There Are So Many Great New Releases!

Remember that scene in Black Panther where Killmonger is looking at the West African masks on display in the museum? He asks the museum “expert” if she thought her ancestors paid a fair price for the artifacts when she scoffs at his offer to take an axe “off her hands.” It raised a good question that a lot of museums in Europe and North America have conveniently not answered, which is: is it ethical to display the spoils of colonialism in museums? It’s something that I’ve been hearing about more and more, and this book takes the topic to another level, realizing a win-win scenario for marginalized people.

In it, Will Chen is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream to his Chinese parents. He’s a senior at Harvard, makes good grades, and all that good stuff. Well, a Chinese billionaire disrupts all that when he reaches out to him to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures that were taken from Beijing hundreds of years ago. To do it, he’ll need to assemble a team with a con artist, a thief, a getaway driver, and a hacker. All for a $50 million cash prize. Yes, this sounds like a typical heist scenario, but I think it turns a few things on their heads. For one, the entire crew is Chinese and contending with their dual identities as Chinese and American— sometimes feeling like neither identity truly suits them. This book also sees to it that they and Will totally upend the stereotype of “model minorities.”

Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander wrote an essay for the New Yorker in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In it, she focused on the challenges of Black life as it applied to her sons’ generation. Here, she furthers her points made in that essay about who she names the Trayvon Generation for their early exposure to the death brought about by racial violence. She examines America’s past and future, and its simultaneous obsession with and denial of race. Her analysis is punctuated by beautiful artwork.

In the late 1960s in Pakistan, a young, midlevel police officer is called to cover up the murder of an 11-year-old girl. She was killed in the red light district of Lahore and it becomes clear she was a worker there. The cover up seems to be a common enough task that shouldn’t be too hard to carry out, and even comes with the promise of curried favor among higher-ups. Despite this, Faraz just can’t bring himself to do it. The memories of living with his mother and sister there before his politically connected father had him taken away tie him too strongly to the slain girl. Farad’s inner turmoil is juxtaposed with that of the country’s, as Bangladesh fights Pakistan for its independence.