Category: In Reading Color

Kuang is the award-winning author of another big and juicy door stopper, The Poppy War (which I very much enjoyed listening to on audiobook, by the way). In Babel, she turns her talents towards the darkness inherent in Western academia. Robin, who was orphaned by cholera, was brought from China to London by a professor and studied Chinese, Ancient Greek, and Latin. His efforts through the years are so that he can enroll in a prestigious Oxford University program called “Babel.” The program’s location, the Babel tower, serve as the world’s translation center, and the reason Britain is able to maintain power. This power comes as a result of the unique magic system of this world, known as silver-working. With silver-working, meanings lost in translation are manifested with enchanted silver bars. Robin eventually realizes how much his own country — and others — suffer because of this magic and Britain’s use of it, and must decide if he wants to serve that power or disrupt it.

In New Delhi, in the wee hours of the morning, five people die in a car accident. The luxury car involved belongs to a rich man, who it turns out wasn’t driving. And the servant who is actually in the car doesn’t know what’s happening. This event kickstarts a shifting and intricately woven narrative that takes place in contemporary India, where wealth, corruption, and violence center around the powerful Wadia family. Characters become connected as they navigate greed, rising through the ranks, and morality in this tome that’s part family saga, part crime thriller.

This historical fiction sprawls over a host of characters — gangsters, CIA agents, journalists, and more — after gunmen try to kill Bob Marley in 1976 Jamaica, wounding others in the process. As the singer seeks refuge in England, readers follow the country in the decades following. Through varied perspectives, James paints a full and complex picture of Jamaica’s complexities, from the ’70s to the much-changed climate of the ’90s.

Sentaro’s dream of becoming a writer seems to fade more and more everyday. With his criminal record and drinking habit, all he seems able to to do for now is sell dorayaki, a Japanese pancake filled with sweet bean paste. His life gets an inspired jolt, though, when he meets Tokue. She’s disabled because of a disease that has filled her life with a lot of suffering, but despite her past, she makes the best sweet bean paste. She starts to teach Sentaro how to achieve sweet bean past perfection, and as they get to know each other better, the pasts they’re both trying to hide start to reveal themselves.

This poetry collection screams “Spring!” to me lately because of the cover, yes, but also because of its focus on the senses, which I think is vital for a spring book. After living through the cold and monochromatic winter, spring is a time for our senses to reawaken and start to differentiate between stimuli again. And it’s through the senses that Powles explores the liminal spaces between languages, memories of a biracial childhood, and the joy of food and nature.

Beautiful covers aside, this YA novel is giving spring because of its plant magic (!). High schooler Briseis is a magical girl. She can will seeds to grow and manipulate plants in other ways. But she keeps her magic hidden from other people, except for her adoptive mothers, and doesn’t explore her power much out of fear. When her biological aunt Circe, who she never knew she had, dies, she leaves her a run down estate in upstate New York. Once the family of three makes the move, it’s at the estate that Bri learns more of her family, and therefore herself, while making tinctures for people, even as she fends off odd groups and mysterious women. This is like the perfect mix of Greek mythology and plant magic with gothic sensibilities. Kalynn Bayron is basically an auto buy for me at this point.

At 640 pages, this is the exact opposite of The Scourge Between Stars, but it’s good to become immersed in a fantasy that’s long af from time to time, you know? Here, three women, who are separated by a stringent social class based on the color of blood, spell the end of oppression. Sylah and Anoor were switched at birth, with the hopes of Sylah being one of the descendants of the magical elites to burn down the social hierarchy from the inside. The two women, with the help of Syrah’s friend Hassa — who is part of the invisible, enslaved class — set the stage for the empire to fall. The world building in this one is immaculate and based on Ghanian and Arab folklore. Thankfully, the second entry into this series, The Battle Drum, is out this year in May.

In this multi award-nominated dark and chaotic novel, a rich Egyptian American woman visits her parents’ homeland where she meets a man who took photos during the Arab Spring. The two find themselves on the outskirts of modern Egypt society in many ways — she because she finds she can’t quite claim Egyptian as an identity, having grown up in the U.S.; and he because of the drug addiction that began after the revolution. The relationship turns violent, as they both try to use each other to compensate for what they lack.

Clint Smith, author of the award-winning How the Word is Passed, reflects on the changing powers of fatherhood in this latest collection of poetry. He explores how we are shaped by our families, as well as the pressures of society at large, but then this established form is disrupted when children are born. Once you become a parent, Smith explores how you start to see the world again, through a different perspective, and how this new view helps you grow with your child.

This YA novel combines vignettes and poems to tell the story of two Bribri brothers. One day Jay and Max rush to the aid of their cousin when they hear trouble in the woods. They find her and their high school’s popular soccer player, who they think is hurting her, and beat him so badly that other kids at school ostracize them and they have to go to a series of counseling sessions. The incident also makes them have an existential crisis — are they just as bad as their abusive father, who they can’t trust, even with their mother? As the brothers reckon with their internal struggles, they grow apart, but also realize that Bribri traditions may help them mend.

Jones ponders on the current state of the world and determines that we’ve been living in an apocalypse. The everyday stressors of our lives, like racism and grief, chip away at us little by little until we are in our own, personal dystopia. But there is sweetness here, too, even as Jones plumbs the depths.

This is another new poetry release that deals with the idea of apocalypses (surprise!) and what they mean for marginalized people. Like Jones, Choi’s poems show how the end of the world has always felt just around the corner for people subjected to colonialism, police brutality, and all the other descendants of colonialism. Where Jones’ collection is more self-based, Choi’s zooms out and crosses through time, looking at everything from the Korean Comfort Women of WWII to pop music.

Amber McBride absolutely kills it with her YA novels in verse. Her debut, Me (Moth) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In this January release, we meet Whimsy, who is in the hospital again for clinical depression. When she meets another former patient, Faerry, who is a Fae, the two start to see how interconnected their lives are. But then Faerry goes missing in the terrifying forest at the end of their street. Witches, princesses, and fairy tales lie in the path Whimsy must take to save him, but she’s also aided by some of the forest’s inhabitants, and by her own practice of Hoodoo.

While most of the books I feature in this newsletter are by authors of color, I will occasionally share a book by a non person of color that is either about a person of color or highly relevant to BIPOC communities. I’ve noticed there are a lot of non marginalized authors writing nonfiction about people of color in history, which is good, but also sometimes makes me wonder about representation and opportunity in academia, since I know it is severely lacking. That is another issue for another day, though.

Today, I’m recommending this much-anticipated new book by Matthew Desmond because it aims right for the so called morality that lies at the core of the Judeo-Christian American Dream this country was founded on, and asks how it could sentence its most vulnerable citizens to poverty. The U.S. is the richest country on earth, but 1/8 of its children don’t have basic necessities, and the number of people without housing is astronomical. Desmond uses research and original reporting to show how the comfort afforded to some comes at the severe cost of others. Luckily, he also shares how to change it, recommending that we all become poverty abolitionists — a term I really appreciate because of how it calls back to slavery abolitionists (thereby drawing parallels between slavery and capitalism).

This and the next book fit so well with the first I mentioned because of how absolute and far reaching the system of privilege is in the U.S. Here, Thomas shows how, to save the environment, we have to look at racial discrimination and the communities it’s hurt. This is because Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately affected by environmental injustice, and only by uplifting their voices — and the voices of other BIPOC communities — will we truly be able to tackle issues threatening the planet.

Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about how living through COVID has been as a disabled, queer femme-presenting person. The fact that the world was made for non disabled people was made even more clear since the onset of the pandemic, but in this book, they imagine a world where the majority of people are disabled. They posit that disability justice and disability culture is vital to overcoming things like fascism, the environmental crisis, and other issues. They also talk about the care crisis, and how disabled people have supported each other, and how they can continue to.

This YA novel takes place around the time Rodney King was brutally beaten by police. Until that happens, Ashley is living well — she’s been spending her high school senior year at the beach and California’s sunny days are peaceful. But once people see the recording of the beating, and L.A. is thrown into chaos, her wealthy Black family suddenly becomes fractured and the friends she thought she had remind her that she’s Black before she’s anything else.

In this collection of stories, Zhang details what it’s like to grow up the daughter of Chinese immigrants in New York City. Zhang’s girls are shy, loving, cruel, and creative, but most of all, they are trying their best to make a space for themselves in the world. Though some of the 1960s Cultural Revolution in China is shown, the stories take place mostly in the ’90s.

This is the first of a series that actually started in the ’90s. In it, Jessica and David are happily married, but Jessica always feels that despite her husband’s seeming perfection, there’s something he’s withholding. Turns out that something is that David is a 400-year-old immortal who traded his humanity for immortality as part of an Ethiopian sect. Now, his sect wants David to leave his family. Instead, he tries to bring Jessica and their daughter into the fold. But Jessica may not be willing to make the sacrifice that’s required.

In the 1950s in Philly, Ruby Pearsall is 15 and on track to attend college, thereby breaking a generational curse that plagues her family. But a love affair threatens to keep her moored in poverty. Then there’s Eleanor Quarles, who has married into an elite family in D.C. and struggles to fit in. Ruby’s and Eleanor’s paths intersect in interesting ways as they both make life-altering decisions.

In Stealing, Pulitzer Prize finalist Margaret Verble writes of Kit Crockett’s quiet life as a Cherokee girl in the ’50s. Since her mother died, and her father has been eaten up with grief, Kitt has spent her days reading Nancy Drew stories, fishing, and gardening, until she’s taken away from her family and people and sent to a Christian boarding School. There, she experiences not only horrible abuse, but also an intentional loss of self. But by writing of her experiences, she remembers and resists.

Includes: Dust Tracks on a Road, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, The Complete Stories, Every Tongue Got to Confess, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, Mule Bone, andTheir Eyes Were Watching God.

In these stories, together for the first time ever and collected from lost periodicals and archives, Hurston writes of Black life — from migration to love to everyday struggles.

Sixteen-year-old twins Cristina and Clement Trudeau hail from a long line of powerful magic users, but their family is currently in disarray. Their father has died, their mother is sick, and the twins aren’t even on speaking terms. This changes once they realize their mother isn’t actually sick, but cursed, and it’ll take the two of them coming together to figure out who on the magic council — the same one from which their family was dethroned — wants to destroy their family. Doing so will require they solve a 30-year-old murder before another magical massacre happens in the city of New Orleans.

We’re taken through the lives of Evelyn, a Creole woman growing up in New Orleans during WWII, and her descendants. For Evelyn, whose family is the apex of Black high society, a difficult choice between love and privilege must be made; then in the ’80s, her daughter Jackie contends with her husband’s drug addiction; and finally, Jackie’s son T.C. leaves jail after Hurricane Katrina to find New Orleans a totally different city than he remembered. As we see how their city changes around them, we see, too, how racism shifts and takes on new forms.

This YA novel just gives. It’s a historical romance set in the early 1900s centered around the Davenports, a wealthy Black family in Chicago whose fortune was made by William Davenport, a formerly enslaved man who became an entrepreneur. Amongst the lavish parties, servants, lush surroundings, and societal expectations sit the Davenport siblings and their friends — all seeking out love, forbidden and not. Beautiful Olivia is the oldest and prepared to get married for the family, but then meets a charming civil rights leader. Then there’s Helen, who likes fixing cars, and her sister’s suitor. Amy-Rose and Ruby are both friends to the girls, and both have a crush on John Davenport. This is fun, historical mess that’s based on the real Patterson family, and shows a time in Black history that I always want to see more of.

While Kareena would love to have a relationship like her parents’, romance isn’t exactly her strong suit. Despite this, her father strikes a deal with her — she gets her mother’s house if she becomes engaged in four months. Thing is, the only man who’s featured prominently in her life lately is the TV doctor Dr. Verma, whom she had an argument with that went viral. The same argument that has dried up funding for the community center he wants to build. But Kareena’s aunties show up with another deal — if Dr. Verma can convince Kareena to marry him, they’ll pay for the center. Listen, sometimes you just need your aunties to bribe someone to be your fiancé.

Kris and D’Vaughn’s relationship is fake, but they can’t let anyone know. They’re on the reality show Instant I Do, where they have to convince their friends and family that they’re getting married to each other to win $100,000. While each of them has their own reasons for being on the show — Kris is looking for her big TV break, while D’Vaughn wants an extravagant way to come out to her family — they both realize that there may be more to this thing that they initially thought.

Here’s one that’ll put a little dash of magic in your romance. Mika Moon is one of the last remaining witches in Great Britain. To keep this secret — thereby staying safe — she’s lived a life of isolation, even from other witches. But she also posts videos online claiming to be a witch, assuming people won’t take her seriously. Well, someone does, and he invites her to his house to teach three young witches how to better use their power. Mika takes him up on his offer, despite her better judgment, and discovers a place to belong. She also discovers thorny Librarian Jamie, who also lives in the house. New possibilities for existing with others present themselves to Mika, but so does danger…