Get Ready to Read for the Win 2016 - Stories Set in a Different Culture - Need Help With That Square?

Get ready for this year's summer reading program Read for the Win, which will be kicking off Sunday, June 12 and will run through Sunday, July 31.

This year you'll be selecting different categories from our summer reading BINGO card.

To help you get started, here's a few suggestions for some good reads for one of the squares' categories - Set in a Different Culture.

Have fun and read for the win!

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan 

Set in 19th c. China when women's feet were bound and they often lived a life of seclusion for the rest of the world. The women in one remote Hunan province create their own secret code which they painted on fans or embroidered on their handkerchiefs to communicate their thoughts and dreams to each other. Two girls to be paired and communicate are Snow Flower and Lily. As the years pass, thorough famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies for motherhood.

The Secret River
This the story of Grenville's ancestry, who wrested a new life from the alien terrain of Australia and its native people. London, 1806. William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman, is deported to the New South Wales colony that would become Australia.


The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Eva Luna
A woman makes love to an India dying of a snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva "so she will love life." Set in Latin America, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures.