Category: In Reading Color

Daniel’s young world got a sudden shock when her family moved from Nigeria to the cold suburbs of England. She got another shock when they uprooted again, this time relocating to the Southern U.S. With each move and each effort to adjust to her changing environments, she lost a little of her mother culture. In this poetic memoir, she wrestles with this upbringing and all the differences in religion, race, and class that converged upon it.

This one is also about a move, but not as big of one. Here, 17 year old Avery’s mother moves them from D.C. to Georgia because her grandmother is dying. Her grandmother isn’t very welcoming, and neither is the town, but Avery is still able to find friends in Simone and Jade. Turns out the Avery’s new home is also riddled with secrets — from Jade’s mother’s unsolved murder case to Avery’s family’s history within the town — and finding them out will come at a cost.

This collections’ award-winning editors have assembled a breathtaking anthology of science fiction and fantasy from Africa and its diaspora. Among the 32 original stories are a tale of a supercomputer that stores the minds of the country’s ancestors, and another in which the daughter of a rain goddess inherits her powers, which are needed to save the world. There are some familiar names among the list of contributors, like Tananarive Due, and many other ones that are new to me, but who I’m excited to discover.

In this YA novel, the towns of Bayside and Hamilton are separated — both racially and physically — by train tracks. When Zach, a white kid from Philly, crosses the tracks to meet his musical idol, a famous jazz musician, he also meets Capri. Capri, like her brother Justin, plans to escape her city, which has become complacent in racial segregation. Her meeting Zach gives her hope that she can make it on Broadway as a dancer. But then Zach’s friend is murdered by a police officer and the teens suddenly find themselves in the middle of a racial feud between the two towns.

After Michelle Obama’s Becoming became (ha) one of the best selling books ever, she’s back with some tips on making it through the muck. She tackles issues like building healthy relationships — both at the personal and community-level — realizing your inherent worth, and dealing with self-doubt with a refreshing brand of optimism. I have to say I’m a little surprised that I haven’t been hearing a lot about this release, but it’s bound to be popular!

The new element known as Divinity is the power source for the most innovative technologies and a key to progress. But it can only be seen by the descendants of those who rebelled during Heaven’s War, now known as the Fallen. Although they have sole access to this valuable commodity, they are deemed as second-class citizens because of their having lost the war. When one of the Fallen, Mariel, is accused of murdering an upperclass Elect, her half sister Celeste will risk her life of privilege and take on the role of Advocatus Diaboli (Devil’s Advocate) to defend her sister. But of course, there are secrets that come to light, revealing things the powers that be don’t want coming out.

Every once in a while, I come across books that feel so perfectly for me. Even Though I Knew the End is one such book, with its ’40s setting, warlock private eye, endearing queer romance, and deals with demons. Years ago, Elena sold her soul to save her brother. Now, with mere days left before she’s dragged to hell, she’s offered a job that, upon completion, would mean she can keep her soul and stay with the woman she loves. She only has three days, though, to catch Chicago’s most notorious serial killer and save herself.

Drew just lost her granny and unexpectedly inherited her bookstore. While having one’s own bookstore sounds like a dream for many, Drew is not much of a reader, and even prefers *gasp* film adaptions to reading books *clutches pearls*. So on top of grieving for her grandmother, she’s also trying to run a business that she’s not used to. When she meets romance writer Jasper, he’s determined to help her see the joy in books, and proposes an exchange: he makes a must-read book list, and she shows him around Denver. As their relationship develops, it gets help from the resident book club called “The Dirty Birds,” which is populated by delightfully meddlesome older ladies. This is definitely a cute lil bookish romp.

Kwasi is both excited and unsettled from his family moving to the opposite side of London. On the one hand, the new house is big but on the other, there is a new school with new kids to contend with. When he stumbles upon the secondhand store called the Chest of Small Wonders, he finds a place in his new world where he belongs and an unexpected friendship forms between him and Rupert, the shop owner whose wife died years ago.

Yes, I also noticed how both newly released books I chose today are brilliantly yellow (orange yellow?). It’s clearly this week’s color theme!

As for Maggie, she goes to a town known as Bell River to help run her best friend’s bookstore that isn’t doing so great. She soon learns why: the local literary society wants to keep the bookstore selling older books, as they think that would be more benefiting of the town’s rich literary history. Problem is, people aren’t trying to buy books like that often. So, Maggie starts selling and discussing books people actually want to read in an underground book club. But then she discovers a town secret that could really muck things up.

I feel like this will be the perfect, cute little bookish cozy romance to snuggle up with as temperatures drop.

This is the second in Lau’s Donut Fall in Love series. In it, opposites in the form of the funny and charming actor Melvin Lee and talented artist Vivian must forget their differences for the sake of their best friends getting married. As they each do their part to make the wedding work, something else starts to work, if you know what I mean.

It’s 1964 in Mississippi and people are literally dying to help others attain basic civil rights. When 22 year old Violet Richards kills a white man in self-defense, she knows she has to leave or risk ’60s Southern “justice.” When the police show up at Violet’s sister Marigold’s door — whose dreams of law school may be delayed due to an unexpected pregnancy — Marigold decides it’s best to leave, too. She heads to the North, trying to outrun the murder case as well as the social shame that comes with being an unwed single mother. What neither sister knows is there’s a man shrouded in darkness who’s hot on their trail.

Schweblin is at the forefront of Latin American writers and this book is a finalist for this year’s National Book Awards for Translated literature. Through looking at houses, and all that they represent, Schweblin unnerves and calls out the ghosts, trauma, and other trespassers that pop up in domestic life. After this one, pick up Fever Dream for a trippp.

This is another wonderful YA novel steeped in history by Randi Pink — who also wrote Angel of Greenwood, a historical novel about the Tulsa Massacre. We Are the Scribes follows Ruth Fitz, a teen girl whose family is heavy into activism. Her mother is a powerful senator fighting for change, her father a professor of Black American history, and her sister is already earning a name for herself within the community as an activist. Ruth sits a little outside of her family, though, as someone who isn’t as activist-oriented and just wants to write. That is, until something tragic makes her not want to write any more. One day she starts getting parchment letters sealed with a label reading “We are the scribes” from Harriet Jacobs. A part from being random — parchment letters, sis?! — receiving letters from the person who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl makes Ruth feel like she’s dreaming.

This follows five generations of Trung women, a Vietnamese family based in New Orleans and Vietnam. This stands out amongst similar family sagas, though, because it goes backwards in time instead of forwards. Starting in the present day, we see how former beauty queen Xuan Trung obsessively tries to map out her daughters’ futures, only for them to forge paths that are nothing like what their immigrant parents expected for them. Throughout the novel, they learn of the secrets of their ancestors, and how everything from beauty pageants to plantations led them to the Americas.

I’ve been excited to talk about this one for a while. In it, Alice Sun struggles with her status as a scholarship kid at an elite international boarding school in Beijing. She finds that one day her figurative feelings of being invisible turn into her actually being invisible. And, once her parents tell her they can longer afford to pay for her tuition that isn’t covered by the scholarship, she decides to monetize her new powers. She uses her invisibility to find out messy life details of her fellow students, but the seemingly small tasks she takes on turn more criminal — slippery slope and all that — and she’ll have to decide just how much her conscience is worth.

Bird is 12-years-old and has been living under an increasingly oppressive American government with his father, a former linguist. In addition to censoring, authorities have just started being allowed to take children away from people who disagree with them, many of whom are of Asian descent. When Bird gets a mysterious letter, he begins on a journey to find his absent mother, whose poetry he has spent years distancing himself from. The gag is that this premise doesn’t sound too far off from reality.

I love novels written by poets, and Belcourt has won awards for his poetry. In this latest book, a queer Indigenous doctoral student wavers on the border between his old life, his childhood on the reservation, and the new academic one he’s trying to establish. Throughout the book, he’s reminded of Jack, a cousin who was in a toxic lifestyle involving police and drugs, an outcome that is not rare for Indigenous people living under the legacy of colonialism. He soon finds out that the escape he was hoping academia would be also has its consequences for people of color.

Zahra and Maryam are two opposites who gravitate to each other in Karachi, Pakistan. The two become best friends and grow up with each other under a dictatorship. Decades later, the women have each made their own mark on London, but when certain people from their past reappear in their lives, the two women’s friendship is challenged.

I love to see books that are centered around platonic friendship.

That cover! I think it perfectly encapsulates the overall vibes of this book. It’s about Marion Shaw, who grew up in abject poverty, and who is desperate to finally get out of it. She sees an odd ad in the newspaper looking for a bloodmaid and figures it’ll give her as good a chance as any to get out of her current situation. Well, the position involves allowing wealthy nobles to drink her blood. In exchange, she’ll be taken care of. So she applies and becomes a bloodmaid for the House of Hunger, where she gets swept up in bloody hedonism. She also falls prey to the charms of her mistress, Countess Lisavet, who inspires admiration and fear equally. She becomes especially interested in Marion, but when other bloodmaids start going missing, Marion must learn what’s going on in the noble house before she’s unable to leave.