Author: Kendra Winchester

This week on the main site, I shared “7 Nonfiction Books for Disability Pride Month,” which included one of my favorite disability memoirs, A Face for Picasso. Henley and her twin sister were born with Crouzon Syndrome, a condition where the bones of their skulls fused too soon. They spent much of their childhood in the hospital, undergoing dozens of procedures to save their lives and to try to make their faces more “aesthetically pleasing.”

Henley gives us a look into her childhood. Of trying to just be a kid when the world around her constantly reminded her that she looked different than everyone else. Adults doubted her intelligence and other kids made fun of her and her sister. But we also see Henley’s joy of playing with her friends and the love she received from her family.

As Henley reaches young adulthood, she finds herself transitioning from a child where adults made a lot of the decisions about her health to an adult who makes her own decisions about her body and what procedures she wants to undergo. She discovers a new confidence in herself and her body.

In her performance of the audiobook, Henley gives us additional emotional insight into her story. I cried when she cried. I felt joy when she felt joy recounting her happiest memories.

The Costa Book of the Year, The Mermaid of Black Conch, is finally available in the US! This novel follows David, a man who rescues a woman caught on a fisherman’s hook. Once out of the water the mermaid begins to change. David must work to help hide the mermaid and tries to help her adjust to life on land.

I love Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, and I’ve been so excited for her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Her memoir goes back to her childhood in Columbia. Her grandfather was a community healer, a man said to possess incredible abilities. Rojas Contreras examines her family legacy and what her role in the family mysteries might be.

In the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, we once again return to the world of Panga. The monk Sibling Dex and the robot Mosscap return from their travels to try to live a life that is filled with friends and goes along with their principles.

Hannah Jones had a core group of friends in college. After one of her friends, April Clarke-Cliveden, is murdered, Hannah eventually marries April’s boyfriend. A decade after the murder, Hannah is expecting her first child. More secrets about April’s death are revealed, turning April’s world upside down.

The queen of historical fiction is back with her latest novel Sister Mother Warrior. This novel focuses on two women during the Haitian revolution. Marie-Claire Bonheur, the first Empress of Haiti, grew up a free Black woman with immense privilege. Gran Toya is a warrior born in West Africa and brought to Haiti as an enslaved woman. Both women have an important role to play in Haiti’s revolution.

I loved I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, so I’ve been highly anticipating Erika L. Sánchez’s new memoir, Crying in the Bathroom. Her memoir discusses everything from white feminism to depression as she shares more about what it was like for her growing up in Chicago as the daughter of Mexican immigrants.

Chloé Cooper Jones is an academic working on her second PhD when she finds herself in a bar watching two men debate on whether or not she should exist. Oddly, she feels removed from the situation. How many times has she had to prove she’s worthy of existence? Far too many to count.

Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a condition that impacted her height and way of walking. Moving through the world as a visibly disabled person has meant Jones faces ableist comments from strangers on a daily basis. But this moment in the bar felt different. Was it because they were trying to be academic or did she just expect more of them? Jones starts searching for answers. She travels the world and enters the field of journalism just for a new challenge.

From its first few paragraphs, Jones’ prose captures your attention. As she performed the text, I couldn’t help but think of how fantastic her prose is, how each word has its place. Jones forced me to think about disability in a new way, questioning the way disabled people are forced to move through the world.

Ever since I finished this book, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. There’s an entire section of disabled motherhood, and Jones shares what it was like for her to surprise doctors when she wanted to have her baby. Admittedly, I found myself tearing up at different parts. Though Jones and I have different conditions, we both share many similar experiences, and I appreciated her thought-provoking takes on how those experiences impacted her life.

In his debut collection, Penobscot author Morgan Talty writes about a Native community in Maine. These twelve stories feature characters encountering mysterious things like a jar filled with a curse or a friend stuck with his hair frozen in the snow. Everyone and their mother’s brother has been gushing about this book and I can’t wait to listen!

Matt Rowland Hill grew up in the UK as a pastor’s kid. As he grows older, Hill realizes he doesn’t share the same faith as his conservative parents. Unsure of where to turn next, Hill finds himself feeling stuck, addicted to whatever he can get his hands on and attending too many funerals of his friends who have overdosed.

On TikTok, there’s nothing like Mamadou Ndiaye explaining his latest fascination with yet another ferocious creature that will be more than happy to end you. Narrated by Ndiaye himself, listeners get to experience the audiobook equivalent of his videos on TikTok.

Waking from a strange dream, Elango feels the urge to create something new like nothing else he has crafted. The potter constructs a terracotta horse, but then doesn’t know what to do with it. Should he display it in a temple? Or maybe give it to the woman he loves? Whatever decision he makes, he knows that from the moment he makes the horse, Elango’s life will be forever changed.

The author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is back with her new novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Sam Masur and Sadie Green start an epic partnership to create their masterpiece, Ichigo, a game that’s everything they always wanted. The novel spans thirty years, showing us the long after effects of their work. I’m always here for a novel about gaming, so I’m thrilled for this novel to finally be out in the world.

With over one million users, The StoryGraph is a reading tracker that allows bookworms to record their reading habits in a wide range of ways. The StoryGraph will then take this date and create easy to understand graphs and charts. I love how easy StoryGraph is to use!

Just in time for this year’s Audiobook Appreciation Month in June, The StoryGraph released its new audiobook feature that allows users to track their listening. You can track your audiobook listening using several different data points, allowing audiobook lovers to customize their experience.

When I asked Nadia, The StoryGraph’s Founder, what challenges they ran into when creating the feature, she said that they had to consider the different ways that The StoryGraph’s users wanted to track their audiobooks and what data users wanted to see. This led them to use a more customizable approach to give their users the best experience possible.

In the future, keep your eye out for new updates from The StoryGraph, like their upcoming book club feature. Plus, they have a new dark mode and a new book scanning feature in the works too!

A family moves from Taiwan to America where the entire family lives in one tiny apartment. Anna thought that moving to “the beautiful” (what they call America in Chinese) would be like a dream. But so far, it’s just been disappointing. Anna can’t help but wonder, is all of her family’s sacrifice really worth it?

Perfect for fairytale lovers, Elsewhere is set in a town where it’s just accepted that some mothers disappear. Vera grows up knowing that for her, motherhood is inevitable. But when the time comes, she has nothing but questions for what her own experience with motherhood will bring.

Set in two time periods, Our Crooked Hearts possesses that creepy magical vibe Melissa Albert is known for. In the present day, Ivy is spending her summer break in the suburbs running into creepy figures and disturbing ruins with strangers. In the past, Dana is a city girl looking to connect with the supernatural with the help of her two friends. These two stories come together in the darkest, most delightfully sinister way possible.

Bernadette and Melvin are a Black couple just trying to make a life for themselves in America in the 1960s. But after being attacked, the couple moves to Ghana in hopes of escaping the racial violence. There they meet Kwesi, a charming man who seems to rule the night life in their new city. When Bernadette experiences an immediate attraction to Kwesi, Melvin begins to worry that he might lose the woman he loves most.

Cat lives in her high school. In fact, she and several other students are trapped. As time passes, they begin to slowly transform into something else. None of them remember why exactly they are there. They just know that if they don’t figure out how to leave, they may lose what’s left of their memories.

After reading Book Lovers by Emily Henry, I knew I wanted more love stories about people in the book industry. As a huge history of publishing nerd, there’s just something about people who love books falling in love that hits the white hot center of my wheelhouse. (I’m sure that it has nothing to do with the fact that I married a guy in my creative writing program in college.)

Izzy feels stuck in her job as an editor’s assistant. As one of the only Black people in her office, she often feels tokenized for the benefit of her white coworkers. So when an opportunity occurs to prove herself and get promoted, she jumps at the chance. That’s how she finds herself on the front steps of the house of Beau Towers, one of the most difficult authors from her publishing house. Beau’s memoir is way overdue, but if Izzy can get him to turn in his pages, she feels she just might finally get noticed by her boss.

I loved this Beauty and the Beast retelling that centers around books. Jasmine Guillory is already one of my favorite romance authors, and her love for her characters shines through Izzy and Beau’s story. Guillory’s characters are full of life, encompassing all its complications and messiness. The two lovebirds have to each work through their own issues before they can finally create a life together.

Sarah Hollis does a brilliant job of narrating the audiobook edition, embodying Izzy’s narrative voice perfectly. I love when a narrator can get me completely engrossed in the story.

A  world of goblins lives beneath the city of York. May comes from a family of witches. But when she falls for a goblin girl, her entire world is turned upside down. Years later, Lou, May’s niece, has no idea about her family’s history. When one of her family members is abducted by goblins, Lou must uncover her family’s past to save her loved one.

The bestselling thriller writer Riley Sager is back with The House Across the Lake, a suspenseful story about an actress who finds herself wrapped up in her neighbors’ lives. Casey flees the paparazzi and hides out in her family’s vacation house in Vermont. She spends her days watching her neighbors, a husband and wife who seem to have a perfect life. But as she views their life through her binoculars, she realizes their relationship might not be as perfect as it appears.

The first in a trilogy, The Final Strife follows three young women whose friendship threatens to bring down the empire as they know it. Sylah and Anoor come from very different parts of society, but their love knows no bounds. Hassa is used to being invisible to the privileged, but the thing she hated most about herself becomes a priceless skill.

Ghanaian American Angela Appiah has tried to be the perfect daughter. She has a great career, an amazing boyfriend, and suitable friends. But when her boyfriend dumps her and her friends pull away, Angie feels like her life is out of control. Plus, she never planned for Ricky Gutierrez to come into her life. And she certainly didn’t plan to fall in love with him.

Ed Yong, the author of We Contain Multitudes, is back with another book about the fascinating living world around us. This time, Yong shares how animals experience the world around them, and how animal senses are often very different from our own. This book is perfect for any animal lover or science enthusiast.

Lucie Yi’s plans for a family with her boyfriend implode after their breakup. Deciding that she isn’t going to wait any longer, she decides to become a parent with a platonic co-parent. When she begins looking for a co-parent, she finds Collin, a man who checks all of her boxes. While she hoped that they could start a family together, she never expected to fall in love.