The 52 Book Club: 2025 Challenge discussion

50. A Person Of Color As The Main Character


We strongly believe in the importance of diversity in our reads. Our second winning prompt for 2022 was “a person of color as the main character.” For this prompt, the character should be the main character within the story. As always, your choice could either fiction or non-fiction, any genre.

Check out our Goodreads List for examples

cold fire by tamora pierce and old comfort read

The Girl with the Louding Voice I loved this one so much! Unique voice that has stayed with me.

The Thursday Murder Club - includes a club

I read Passing

Have We Met? by Camille Baker

The Personal Librarian

Simmer Down by Sarah Smith

The Wedding Party - Jasmine Guillory

I highly recommend Cane River by Lalita Tademy. I loved it so much that I've read it six times!

Tell Me How to Be by Neel Patel

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
(Rebecca Skloot)

Publisher's Summary
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells, taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first immortal human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years.

If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons - as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings.

HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bombs effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now, Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the Colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henriettas small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta's family did not learn of her immortality until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family, past and present, is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

©2010 Rebecca Skloot (P)2010 Random House

I read Trevor Noah's "Born a Crime."

I read The Color Purple by Alice Walker ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

My nephew was reading The Hate U Give and it was on my TBR shelf so I thought, "Why not now" and we read it 'together'.

The family, friends and main character are all nicely described and given life in this book about life in the ghetto, walking the line between the white school hallways with rich, privileged classmates & the black gang ridden street of home. Death & hate, love & life all co-exist. Can we?

*****/*****

All Boys Aren’t Blue

Just to clarify, Person of Color doesn't mean Black. Two very different groups of people.

I will read My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite.

Currently reading Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas.

I read The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland. Amazing writer!

I listened to Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones.

Everything, Everything

I read Honor by Thrity Umrigar, 3 Stars

Tia Williams, Seven Days in June.

I read A Whole New World by Liz Braswell.

I just finished The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 5 stars.
Would definately recommend.

I read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

I read Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

I just got done with Black Thunder by Aimee & David Thurlo. It's #16 in the Ella Clah series, and takes place in the New Mexico Navajo country.

I read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. It is a beautiful book! Great story about twins leading two VERY different lives. I loved it! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I read My Sister The Serial Killer and it was a great read. Quick and enjoyable

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (very good!)

I read Everfair by Nisi Shawl. Loved the concept, but something was just to thin. Maybe it was the characterization, or perhaps the alternate history aspects were just alternate of an era and geography I'm ignorant of. Either way, the book didn't click for me.

I read Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

I read Yinka, Where is your Husband?... It was amazing! I read it in a day! Such a fun read! I couldn't put it down! Highly recommend!

“Will” by Will Smith

Sexy in stilettos by Nana Malone

12 Years a Slave

Transcendent kingdom by Yaa Gyasi.

Snow Flower and the secret fan by Lisa See

an random selection based on the cover at the library turned out to be a wonderful surprise book that i thoroughly enjoyed

Mirror Girls by Kelly McWilliams 4/11/22

https://titlesurfingwithtraci.blogspo...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

North to Paradise by Kidman Umar

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ such a beautiful book! Loved it!

I just finished reading We Are Not Like Them ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I listened to "My Grandfather's Son," authored & narrated by Justice Clarence Thomas.

I read "Happy Endings" by Thien-Kim Lam

House of Stone by Zimbabwean author Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is an award-winning novel covering the history around the decades of the formation of Zimbabwe as a new nation, in particular the Gukurahundi massacres which followed. ⭐⭐⭐ here is my review