One Book, One San Diego has announced the selections for the 2025 region-wide read: “Deacon King Kong” by James McBride has been chosen for adult readers; “Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam” by Thien Pham for teens and tweens; and “The Interpreter” by Olivia Abtahi and illustrated by Monica Arnaldo for children. For Spanish language readers, “The Interpreter” is available in Spanish translation and will be part of our One Book Sin Fronteras program.
All three books selected for the One Book, One San Diego 2025 season emphasize the importance of finding shared humanity in varied lived experiences so we can better understand the differences we each face, and see how similarly we overcome hardship — with love, understanding, hope, support, community and resilience.
In “Deacon King Kong,” a church deacon known as Sportcoat shoots a South Brooklyn project’s drug dealer at point-blank range in front of everybody. McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself. The lives of the characters overlap in unexpected ways and, as the story unfolds, "Deacon King Kong" demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
“I’m very excited to be participating in the One Book, One San Diego festivities. I wrote the book because I wanted people to know about the community that produced me and people like me. This is a world that many people only see from behind the wheel of a tightly locked car, so I wanted to show how wonderful some of these people are, humanize people. That’s one of the jobs of a good writer, to try to humanize folks, so that we all see each other as pretty much the same,” says McBride.
“Family Style” is Thien Pham’s graphic novel memoir where food and his search for belonging go hand-in-hand after his family leaves Vietnam and settles in America.
“My family and I came to America in 1980 on a boat and I've always wanted to tell this story. For some reason, I tried and tried and I just could not tell the story until 2008, when I finally got a chance to sit down with my mom. I finally got to ask her how we came to America and when she told me the story of how we came to America in detail, I felt so moved that I had to write this book. I'm really excited to be able to come and hang out with you all this fall in San Diego,” says Pham.
Celia has two jobs in “The Interpreter”: she is a young kid who loves to play soccer and she accompanies her parents to grown-up places to serve as their interpreter, translating from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. Olivia Abtahi’s clever text and Monica Arnaldo’s charming illustrations capture a common aspect of life for immigrant and bilingual families while offering a model for teamwork that helps everyone feel understood.
“I wrote this book because I really wanted to share what it's like to interpret English to your family's home language. I grew up with an Iranian dad and Argentinian mom, so we had languages flying all over the place, but in the United States it's usually children who are interpreting English to Spanish for their parents. So it means so much to me for this book to be chosen for One Book, One San Diego, because there is a huge Spanish speaking population and there are a lot of little interpreters in the San Diego community,” says Abtahi.
In early fall, One Book, One San Diego will host an event featuring an interview with McBride. Event details and registration will be available in the coming weeks at www.kpbs.org/onebook.
Free discussions, film screenings, lectures and workshops around the 2025 selections will be hosted by public libraries and other partner locations throughout fall and winter 2025. Find details at www.kpbs.org/onebook.
About One Book, One San Diego:
Launched in 2007, the program encourages everyone in the San Diego and the Northern Baja region to read and discuss the same book. One Book is selected for four categories of readers: adults, teens, kids and Spanish. It is a partnership, led by KPBS, with the San Diego Public Library, the San Diego County Library, San Diego State University, One Book Sin Fronteras and more than 40 others. The program is funded by the Linden Root Dickinson Foundation, the Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, the Payne Family Foundation, the Frieda Berlinski Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, the City of San Diego and Lloyd Pest Control.
Media Contact:
Heather Milne Barger
hmilne@kpbs.org
