November's Diversity Matters book group's pick is a graphic novel "Worm : A Cuban American Odyssey" by Edel Rodriguez. Please join wherever you are in your reading. This event is a hybrid event and you can attend via Zoom or in-person. Please register below if you would like the Zoom link.

About the Book: Listed in Boston Public Library's Vida Latina 2024 Reading List "A stunning graphic memoir of a childhood in Cuba, coming to America on the Mariel boatlift, and a defense of democracy, here and there Hailed for his iconic art on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world, Edel Rodriguez is among the most prominent political artists of our age. Now for the first time, he draws his own life, revisiting his childhood in Cuba and his family's passage on the infamous Mariel boatlift. When Edel was nine, Fidel Castro announced his surprising decision to let 125,000 traitors of the revolution, or "worms," leave the country. The faltering economy and Edel's family's vocal discomfort with government surveillance had made their daily lives on a farm outside Havana precarious, and they secretly planned to leave. But before that happened, a dozen soldiers confiscated their home and property and imprisoned them in a detention center near the port of Mariel, where they were held with dissidents and criminals before being marched to a flotilla that miraculously deposited them, overnight, in Florida. Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells a story of a boyhood in the midst of the Cold War, a family's displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for those they left behind. It also recounts the coming-of-age of an artist and activist, who, witnessing American's turn from democracy to extremism, struggles to differentiate his adoptive country from the dictatorship he fled. Confronting questions of patriotism and the liminal nature of belonging, Edel Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom"--Catalog.

Physical book copies are available at the circulation desk and as an eBook on the Libby app.  Sign up for Libby for free with your library card. Email mwillwerth@manchesterpl.org for more info and to get connected to the group.