Spring These Books into Your TBR

Ingrid Yang is 29 and going through it as a PhD student. For years, she’s been researching the late Chinese poet, Xiao-Wen Cho, even though she had no interest in him prior to starting her PhD (or any interest in since having started, if we’re keeping it real). Instead, the subject of her future dissertation was chosen by her adviser, a white guy who starts off being very invested in Chinese culture, and ends up… being the opposite of that. One day she finds a note in the Chou archives that leads to a helluva discovery. With her best friend, she sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery. There are book burnings, Anti-Asian propaganda, and a reckoning with how white men factor into her life that Ingrid experiences in this funny dark academia novel.

Finally, Meddy Chan’s Aunties from Dial A for Aunties are back and still just as Med-dlesome (ha!). There is a grand wedding as in the first book but this time it’s Meddy’s! They hire another Chinese-Indonesian family to handle all the particulars, and practice their British phrases in anticipation of meeting her fiancé’s family. The wedding planner family’s photographer, Staphanie, and Meddy bond until Meddy overhears her talking about assassinating someone. Bloop! Now Meddy and her aunts try to stop this mafia family from taking out one of their wedding guests. Hijinks follows, naturally.

Joan is an artist who paints the women of North Memphis, where her mother moved her and her sister in order to escape domestic violence. It’s also there that Joan’s grandfather was lynched 50 years earlier. Stringfellow jumps back and forth through time to tell the story of a Black family’s continued brushes with violence, tragedy, and trauma. Only by seeing the women in her family in a new light can she hope to break free of her family’s generational curse.

This is another muligenerational tale of women in a family that spreads across Kuwait,the United States, Lebanon, Iraq, and India. Sara, after having moved back to Kuwait from California, is a professor of philosophy at Kuwait University with a complex relationship with her home country. This is made even more complex once she teaches a class on Nietzsche that brings with it a charge of blasphemy on her. As she tries to fight the charge and figure out what her future will look like, the story weaves in and out, telling the stories of Sara’s grandmothers starting in the ’20s and how their actions led to today. No matter which country they found themselves in over the years, they were, like Sara after her mother died, always tied back to Kuwait.