Author: Tirzah Price

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram.

Content warning: depression, discussion of suicide, bullying

Darius the Great is Not Okay is a memorable book about Darius, an Iranian-American teen who loves tea, lives with depression, and struggles with feeling like he’s “enough” no matter where he goes. When the book begins, Darius is being bullied at school and his white dad doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. The lack of empathy is frustrating for Darius because his dad is the only other one in the family also taking medication for clinical depression, so Darius thinks he’d understand how hard life can be. Then the family receives word that Darius’s maternal grandfather, who lives in Iran, is sick. The family drops everything and travels across the world, and Darius and his little sister meet his mother’s extended family in person for the first time. In Iran, Darius finds more reasons to stick out–at home, he’s too Persian, and here he’s too American. But he also meets Sohrab, a boy his age who lives next door to his grandparents, and in Sohrab, Darius finds his first real friend.

This book is surprisingly funny amidst all of its soul-searching and family angst, and Darius is a winning protagonist. He’s warm and sensitive, inquisitive and funny, vulnerable and so honest. I adored his love of tea, how he loves his little sister, and his bravery in connecting with people in a new place. This book also offers a great perspective on mental illness–at the beginning of the book, Darius’s depression is managed responsibly with medication, and a lot of his hang ups have to do with his relationship with his dad, who seems so distant to Darius that he refers to him by his first name. The mental illness discussion is further explored when Darius discovers that his Persian family views mental illness very differently, and he has to rely on what he knows to be true about his depression–that it’s manageable with medication–in order to stay strong. The friendship angle is so delightful. It doesn’t quite verge into the territory of romance, but the deep understanding that Darius and Sohrab share is uplifting and allows Darius to learn to be okay with who he is, and who he isn’t. This is a YA book, but I recommend it for fans of great family stories that get to the heart of cultural differences, mental illness, and what it means to find self-acceptance. It’s also great for readers who loved Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

Bonus: I listened to the audio, and it was narrated wonderfully by Michael Levi Harris. Plus, a sequel is on the horizon! Darius the Great Deserves Better will hit shelves on August, so now’s the time to read this great book!

Happy reading!

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

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Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust.

Content warning: None that I can recall!

Calling all fairy tale retelling fans! This is one of the best Snow White tales that I’ve ever read. Mina is a young woman with a heart of glass–her sorcerer father replaced her real heart and she grew up unaware, until one fateful day when she realizes just how different she is from other people. When her father secures them a place at court, Mina becomes convinced that she’s incapable of love, so the next best thing is being loved–so she’ll make the king fall for her. But marrying the king means becoming a stepmother to Lynet, the young princess.

Lynet has grown up in the shadow of her dead mother, pampered and over-protected when all she wants to do is run and explore. She adores no one more than her beautiful stepmother Mina, but when her father makes Lynet queen of the Southern Territories–where Mina is from–and then suffers a tragic accident, she sees that her stepmother is full of anger and hate, and she must flee her only home in order to survive.

This is a beautifully told, magical book about discovering who you truly are, and learning to be at peace with what you find. The fantasy world is also lush and intriguing, from a northern kingdom that’s destined to live in ice and snow, to a beautiful and exciting southern territory with universities, people, and exciting new opportunities. Bashardoust also rejects the idea of a prince character altogether, and instead creates a fascinating female surgeon who is keen to study medicine, and who intrigues Lynet to no end–it’s not much of a spoiler to say there’s a blossoming romance there! I loved how neither of the main characters is perfect–Mina’s guiding belief is that she’s unlovable, so she neglects to see just how much Lynet truly loves her, and Lynet believes that she’s destined to be just like her dead mother, failing to understand how she can bravely forge her own path. Bashardoust subverts the evil stepmother archetype by giving her a backstory and making her lovable, even if she doesn’t think she is, and the resolution to this story is so memorable that I can’t think of Snow White the same way ever again.

Bonus: The audiobook performance by Jennifer Ikeda is excellent, but I’m torn–I think I would love to experience this novel in print, since the language is beautiful and worth lingering over! Plus, look for Bashardoust’s newest fantasy book, based on Persian mythology, Girl, Serpent, Thorn out in July!

Happy reading!

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich.

Content warning: Talk of genocide, alcoholism, sexual abuse/rape, brutality

I’ve not read Louise Erdrich’s entire (extensive!) backlist, but I picked up her newest book recently and I was completely blown away. Set in 1953 on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, this book follows Thomas, a night watchman, and Patrice, a young woman looking for her sister. Thomas guards the local jewel bearing plant at night, where he has plenty of time to correspond with various members of the Chippewa Nation as part of his job as council member. When he learns that Congress wants to revoke their treaties under the guise of setting the people “free” and selling their land out from under them, Thomas is alarmed and knows they must fight it. Patrice works at the plant, but her worries are a bit more personal–she’s scared for her older sister, who moved to Minneapolis and hasn’t contacted her since. Thomas and Patrice’s stories intertwine with others in their community as Thomas looks for a way to fight for their treaties, and Patrice’s eyes are opened to the dangers beyond her world.

All of Erdrich’s books are powerful, but this one especially took my breath away. She does such a brilliant job of setting the scene and she effortlessly contextualized so many historical events within the narrative. The people living on Turtle Mountain in the 1950s aren’t that far removed from the genocide and violence that first arrived on their land in the 19th century, and many of the young characters are survivors of the government schools. The phantoms of the past haunt the characters both literally and figuratively throughout the novel as they figure out how to keep living, even as the federal government wants to wash their hands of them. One thing that never fails to impress me about Erdrich’s writing is how she can write about such atrocities with a perfectly measured magical touch, so that you know exactly what she’s talking about without her ever having to spell it out for you, and as a result you feel what the characters are experiencing rather than simply absorb the facts of countless cruelties. This is a really powerful book that explores the past, but is a good reminder that these struggles aren’t over–they just keep repeating themselves.

Bonus: I listened to the audiobook version, which is narrated by Louise Erdrich herself, and it was a fantastic experience.

Happy reading,

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn!

Content warning: Chronic illness, nothing else that I can recall.

If you’re a Janeite who also likes speculative fiction of the mind-bending variety, this is a must-read for you! Rachel and Liam are two travelers who arrive in London in 1815 with carefully prepared aliases and the seams of their clothing sewn with a small fortune in bank notes. They’re from the future, where the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics has discovered time travel and engages missions to the past–not to change history, but to study it. Rachel is a doctor who travels between disaster and war zones, and Liam is a famous stage actor. Their mission is complex, but has the potential to be groundbreaking back home: Befriend Henry Austen, a banker whose business is about to go under, and gain access to his sister, Jane. From there, they intend to steal Jane Austen’s unpublished manuscript, The Watsons.

This is a high-concept premise with a lot of heart. Rachel is our protagonist and narrator, and although this book begins with their arrival in the past, she seamlessly weaves in fascinating glimpses to her troubled home timeline (environmental disaster has brutally changed the landscape, and sentimentality for the past drives big endeavors) in between interesting tidbits about how to pass as a lady of the Regency era. Finding and befriending Jane Austen is a feat equal to any of the plots of her famous novels, with tense drawing room scenes, secret notes, and intriguing alliances behind closed doors. Flynn doesn’t sugarcoat what it was like to live in the early 19th century, but the advantage of a time traveler’s perspective is that Flynn gives the reader fascinating historical context for life in 1815 without being pedantic.

But what makes this book extra special isn’t necessarily the concept of time travel to meet Jane Austen, but the question of what if? Rachel and Liam have the opportunity to influence history, to try and save Jane Austen from an early death, even if it goes against their orders. Their dilemma puts them into an ethical gray area, and has them meditating about what it means to be famous after death, what artists owe the world, and how art endures. I love the journey that this book takes readers on–the destination might be unexpected, but the trip across centuries is memorable!

Bonus: I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by one of my favorite narrators, Saskia Maarleveld! She switches seamlessly between English, American, and Irish accents within scenes, making it a really fantastic performance!

Happy reading,

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson.

Content warning: Home invasion, some violence–sorry, I don’t remember anything else!

American Spy is one of my favorite books of 2019, and even a full year later I still cannot shut up about this book! It’s about Marie Mitchell, a Black FBI agent working in the 1980s. Her ambitions are high, but her career has stalled out thanks to racism and sexism in her home office, and she’s not really sure what the future holds for her. Then she’s recruited by the CIA for a one-off mission that turns into an ongoing, overseas assignment: spying on Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, first on his U.S. visit and then in his own country. Marie is cautious, but she takes the job. Thomas is intellectually engaging, charismatic, and sensitive, a born leader despite his tendency towards Communist values. It’s not long before Marie finds herself agreeing with his politics more often than not, and increasingly uneasy about the level of U.S. meddling with foreign affairs…and when violence breaks out, she must act quickly to establish where her loyalties lie.

This is an absolutely stellar spy thriller, and I’m so excited about it because it centers a Black woman–in the ’80s and ’90s, no less! It’s also beautifully written, structured as Marie’s letters to her young children, written in the ’90s as she looks back on her choices to get involved with the mission to spy on Sankara, and the fallout which persists to her present day. There’s also a strong subplot involving Marie’s sister, whose career choices inspired Marie’s journey to the FBI, and whose mysterious death has haunted her for years. This book is intense, but not in the traditional spy thriller way. There aren’t endless shoot-out scenes and high speed car chases, but there are deeply unsettling meetings, mysterious strangers, and shady dealings that force Marie to question her moral compass, the motivations of every one around her, and what it means to be a good person, a good spy, a good mother, and a good American. If you’re looking for a deeply human spy novel, then you cannot go wrong with this book. Bonus: I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated brilliantly by Bahni Turpin, one of my favorite narrators.

Happy reading!
Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.