A Long Island Grifter, Queer Lady Gladiators, and More Meaty May Reads

Though the year feels like it’s zooming by, it also feels like people are super ready for summer. Or, I guess maybe people are always super ready for summer, it’s just that this time, I am too. Either way, I’m looking forward to trying this spicy watermelon lemonade! I’ve never thought to make lemonade spicy, but I have enjoyed the spicy margaritas I’ve tried, and lemonade has similar sweet/tart vibes going on.

Looks like you’ll just need:

– watermelon, cut up

– 4 fresh lemons for juicing

– 1/2 jalapeño

– sugar

– water

Then blend and garnish!

Before we get to the books, don’t forget to check out First Edition, the new podcast started by Book Riot co-founder Jeff O’Neal. It explores the wide bookish world, with interviews, lists, rankings, retrospectives, recommendations, and much more, featuring people who know and love books. Subscribe to First Edition on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcatcher of choice.

This is definitely one of our most-anticipated books of the year. With a premise that involves top women gladiators fighting for their lives within a corrupt prison system, it’s understandable. The author of Friday Black tells the bloody story of Loretta Thurwar and “Hurricane Staxxx,” two women who are friends, lovers, and popular Chain-Gang All-Stars. As All-Stars, they’ve fought against other prisoners in lethal battles to win shortened sentences through a highly contested program that’s run through the controversial Criminal Action Penal Entertainment organization in a (not so) alternative United States. Loretta nears the day she’ll finally be free, but the burden of all she’s done — and still has to do — weighs heavily on her in this damning look at America’s prison industrial complex and culture of violence.

The bestselling author of Cutting for Stone is back with a family saga spanning more than 70 years. The story of a girl who would come to be known as Big Ammachi — which essentially translates to “Big Momma” — twists and turns, intertwining as the waterways that her and her would-be family live by in Southern India. Big Ammachi’s family, part of a Christian community with a long history, will be as gifted as they are cursed, with the curious incidence of drowning being a common theme reoccurring through the generations. Starting in 1900, we experience the change and advancements time brings as Big Ammachi experiences them.

Alex is a certified mess, but I have to admit she’s also pretty bold in ways I could never be. After she commits a faux pas at a party, the older man she has a lil something going on with sends her on her way with a ticket back to where she came from. But she’s not ready to leave the bougie part of Long Island and all the potential ways its inhabitants could support her. So she drifts from place to place, using her people-reading skills to melt into each new social situation, seamlessly fitting in..until she doesn’t. Alex is the type of person who has random thoughts about how easy it’d be to steal things she comes across, so while she is pretty morally reprehensible, the narrative of seeing rich people’s worlds shaken up a bit makes for an interesting read. The premise of how she’s able to so easily pass in new social groups says a lot about privilege and race, I think. It also reminds me of a story from awhile back about a woman who pretended to be a German heiress. Supreme mess.

Kuang only writes bangers, and in this one, June witnesses the death of Athena Liu — who just finished a novel that promises to be a masterpiece about Chinese laborers’ contributions to the Allied forces during WWI. June decides to take Athena’s manuscript and claims the story as her own. To take full advantage (because, you know, stealing someone’s book wasn’t enough), she also lets her publisher rebrand her with an Asian-sounding name and an author photo of someone who is racially ambiguous (if you hadn’t guessed, June is white). The book is successful, but June can’t shake the feeling that it could all come tumbling down, and that the truth of Athena is about to be exposed.

*Bonus*: Kuang is interviewed here by author Zakiya Dalila Harris (The Other Black Girl) about the book and what inspired it. Here’s an excerpt I had to include:

“Kuang: “I really like the novelist John Banville and I was reading some interviews he’d done, and he mentioned that once he tried writing in an alternate voice, like a crime thriller, and suddenly he’d written paragraphs and paragraphs, and he thought to himself, ‘John, you slut.’ That’s how I felt drafting the first 3,000 words of Yellowface. It was just pouring out and I thought, ‘Becky, you slut. What are you doing?'”

Kuang, if you’re reading this, this paragraph makes us friends now.

In the late 1800s, Pirbhai, a young Indian boy, becomes a worker indentured to the British in his desperation to find work. He’s taken to East Africa to work on the East African Railway, where he’s pressured to commit an act that will haunt him and his family for generations. His children grow up in a Uganda that is starting to divest from British rule, and eventually his descendants have to leave because of Idi Amin’s South Asian expulsion. They end up in different parts of the world, with some eventually finding each other again in Canada. This covers five generations of a family with lives spread out over four continents as they reckon with what they’ve done and lost in the name of survival.