Author: Erica Ezeifedi

I know this is pretty simple, but I also thought it was a really good idea when I first saw it. I’ve already tried it and it really is a simple, delicious thing to have, and of course, you can use whatever fruit you like! You just need fruit, honey/agave, and coconut whip cream (I bought mine premade, but I’m sure fresh is even better). I also think it would be a good idea to let the fruit sit for at least 30 minutes with the honey/agave to let the flavors meld (but of course not if you use fruit that browns). It’s pretty straight forward — you just finely chop fruit and add it to coconut whip cream — but here’s the original video, anyway.

I already love soup, especially around this time of year. The addition of corn dumplings makes my southern heart sing. The history of the three sisters — corn, beans, and squash — also holds a special place in Indigenous histories. I haven’t made this yet, but judging by the ingredients, it seems like it’ll have a slight chili taste. Well, actually just judging by the cumin because cumin very easily makes everything taste like chili to me. Follow the recipe here.

You may have heard of the botanist/author Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a book in which she extols the virtues of looking to plants and animals as teachers, a traditionally Potawatomi Nation perspective. This young adult version does the same thing, just in a way that is more accessible to younger readers (plus there are illustrations!).

Whew, what an intense story Terese packed into a mere 143 pages! After reading this memoir, I almost feel like I can call the author by her first name. Her writing was so personal and raw, after finishing the book, I felt like we needed to go get drinks somewhere and decompress. She talks about growing up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the PNW, her PTSD and bipolar II diagnoses, her problematic relationship, and childhood abuse. Her writing was poetic, fluid, and pulled no punches. Y’all aren’t ready.

The encampment at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota grew into the largest Indigenous protest movement of the century. In Our History Is the Future, Estes chronicles the history of Indigenous protest that led to standing Rock, and what it might lead to in the future.

Justice speaks on the states of Indigenous literature and Indigenous literature studies, and how necessary they are in dismantling a culture of colonialism. Indigenous writers do this by asking existential and interpersonal questions, and by doing so, challenge colonialist policies that have driven wedges between Indigenous people and their connections to each other and the land.

I am a simple creature. You fry a fish and I’ll eat it. Seriously, it may be a circumstance of my Nashvillian upbringing, but I love a good fish fry. This recipe does something new that I find super intriguing. It uses corn meal (which I’m used to for frying fish), but also ground up roasted pine nuts. You follow the usual steps for frying fish, you just add pine nuts that you’ve roasted and ground for five minutes to the dry fish fry before you coat the fish and fry it in oil at 350 degrees.

Reading the title and looking at the cover had me thinking “Is that…Patricia? With the rather large hand and dripping nail polish??”

Let’s just say it might be because once the weary contestants of a heterosexual dating show make it to the top of an island’s tallest peak and meet her, they have to start fighting for their lives. This is a comedy that’s also a queer love story that I’ve seen compared to X-Files and The Bachelor.

This book won this year’s 2022 Booker Award, proving that extra plots are where it’s at. In this satire, it’s 1990 in Colombo when queer photographer Maali Almeida wakes up in the celestial visa office. Well, his consciousness wakes up, while the rest of him — his actual body — is rotting in the Beira Lake. He has no idea who killed him, and the widespread, varied violence of the time makes the suspect list long. To add to the drama of it all, he has only seven moons to lead two loved ones to photos that will change the course of Sri Lanka.

Tell me you wouldn’t read this cover in a bookstore or at a library and have to pick it up. And the title is pretty spot on. Cinnamon is drunk when she saves the shifter demon Fallon, and after he follows her home and tells her of the evil goddess that has reduced demons to zombie-like states, she accompanies him to free his people. She helps him free some other things, too, if you know what I mean. This is a fun, funny, steamy monster romance with a Black female lead (in other words, you should read it ASAP). Bonus points for Cinnamon’s siblings being named Chili and Cumin.

I’m a plebeian and have never read any McCarthy books, but I’ve heard they can be pretty out there as a general rule. This one seems to have core elements that tickle my fancy. It follows Bobby Western, a salvage diver, who, in 1980 Mississippi, has found a sunken jet. Among the wreckage are nine bodies, but what isn’t there is more where the story lies. The black box is missing and so is the 10th passenger, and people are thinking Bobby had something to do with it. This may sound like a kind of so-so set up so far, intriguing but not quite out there, but what made me do a double take with this one was that 1) both Bobby and his sister are mathematical geniuses who are descendants of a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and 2) he’s in love with his sister who spends her last days in an asylum.