Author: Serena Datta | BHSc Student at Queen’s | TNO Community Ambassador A reader lives a thousand lives, played out in both …
October 2025
Books that Cross Borders: A Back-to-School Reading List Curated by Local Youth
Author: Serena Datta | BHSc Student at Queen’s | TNO Community Ambassador
A reader lives a thousand lives.
Some play out in rooms that feel familiar—in apartments just like ours, school hallways we’ve walked, families navigating tensions we’ve seen before.
Other stories pull us far beyond the edges of our everyday. Into cities fractured by war. Onto the slopes of Everest. In futures imagined by someone else.
Books can be maps, sometimes to other worlds, sometimes back to ourselves. Between these pages, a reader steps in and out of lives—testing choices, tracing consequences, learning what it is to be someone else for a while.
This summer, we spoke with local youth about the stories that have resonated with them. The titles they chose aren’t always easy. Some confront heartache, loneliness, or identity head-on. Others make space for joy, imagination, and the freedom to be soft in a world that often demands toughness.
Youth Reflections
One participant, a young girl herself, shared Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. “It felt private and brave. I liked that she wrote even when nobody was listening.”
A 16-year-old shared Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. “I felt like it showed what happens when people love each other, but still get it wrong. And that hit home.”
A 12-year-old boy recommended The Giver by Lois Lowry. “It made me think about memory and choice. I never thought about how important memory is.”
A 14-year-old picked The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: “It didn’t make anyone a perfect hero. That’s what made it real.”
The Lives We Haven’t Lived—Yet
For youth growing up between languages, homes, and histories, books offer more than just an escape. It’s exposure. To other griefs, other kinds of strengths, other possibilities. They let young readers test-drive versions of themselves.
A reader can live a thousand lives—because one is never enough, and never the whole story.
The Back-to-School Reading List
These are the twenty books that changed how local youth understand the world, and how they understand themselves.
Deborah Ellis, Canadian fiction author, writes for children with unflinching honesty, amplifying the voices of girls living through war, displacement, and injustice. | Photo Credit: Marie Coleman via Wikimedia Commons
A Métis author and fierce advocate for Indigenous youth, Cherie Dimaline blends speculative fiction with lived memory. | Photo Credit: Dan Harasymchuk via Wikimedia Commons
American novellist, Jhumpa Lahiri, writes about the quiet fracture lines between cultures, generations, and languages. Her work reflects the diasporic search for belonging, both in place and in self. | Photo Credit: Carlo Benini via Wikimedia Commons
