Month: February 2021

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Canada Giveaways

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We’re giving away 10 copies of Chain of Gold by Cassandra Clare to 10 lucky Riot readers!

Enter here for a chance, or click the cover image below!

Here’s what it’s all about:

James and Lucie Herondale are Shadowhunters, powerful warriors who fight demons and keep evil at bay. Raised in Edwardian London on stories of good conquering all, they are completely unprepared for the devastation that is coming their way. For two new families are arriving, bringing with them a remorseless and inescapable plague. Chain of Gold is a Shadowhunters novel.

Categories
Giveaways

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We’re giving away five copies of The Tiger’s Apprentice by Laurence Yep to five lucky Riot readers!

Enter here for a chance, or click the cover image below!

Here’s what it’s all about:

A boy, a magical tiger, an outlaw dragon, and a mischievous monkey carry the fate of the world on their shoulders in this new edition of The Tiger’s Apprentice from two-time Newbery Honor-winning author Laurence Yep!

This action-packed fantasy reveals a hidden world within our own where animals take human form, where friendship is the final weapon in the battle between good and evil, and where a young boy is responsible for saving the world he knows . . . and the one he is just discovering.

Categories
The Kids Are All Right

Kidlit Deals for February 3, 2021

Happy February, kidlit pals! I hope you’re staying cozy amidst all the winter storms that are sweeping the country. February is a month of love, and it’s also Black History Month, so today’s deals are full of books that celebrate both. Of course, every month is a great time to read a wonderful book by a Black author, but here are a bunch that you’ll want to load up on!

Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor by Ally Carter is a series starter and a great thriller, for just $3!

A Good Kind of Trouble by Lisa Moore Ramée is a great middle grade about a girl learning about the #BLM movement, and it’s $2.

President of the Whole Fifth Grade by Sherri Winston is a cute book about a girl who wants to follow in her idol’s footsteps, and becomes determined to run for class president. It can be yours for $2.

Misfits by Jen Calonita is a great adventure for fairy tale fans for $2.

Need a fun and creepy new series? The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste, and its to sequels, are $2 each!

Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes is about surviving Hurricane Katrina, and it’s also $2.

Want a sweet picture book for Valentine’s Day? Love Is by Diane Adams and Claire Keane is just $2.

Donavan’s Word Jar by Monalisa DeGross is a beautiful easy chapter book about a boy who collects words, and it can be yours for $2.

Looking for a great nonfiction title for kids about Black History Month? March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine by Melba Pattillo Beals is a beautiful memoir of a civil rights activist, and it’s also $2.

The Next President by Kate Messner and Adam Rex is a fun picture book about history and future of the American presidency! It’s a perfect pick, especially since we have a new president. Snag it for $2.

Happy reading!
Tirzah

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Riot Rundown

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Categories
In The Club

In the Club 02/03/21

Welcome to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met, well-read, and well-fed. I am writing this to you with my face numbed to high heaven on account of some aggressive dental work and I am so. freaking. hungry!!! I keep trying to chew and drink something—anything!!—but I either bite the hell out of my cheek or the food just ends up on my shirt. But enough about me being a mess as per usual! Let’s kick off Black History Month with just that: Black history.

To the club!!

Nibbles and Sips

I was in the mood for an adult beverage last week but couldn’t decide what the $@^#! to make with the ingredients on hand. That’s when I remembered that one of my favorite podcast personalities, Jade Verette, has a legit (and hilarious) IGTV cocktail series called Cocktails en la Casa (read up on her in this spotlight on Black mixologists by Food and Wine). I whipped up this frozen cucumber mint situation to pretend it was much sunnier outside my casa. It’s such a fresh, delicious blend of cucumber, mint, elderflower liqueur, fresh lime, and gin. Enjoy!

New Black History

Let’s get this part out of the way: around here, we read Black authors year round and not just in February. We do still set aside some designated time to celebrate Black voices during Black History month though, so that’s what we’re going to do today. These history books are all new and recent works by Black authors.

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

I was originally going to suggest Ibram X Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, a book I’ve been slowly making my way through for months now. Then I remembered Four Hundred Souls and had to go with this. It’s a one-volume community history by 90 brilliant writers, each of whom tackles a five-year period from 1619 to the present. Each writer’s approach is different: some wrote historical essays, others short stories, some shared personal vignettes. The result is an important body of work that “fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.”

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

I’m actually surprised the concept for this book wasn’t explored sooner, because it feels long overdue. So much has been written and read about Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin (not that everyone has digested their message accurately, pero that’s some side eye for a different day). But very little has been said about the extraordinary women who raised these American icons. In one stunner of a debut, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling these women’s stories.

Caste

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

When Isabel Wilkerson gets out bed in the morning, do you think she has her toast and coffee before or after she sits down to craft masterpieces of thought? Whew! It landed on all of the best-of lists and won all of the things in 2020, and it’s no wonder. This time she’s taken on America’s hidden caste system with a “deeply researched narrative and stories about real people.” She pulls back the veil to reveal the hierarchy of human rankings that dominates our society and the systemic racism that allows it to thrive.

Suggestion Section

Barack Obama apparently surprised a Zoom book club by dropping in on their discussion of his book, A Promised Land. I can’t even pretend that I wouldn’t have blurted out, “HOW HAVE YOU BEEN, DAD, AND DO YOU THINK MICHELLE WOULD LET ME BORROW THAT COAT?”

Good Morning America’s February book club pick is Cherie Jones’ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House.

The Today Show’s Jenna Bush Hager selects not one, but two books for February’s book club.

PBS’s February book club pick is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown.

American Airlines’ new Apple Books partnership includes access to Oprah’s Book Club picks,

Thanks for hanging with me today! Shoot me an email at vanessa@riotnewmedia.com with your burning book club questions or find me on Twitter and the gram @buenosdiazsd. Sign up for the Audiobooks newsletter and catch me once a month on the All the Books podcast.

Stay bad & bookish, my friends. 

Vanessa 

Categories
Today In Books

Wakanda Disney+ Series in Development: Today in Books

Wakanda Disney+ Series in Development with Black Panther Director Ryan Coogler

Fans of Black Panther have something new to get excited about. The world of Wakanda is coming to the small screen. Black Panther director Ryan Coogler has signed a five-year contract with Disney+ to develop a TV show under his Proximity Media banner. The show is being described as “a drama based in the Kingdom of Wakanda for Disney+.” 

Dante Alighieri’s Descendant Seeks to Clear the Poet’s Name

More than 700 years after Divine Comedy poet Dante Alighieri was accused of corruption and condemned to perpetual exile, his descendant is hoping to reverse the sentence. Dante’s descendent Sperello di Serego Alighieri is an astrophysicist working with law professor Alessandro Traversi on the case. The formal process to clear Dante’s name begins in May, and Antoine de Gabrielli, a descendant of the official who convicted Dante, will take part in the proceedings as well.

The Conscious Kid Partners with Pottery Barn to Create BIPOC Book Bundles for Kids

The Conscious Kid has partnered with Pottery Barn to curate book bundles for kids centered around BIPOC authors. The Conscious Kid is an organization dedicated to “equity and promoting healthy racial identity development in youth.” Right now on the Pottery Barn website, you can purchase a board book bundle, a picture book bundle, or you can make a donation. All donation proceeds go towards getting children’s books from TCK’s list of Antiracist Children’s Books into classrooms.

Readers Fell In Love With These Top Romance Books On Amazon

Check out the top romance books on Amazon, featuring 20 titles and ten of the most highlighted passages.

Categories
True Story

New Releases: History + True Crime

WELCOME TO FEBRUARY. I am psyched about every single one of these new releases. We had some great releases in 2020, and 2021 is giving us awesome book after awesome book. Nonfiction is such a good genre, and I’m so happy people are still taking the time and energy needed to study, write, and bring us facts, memory, and emotions from their own experience and education. Mmm. Nonfiction.

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi, Keisha N. Blain

This. Is. So. Cool. Blain and Kendi have brought together 90 writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of the 400 years from 1619-2019. Writers explore their time period through “historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects.” This book seriously looks so good. Really excited for it.

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little. All grew up among Jim Crow and all “passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning.” A celebration of Black motherhood well in time for Mother’s Day and just in time for Black History Month.

Why Wakanda Matters: What Black Panther Reveals About Psychology, Identity, and Communication edited by Sheena C. Howard, PhD

The essays in this book cover topics like “how Black Panther has created a shared fantasy for Black audience members—and why this is groundbreaking; what we can learn from Black Panther’s portrayal of a culture virtually untouched by white supremacy; and how Nakia, Shuri, Okoye, and Ramonda—all empowered, intelligent, and assertive women of color—can make a lasting impression on women and girls.” If you’ve never stopped thinking about this movie or if you’re interested in diving in and thinking more about what it means, check this out.

Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan

I am currently obsessed with this book. As a journalist, McGarrahan witnessed the prison execution of a man convicted of the murder of two police officers. Years later, she discovered the condemned man might have been innocent. This book is her exhaustive search into what really happened, which takes her across the country from Florida to Washington.

For more nonfiction new releases, check out the For Real podcast which I co-host with the excellent Kim here at Book Riot. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Categories
Unusual Suspects

Locked Room & Remote Mysteries

Hi mystery fans! I am a sucker for mysteries that are locked room and/or remote mysteries. This is certainly tied somehow to being a fan of Agatha Christie as a child, and the movie and VHS game Clue. It’s also a favorite of mine because you know that the person(s) responsible are right in front of you, you just have to figure out who based on the why. And my first and foremost love of the mystery genre is based on my love of puzzles. My two selections are both influenced by Agatha Christie (and Sherlock Holmes for the first) but contemporary and set in different places in the world while also making the setting an important element. Put on your sleuthing hats and good luck guessing!

Murder in the Crooked House cover image

Murder in the Crooked House by Sōji Shimada, Louise Heal Kawai (Translation)

This is both a locked room mystery and a remote mystery, so basically two of my favorite things for the price of one! Wealthy Kozaburo Hamamoto has built a literally crooked house (sloping floors and the building is leaning–yes, think of Italy) in the remote northern tip of Japan, Hokkaido island. And, in 1984, Kozaburo and his daughter Eiko invite guest to stay over for Christmas in the house.

It starts with you meeting everyone as they arrive, Kozaburo setting up puzzle challenges for some guests, and telling his daughter if she wants to marry between two of the guests he could challenge them and see who solved his puzzles. But the festivities put the red in Christmas, no matter how much white snow is falling, when the murders start. In locked rooms! Clearly it has to be one of them, and the local detectives are staying over to figure out who. But they’ll be competing with Kiyoshi Mitarai, a famous detective who can obviously figure this out over the local detectives–you get Agatha Christie inspiration and Sherlock Holmes, more two for the price of one.

This was fun and balanced how much you care about people when you know people are gonna be dying, and it was interesting to see how much early British mysteries have influenced Japanese mysteries. I always figure these out, but this has an added element I don’t think anyone will solve 100% of, which I appreciated.

(TW attempted suicide, brief detail mentioned/fatphobia)

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

First a note: if you read Foley’s previous book and were bothered by the use of mental illness as the boogieman, I felt this one didn’t do that.

This is not a locked room mystery but a remote setting mystery that was one of the big books of last year. A clever thing I enjoyed about it is that you don’t actually know who is dead at the start so the mystery is both who did it, but also to whom? It’s a wedding and so everyone should be celebrating but L O L this is a murder mystery so it’s just gonna be drama and secrets and at least one dead body. The bride and groom are wealthy, influential, and one is a mild celebrity with a survival type reality TV show, and they’ve invited family and friends to an island off Ireland’s west coast.

We start with the scream, something awful has certainly happened and then we go back briefly in time to meet those arriving along with the bride and groom and the wedding planner who lives on the ten bedroom property the guests are staying at. Everyone has secrets and drama (family, romantic, friendship) and life problems as we rotate between the wedding planner, bridal party, bride, groom, and the bride’s best friend’s wife. The bride has issues with her mom stemming from her childhood, the bride’s sister is going through a breakup, the bride’s best-friend and his wife are trying to finally take a proper holiday from their kids, and the groom and his best mates are caught up in reverting back to adolescent behavior. It’s fun when it feels like many people have many reasons to want to kill a few people–it’s fiction, don’t judge me.

I went with the audiobook because it’s multi-voiced and that always makes me feel like the characters are easily separated and more defined. So if you audio, I recommend that format.

(TW self harm on page/ disordered eating talk/ fatphobia/ Non-consensual distribution of sexual images or video/ suicide, detail)

From Book Riot’s Crime Vault

12 Recent Locked Room Mysteries For Fans Of Escape Rooms

Browse all the books recommended in Unusual Suspects previous newsletters on this shelf. See upcoming 2021 releases. Check out this Unusual Suspects Pinterest board and get Tailored Book Recommendations!

Until next time, keep investigating! In the meantime, come talk books with me on Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Litsy–you can find me under Jamie Canavés.

If a mystery fan forwarded this newsletter to you and you’d like your very own, you can sign up here.

Categories
Read This Book

[2/3] Read This Book: AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones

Welcome to Read This Book, the newsletter where I recommend a book you should add to your TBR, STAT! I stan variety in all things, and my book recommendations will be no exception. These must-read books will span genres and age groups. There will be new releases, oldie but goldies from the backlist, and the classics you may have missed in high school. Oh my! If you’re ready to diversify your books, then LEGGO!!

One of the best parts of reading The Women of Brewster Place was reading the foreword written by one Tayari Jones. After I read that foreword, I knew it was time for me to stop procrastinating and start reading Jones’ most recently published book that has been collecting dust on my bookshelf. 

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An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of the American Dream. As they settle into the routine of married life, their world is torn apart when Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. While Roy is away, Celestial finds comfort in Andre, her childhood friend who was also the best man at Roy and Celestial’s wedding. The longer Roy is away, the harder it is for Celestial to hold on to their love. When Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned after five years, he is ready to resume the life he once had with Celestial. 

If nothing else convinces you to read this book, then just know I read most of it in one day. Every time I thought I would take a break, I had to read just one more chapter. What I enjoyed most about An American Marriage was how the entire situation was mostly spent in the grey. It is obvious Roy is innocent of his charges, so the grey area comes through the dynamics of Celestial and Roy’s marriage during Roy’s incarceration. Reading each of their sides of this love story, I went back and forth about whether Celestial or Roy was in the wrong. In the end, I realized they were in an impossible situation where no one was ever really wrong. 

I also saw An American Marriage as an alternative version of If Beale Street Could Talk. I haven’t read the novel, but I saw the adaptation in theaters in the Before Times when we did those activities. The juxtaposition between the two couples was always in the back of my mind. While Fonny and Tish seemed to be brought closer, Celestial and Roy drifted apart. No one enters marriage thinking their spouse will one day be convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, but what would I do in that situation? Would I be like Celestial or Tish? 

Until next time bookish friends,

Katisha

Find more of me on Book Riot. 

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What's Up in YA

Your YA Book News and New Books: February 4, 2021

Hey YA Readers!

Welcome to a new month. We’re launching February strong in the world of YA, with tons of interesting news, as well as outstanding new releases.

YA Book News

New YA Books This Week

The Afterlife of the Party by Marlene Perez (paperback)

All-American Muslim Girl by Nadine Jolie Courtney (paperback) — this is such a great read!

All That Glitters by Gita Trelease (first in a series, paperback)

All The Tides of Fate by Adalyn Grace (series)

The Best Laid Plans by Cameron Lund (paperback)

The Edge of Falling by Rebecca Serle (paperback)

Ember Queen by Laura Sebastian (series, paperback)

Everything That Burns by Gita Trelease (series)

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado — I adored this book so much.

The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper (paperback)

The Golden Flame by Emily Victoria

How To Build a Heart by Maria Padian (paperback) — Highly recommended!

The Life Below by Alexandra Monir (paperback, series)

Love in English by Maria E. Andreu

Love Is a Revolution by Renée Watson — Watson knocks it out of the park again.

Muse by Brittany Cavallaro

Muted by Tami Charles

The Obsession by Jesse Q Sutanto (paperback)

Payback by Kristen Simmons (series)

The Poetry of Secrets by Cambria Gordon

The Project by Courtney Summers — Love dark stories about sisters, cults, and older teens? Grab it.

The Queen’s Assassin by Melissa de la Cruz (paperback, series)

Revenge of the Sluts by Natalie Walton

Scammed by Kristen Simmons (paperback, series)

A Taste for Love by Jennifer Yen

Thorn by Intisar Khanani (paperback, series)

Time of Our Lives by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (paperback)

What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo

Yesterday Is History by Kosoko Jackson

YA Book Talk on Book Riot

Thanks for hanging out, and we’ll see you again on Saturday with some great ebook deals.

Psst: I’d LOVE if you’d share this newsletter with fellow YA book lovers and encourage them to subscribe. We’re so close to breaking a huge milestone in subscribers — 100K! — and I’d love to see that happen before spring.

— Kelly Jensen, @heykellyjensen on Instagram and editor of Body Talk, (Don’t) Call Me Crazy, and Here We Are.