Exciting New Reads for Spring

For the first few years of my life, we lived a few hours from Memphis. Then, when I was a teenager, we moved to a town just half an hour drive from it. I also have a good college friend from there. Basically, what I’m saying is that I’ve been anxiously awaiting this book and I feel like I know the women in it.

Here, Joan, her sister, and her mother go back to their family’s home in Memphis, TN in the mid ’90s to escape her abusive father. The house they returned to was built by her grandfather, who was lynched 70 years prior. This wouldn’t be the last time violence touched Joan’s family, and the trauma from all these experiences manifest within the generations in different ways through the years. As an artist, Joan channels this trauma through her portraits of the women of North Memphis. The narrative travels through time to paint a full, and at times heartbreaking, picture of a Black, Southern family.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss Joan’s mother’s decision to move her daughters back into a house where she knew abuse had taken place.

A couple characters from Mandel’s The Glass Hotel make an appearance here, but it’s not necessary to read it before picking this one up. Mandel weaves together the stories of several people who all hear a brief moment of notes from a violin, followed by a whooshing sound. Weird, right? What’s weirder is that these people inhabit different times— a teenager is exiled from his rich, British family in 1912, a composer plays a video his late sister shot during a concert in 2020, and an author writes a pandemic novel and lives on the moon in 2203. The Time Institute of the year 2401 sends an investigator back in time to sort out the glitch that made all these people experience the same thing at different times. It sounds like a lot of moving pieces, but the narratives complement each other, coming together to make some interesting observations on existence and even pandemic living.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss investigator’s Robert’s findings. Do you think it tied the narratives together well? What do you think Mandel is trying to say about reality?

This is a follow-up to Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad  and has a few familiar characters and their children. This is another case where you don’t really have to have read the first book, though. Here, Bix is a super rich tech guy (think of one of the CEOs or founders of Twitter/Facebook/etc., except he’s Black) and develops a new platform that can hold your consciousness called “Own Your Unconscious.” Naturally, this develops into “Collective Consciousness” where people can upload their memories, which allows them to share with others who have done the same thing. As cringe as it sounds, it also low-key sounds likely to happen. Not everyone is down with sharing consciousnesses, though, and a movement rises up to counter it. Egan uses a number of different view points and chapters that have totally different narrative styles to explore just how far this social media thing can, and will, go.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss how likely you think the premise is. Do you think the platforms are possible, and if so, do you think people will really be as enthusiastic?

The stories in this collection are gathered and told by the spirits of Lagos, Nigeria. This chorus of spirits see all of the abuse and suffering going on as a result of homophobia and sexism, and people unwilling to conform to society’s rules. These outcasts, or vagabonds, in these stories are the poor, queer people who are used up by the rich with seemingly no consequences. There is hope, though. Osunde’s Lagos has devils and spirits that avenge and protect abused girls, teenagers reading about queer love and finding hope in Akwaeke Emezi novels, and a mysterious power that lets abused women find absolute escape. As gritty and real as the stories can get, the inherent magic of the Vagabonds give the city, and the collection of stories, its beauty.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss the story “Johnny Just Come” and what parallels Johnny’s predicament has to not speaking out on other issues.