How On Trend Are You, Book-Wise?

So Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gets to be an NBA star, be in movies with Bruce Lee, and write Sherlock Holmes-adjacent books?! I’m not mad at it. Here, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft is newly out of college and already starting to get noticed within the British government. His world gets shaken up, though, when his friend Cyrus Douglas starts hearing about these weird things happening back home in Trinidad. There are disappearances and talks of children being led away by a lougarou (basically a werewolf) to their deaths. Mycroft and Douglas go there to get to the bottom of it.

In February 2014, Ukrainian police fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing dozens. The protestors had been gathering for months at that point to speak out against President Yanukovych’s siding with Russia at the expense of other alliances. This book centers around Ukraine that winter by following four people: engineer Misha, who lost his wife; Slava, a young activist; Katya, a doctor treating protestors at a monastery; and Aleksandr, an ex KGB agent. The four people’s lives intersect during this time of unrest, and the story is told by a chorus of Ukrainian singers who were killed by the Russian czar. Yeah, it’s a lot in the best way.

The titular character is raised by her grandparents in Philly because her Black mother is perpetually touring with a theatre troupe, and her Jewish father has just always been gone. When she comes of age, she sets out to find her father in NYC based on a clue he left behind hinting at some grand mystery regarding her birth. This is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth and is described as a funny, “feminist picaresque.” It’s a satire that’s as humorous as it is scathing.

Lydia is 23, fresh out of art school, annnd a vampire. We meet her as she’s all set to start adulting in London, having just placed her mother in a nursing home. Except it seems like nothing is really working out for her. Her internship isn’t a paying one, she’s down bad for a guy who’s dating someone else, and she can’t find fresh pig blood (her blood of choice). So she’s hungry. All. The. Time. Her solution is to stay in her studio apartment, alternating between watching videos of people eating on YouTube and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (lulz). She longs to feel a connection to other people so many experience through food that she can’r eat, and she has to work through trauma from abuse, disordered eating, and feeling isolated to be her best self.