In this week’s edition of “Inspired By,” we are featuring one of our wonderful interns, Rikki Lux. Rikki is a senior English major at Arizona State University. The following books inspire Rikki most.

 

 

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Young Astrid lives in her eccentric and daring mother’s shadow. When her mother is incarcerated for poisoning her ex-lover, Astrid must adapt to life in a string of foster homes. Throughout her story, she cultivates her own identity through self-discovery and finally breaks free of her mother’s chains – but not without pain, heartbreak, and difficult life lessons.

 

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

Before her success with Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed was the anonymous advice columnist for The Rumpus. People wrote to her asking about love, sex, family, despair, and everything in between. What made Strayed’s column so popular was the compassion, honesty, and wisdom she gave in her answers. With each question and answer, the reader feels like their own empathy expands because of the seemingly endless amount Sugar has to give.

 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tackles the topic of subjective beauty with intense and lyrical prose. Young Pecola Breedlove is a lonely black girl living in poverty in Lorain, Ohio. Her idea of beauty – blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned – is the very beauty she covets for herself. She suffers an unspeakable tragedy, and as a way to escape her reality she yearns for blue eyes so that she and her world will look different.

 

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

In her collection of short but powerful stories, Watkins writes about the vast, desolate, and falsely hopeful places in Nevada that form her characters’ identities and motives. Each story is unforgettable because of Watkins’ fierce storytelling, which is most evident in Ghosts and Cowboys. It is the only story in her collection that reveals true events about her father, who was Charlie Manson’s “right hand man.”  

 

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Melinda becomes isolated as her former friends shun her because she called the cops at a party after being raped, but she is too ashamed to tell anybody what happened. She must return to high school as an outcast and eventually stops speaking altogether. She finds release in her art class, where she creates sculptures that identify her pain. Finally, her secret comes out and she learns the importance of having a voice.

Pinterest PS!  Be sure to check our Rikki-inspired #Pinterest board!