are celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month by reading a book that pays tribute to Hispanic American culture.

Here’s a quick summary from the publisher:

I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country.

Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family.

How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country “is as much an all-American story as it is a global one” (Booklist, starred review). – Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

This title is also available in large print.

Looking for some other books that celebrate Hispanic heritage? Try any of the following:

• Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A Anaya
• Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth by Daisy Hernandez
• Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics by Ricardo Quintana Vallejo
• Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
• The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu
• The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore by Anika Fajardo
• The Possession of Alba Diaz by Isabel Canas
• Solito : a memoir by Javier Zamora
• The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

As always, check each of our locations for displays with lots more titles to choose from!