New Year, New Books, Who’s This?

In Yanagihara’s highly awaited new novel, three stories converge in compelling ways, with recurring themes of illness, disability, queer love, family, and class. This 700-page tome divides the narratives and takes place in an alternate America. The first is set in 1893, in a New York that is part of the Free States where people may marry whomever they want. The son of a wealthy family is set to marry another distinguished family’s son, but he’d rather be with a penniless music teacher. Next, we see New York in 1993 during the AIDS epidemic, and a young Hawaiian man’s struggle to hide his past from his older partner. Finally, there is the year 2093, where plagues and totalitarianism run the world, which feels a little too close to being real, if I’m being honest.

Olga and her brother Prieto outwardly seem to have everything. But you know how that goes. She’s a bougie wedding planner for whom “Tinder” literally means “the stuff that starts fires” because her own love life is a hot mess. He, meanwhile, is a congressman who’s battle against gentrification is being negatively influenced by his status as a closeted gay man. The two struggle with themselves and their identities as their mother— who abandoned them as children to join a radical political party— storms back into their lives as Hurricane Maria gears up to devastate Puerto Rico.

As planes fly overhead, and subways rumble below, the daughters of immigrants settled in Queens, NY find each other. These brown girls promise each other lifelong friendship as they try to be the dutiful daughters their parents demand them to be. But, the promise of love, adventure, and other skylines sometimes lead them away from each other and the home they’ve always know. Brown Girls is a poetically told rendering of the eclectic borough as seen through the eyes of girls of color coming of age.

Primi Peregrino’s parents drown at sea when she is eight, leaving her and her sister to be raised by a collection of eccentric family members. Literature provides a foundation and is the backbone of Primi’s upbringing. As a result, she becomes obsessed with it and those who make it. She finds herself seeking out places where writers, poets, bookstore owners, and anyone else tangentially related to books gather in order to sleep with them. Primi’s odd, escapist quest is juxtaposed by the beginnings of a revolution to overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in Apostol’s humorous novel that is available for the first time in English.

In Civil Rights Queen, Brown-Nagin gives Constance Baker Motley her well-deserved flowers. She was born and grew up during the Great Depression to a blue-collar family. It was expected that she’d have a respectable life as a hair dresser. Instead, she went to law school at Columbia in 1944, was the first Black woman to argue a Supreme Court case, defended Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, helped in the Brown vs. The Board of Education case, helped to rid the U.S. of the evils of Jim Crow, and so much more. There were so many women and queer people who held such instrumental roles in the civil rights movement in America, but are barely mentioned. It’s nice to see them getting their shine.