Category: In Reading Color

Trust is Pulitzer-nominated Diaz’s second novel. It’s actually four stories told in distinct styles and voices about capitalism, gender, love, and mental illness. The first, “Bonds,” has been likened to writings by Edith Wharton and follows a fictional character based on Andrew Bevel, and is written by Harold Vanner. Bevel survived the Wall Street crash of 1929 and became one of the richest men in the U.S.— and is, himself, also fictional (little bit of a story within a story, Book-ception situation going on here). Well, Bevel doesn’t care for Vanner’s portrayal of his life, and writes an unimaginative memoir in response (the drama!), which supplies the novel with its second story. The third is written by the daughter of an Italian anarchist in exile (more drama!) who is hired by a super messy Bevel and swallows her own ethics to help the magnate come for Vanner. The last story is from a journal written by Mildred, Bevel’s wife who suffered from mental illness, and whose writings give the story a bit of a twist.

If it seems a little confusing, it is a bit at first, but will make sense once you read it. It’s essentially giving multiple angles on a story of how one man came to be so rich even while the rest of the country entered into a depression, and all the people who were sacrificed for that to happen.

Siren Queen is about Luli Wei who is desperate to be a star in 1930s Hollywood. The industry she fights so hard to be a part of is one in which young female stars like her and her lovers are sacrificed and controlled. And one in which the only roles for outsider Chinese American girls are monsters. No matter, she plays the game and takes the roles given to her, navigating a world of dark and ancient magic.

Confession: I’m a Nghi Vo simp and am always down for her beautiful writing and magic realism, so there’s that…

Fuyuko Irie is a woman in her 30s who sees herself in a reflection one day and realizes that she’s not quite where she’d like to be in life (which reminds me of this). As a freelance editor living in a city where it’s hard to meet people, her social life only extends to interacting with her editor, Hijiri. She decides to stop making excuses for herself and steps outside of her comfort zone. By going to sign up for a class, she meets a man named Mitsutsuka who she starts meeting at a cafe regularly where they have conversations about the science of light.

As Mitsutsuka helps Fuyuko develop the changes she wants in life, so too do the women she knows, who are all quite different from each other. There is her editor, Hijiri, who is pro-sex and assertive, the more traditional Kyoko who dispproves of Hijiri, and Norioko whose marriage is in shambles. With poetic writing, Kawakami offers reflections on the nature of living and perception and how there’s no one right way to live as a woman.

The past few years have seen trauma being explored in interesting ways. For one, there’s the idea that it can be passed through generations, which is aptly referred to as generational trauma. Foo, an award-winning radio producer, comes to understand that her daily crying sessions and panic attacks are a result of complex PTSD (C-PTSD) as a result of trauma. With this memoir, she includes thorough research and interviews with experts to detail how she came to heal from inherited trauma, emotional and physical abuse, and abandonment by her parents.

Heera is a teenager growing up in the ’80s in North Carolina who feels suffocated by parents who immigrated from Bengali before she was born. She and her friends Marie and Marie’s brother Marco, dream of escaping to New York City, and engage in pickpocketing to make it happen. Petty thefts aren’t Heera’s only act of rebellion, though, as she and her friends paint anarchy symbols on water towers. Although Heera feels stifled by her community, it provides needed support when Marie is killed in a car accident, which is contrasted with Marco’s excessive freedom and eventual downfall. After the tragedy derails Heera’s plans, she finds another way to live in NYC and go to school, but it involves marrying a 26-year-old stockbroker. This a funny, sad, and lyrical coming-of-age story.

That cover! This is a YA, stand alone fantasy that I will warn you is a plague story. It’s the Black Plague, though! Lord Cassia is a young nobleman who comes to be imprisoned by the enemy because of said plague. He eventually gets out and returns to a home that has changed in many ways. For one, his castle now houses the royal court. Secondly, it seems like they brought their raggedy enemies with them. There’s an assassin on the loose who seems to be targeting those close to Queen Jehan, so Cassia teams up with the king’s younger sister, aspiring historian Lena, to uncover their identity. And Cassia can also see ghosts, so there’s that.

I remember seeing Viola Davis here and there in supporting roles in movies and TV shows before I noticed people recognizing her as one of the great actors of our time. She calls these roles “best friends to white women roles” in this memoir and tells how she had to do a string of them at one point due to a lack of other roles. Before she was even able to act, though, she was a child born on the South Carolinian plantation on which her grandparents were sharecroppers, and one who grew up poor in Rhode Island. She gets real about all that entailed. Really real. Like, abusive, alcoholic father and wetting the bed so much that you went to school smelling of urine real. She was a traumatized, misunderstood girl who suffered the effects of dire poverty as well as racism, but who was also inspired to pursue a dream by seeing someone who looked like her on TV. Through her memoir, Davis shows the importance of rejecting the narrative others paint around you, being honest, and letting go of shame in order to live authentically.

Also, if you follow Oprah’s book club, she’s made it a book club pick.

This is another retelling that reimagines the motivations for certain figures in mythology a la Circe. Although I’m not as familiar with the Indian mythology from the epic poem the Ramayana as I was with Ancient Greek mythology when I read Circe, I’m always here for female characters being reexamined. Here, Kaikeyi is raised on stories of gods and their benevolence only to have that dashed by the reality of her father banishing her mother and her own reduction to a thing to be married off and bear children. One day she learns of a magic she has that allows her to transforms herself into a warrior, thereby creating a space for independence for herself and hopefully other women in the kingdom.

She decides to become the third wife of King Dasharath’s on the promise that her son will inherit the throne instead of the rightful heir. Now, Kaikeyi isn’t really known as a hero in the epic poem, as she was the one to encourage the king to exile his son, the true heir Rama, for fourteen years. Instead of her reasons being to keep her own son on the throne, Patel shows that Kaikeyi, whom Rama addresses affectionally, only wished to teach the young prince the downfalls of patriarchy and was trying to establish balance for her kingdom to benefit all citizens.

I just finished reading all of the manga that the Demon Slayer anime hasn’t adapted yet *sobs in book hangover*, and I’m caught up on the Jujutsu Kaisen manga. I say all that to say that I’m super into Japanese folklore, especially as it relates to demons, or the yokai, as this book does. Instead of taking place in Japan, as the manga I mentioned do, The Fervor takes place in the U.S. in 1944 as the U.S. government is imprisoning citizens of Japanese descent for simply being Japanese. Meiko and her daughter Aiko are forcibly removed from Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. There, a mysterious disease starts to take hold. Suddenly, simple colds turn into aggression that can become lethal. The group of doctors that arrive to investigate provide the opposite of comfort and assurance, so Meiko and her daughter join forces with a reporter and a widower to find out exactly what is happening around them. There is a demon that Meiko learned about from childhood stories clawing its way onto her plane of existence, but there is also the already existing evils of racism and anti-Asian discrimination that the U.S. government displays on its own.

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

Forbidden City by Vanessa Hua

Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez

Never Cross a Highlander by Lisa Rayne 

Such Big Dreams by Reema Patel

When We Fell Apart by Soon Wiley

This is the Caldecott Honor winning true story of Mohammad Alaa Aljaleel, who decides to stay behind to help out in Aleppo, Syria when the war comes. As he starts to feel loneliness from his now empty neighborhood, he realizes the cats people had to leave behind are lonely, too. He starts to feed and love on them and soon more and more cats come. People all over the world hear about his story and help out and he’s able to get a cat shelter. Alaa gives tidbits of how life was in his town before the war in the form of notes throughout the book, painting the picture of a vibrant community before the war hit.

This is a YA novel in verse about Nima, who is fourteen-years-old, Muslim, and the daughter of an immigrant. Nima is in between two worlds— her mother’s home country and her current suburban home in the U.S.— neither of which she feels she truly belongs to. Haitham is her neighbor and her only friend, but one day he’s attacked in a hate crime and the chasm between her mother and her only seem to grow bigger as she learns more about her father and things that could have been.

Mina, a surgeon in her late 50s, has been booed up with her wife in Chicago for awhile now. When she gets a request from a friend to come help the non profit she’s working for, Mina flies to the refugee camp on the Greek island Lesbos. This is the closest she’s been to her home of Lebanon since she was rejected for being trans. There, she starts to bond with a Syrian woman whose cancer diagnosis she keeps hidden from her family. The story is told through Mina’s experiences treating patients and through an account she writes and directs at a Lebanese writer who convinced her to document what the refugee camp was like. Mina manages to mix a little humor in with the tragedy of displacement.

Hashimi uses beautiful writing to tell the story of how Sitara came to survive the 1978 Afghanistan coup. When she was ten, her father served as an advisor to the president. Once the presidential palace is attacked, her entire family is killed and only she survives with the help of a guard named Shair. She’s raised in America where she adopts a new name and studies hard to become a surgeon.Then, thirty years after the coup, she sees Shair again, this time as a patient, and traumatic memories resurface concerning who really killed her parents.

This just came out last week and is Vuong’s follow-up to his award-winning collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Where Night Sky had his father shot in the back and floating in the sea, Time Is a Mother has Vuong contending with his mother’s death. Here, time, trauma, language— and sometimes the lack thereof— all converge into a perplexing and at times paradoxical experience. These poems are deeply personal, even as form is experimented with.

Shire is a British poet born to parents who immigrated from Somalia. You may have heard of her because of Beyoncé, who featured her poetry in Lemonade. In other words, Shire is that girl. In her first full poetry collection— which also just came out last month— she draws inspiration from her own experiences and pop culture to explore motherhood, immigration, trauma, racism, sexism, and what it means to be a woman. Also make sure to pick up her chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.

In Brown’s award-winning third poetry collection, Greek mythology, Christianity, science, and art are offered up to show just how vulnerable the most vulnerable are. The history of Black bodies— especially those of queer, Black men— being both belittled and abused is explored through different scenarios, some personal and others historical. Brown even invented another poetry form in the duplex, which combines the blues, a sonnet, and a ghazal.

This is another recent award winner! Diaz is a queer Aha Makav woman, and with great range for poetic styles, shows how merely existing as a minority in the U.S. is an act of defiance and protest. Despite immense oppression, though, how the land, as well as Brown and Black bodies, can heal and still feel love and desire is detailed. As history, pain, and family linages are explored throughout these poems, Diaz pushes towards a future with happiness.

Remember that scene in Black Panther where Killmonger is looking at the West African masks on display in the museum? He asks the museum “expert” if she thought her ancestors paid a fair price for the artifacts when she scoffs at his offer to take an axe “off her hands.” It raised a good question that a lot of museums in Europe and North America have conveniently not answered, which is: is it ethical to display the spoils of colonialism in museums? It’s something that I’ve been hearing about more and more, and this book takes the topic to another level, realizing a win-win scenario for marginalized people.

In it, Will Chen is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream to his Chinese parents. He’s a senior at Harvard, makes good grades, and all that good stuff. Well, a Chinese billionaire disrupts all that when he reaches out to him to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures that were taken from Beijing hundreds of years ago. To do it, he’ll need to assemble a team with a con artist, a thief, a getaway driver, and a hacker. All for a $50 million cash prize. Yes, this sounds like a typical heist scenario, but I think it turns a few things on their heads. For one, the entire crew is Chinese and contending with their dual identities as Chinese and American— sometimes feeling like neither identity truly suits them. This book also sees to it that they and Will totally upend the stereotype of “model minorities.”

Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander wrote an essay for the New Yorker in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In it, she focused on the challenges of Black life as it applied to her sons’ generation. Here, she furthers her points made in that essay about who she names the Trayvon Generation for their early exposure to the death brought about by racial violence. She examines America’s past and future, and its simultaneous obsession with and denial of race. Her analysis is punctuated by beautiful artwork.

In the late 1960s in Pakistan, a young, midlevel police officer is called to cover up the murder of an 11-year-old girl. She was killed in the red light district of Lahore and it becomes clear she was a worker there. The cover up seems to be a common enough task that shouldn’t be too hard to carry out, and even comes with the promise of curried favor among higher-ups. Despite this, Faraz just can’t bring himself to do it. The memories of living with his mother and sister there before his politically connected father had him taken away tie him too strongly to the slain girl. Farad’s inner turmoil is juxtaposed with that of the country’s, as Bangladesh fights Pakistan for its independence.

Elle Burns is a formerly enslaved Black woman living in the U.S. during the Civil War. She gives up her freedom to spy as an enslaved woman within a household of white people who appear to be living a pampered life despite those suffering around them. Malcolm McCall works for the Pinkerton Secret Service, and is also spying for the war effort. The two have a connection, but trying to maintain their covers in public may destroy their relationship. I haven’t come across many spy adventures set during the American Civil War, much less ones that are also romances with complex characters, so this is a win all around.

This fun little novella takes place in the Caribbean, where Graciela is determined not to marry the island’s most sought after bachelor. Even if it means tarnishing her family’s reputation. Graciela’s aunt hires Vincente to keep her together, but of course, he ends up being amused and enthralled by her antics. Side note: Talia Hibbert (author of Get a Life Chloe Brown) likes this book, so you know it’s good!

Within the Pingkang Li, beautiful courtesans, imperial scholars, and bureaucrats all intermingle. Yue-ying was forced into prostitution, but isn’t considered to be one of these beauties on account of a red birthmark on her face. She resigns to being her mistress’s maidservant when she meets Bai Huang. She chalks up the aristocratic socialite’s interest in her to drunkenness, but it proves to be much more than that. The pair’s relationship deepens once a courtesan is murdered and they both become involved in the aftermath. The mystery isn’t at the forefront of this story, though. Instead, the main focus, and what will probably appeal most to you, is how Yue-ying and Bai Huang fight insecurities and social standards to find a place where they can be together.

This is another book that takes place around the time of the Civil War, but this one is right after, during the Reconstruction era. Spring Lee is a Black woman has been through it. She’s been able to find some semblance of peace, though, through owning a ranch in Wyoming where she trains wild horses. When she stops to help Garrett McCray, a Black man who’s come from Washington, D.C. to interview her brother, she’s not really looking for love like that, but you can guess how that goes. This is an interesting look into a time in Black history that isn’t explored much, with a fiercely independent heroine.

This cute romance takes place in a small town, which just so happens to be owned by Jeremy, the Duke of Lansing. Now, Jeremy kind of banished himself from the town years ago when he told Chloe about his feelings for her and she told him to get serious. Ouch. Now he’s back to convince type A personality Chloe to accept him as he is, even though he’s never told her his title, and she has all these other plans for her life. This is a friends-to-lovers type of romance with lots of characters of color and a dash of the sunshine/grumpy trope.

Ingrid Yang is 29 and going through it as a PhD student. For years, she’s been researching the late Chinese poet, Xiao-Wen Cho, even though she had no interest in him prior to starting her PhD (or any interest in since having started, if we’re keeping it real). Instead, the subject of her future dissertation was chosen by her adviser, a white guy who starts off being very invested in Chinese culture, and ends up… being the opposite of that. One day she finds a note in the Chou archives that leads to a helluva discovery. With her best friend, she sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery. There are book burnings, Anti-Asian propaganda, and a reckoning with how white men factor into her life that Ingrid experiences in this funny dark academia novel.

Finally, Meddy Chan’s Aunties from Dial A for Aunties are back and still just as Med-dlesome (ha!). There is a grand wedding as in the first book but this time it’s Meddy’s! They hire another Chinese-Indonesian family to handle all the particulars, and practice their British phrases in anticipation of meeting her fiancé’s family. The wedding planner family’s photographer, Staphanie, and Meddy bond until Meddy overhears her talking about assassinating someone. Bloop! Now Meddy and her aunts try to stop this mafia family from taking out one of their wedding guests. Hijinks follows, naturally.

Joan is an artist who paints the women of North Memphis, where her mother moved her and her sister in order to escape domestic violence. It’s also there that Joan’s grandfather was lynched 50 years earlier. Stringfellow jumps back and forth through time to tell the story of a Black family’s continued brushes with violence, tragedy, and trauma. Only by seeing the women in her family in a new light can she hope to break free of her family’s generational curse.

This is another muligenerational tale of women in a family that spreads across Kuwait,the United States, Lebanon, Iraq, and India. Sara, after having moved back to Kuwait from California, is a professor of philosophy at Kuwait University with a complex relationship with her home country. This is made even more complex once she teaches a class on Nietzsche that brings with it a charge of blasphemy on her. As she tries to fight the charge and figure out what her future will look like, the story weaves in and out, telling the stories of Sara’s grandmothers starting in the ’20s and how their actions led to today. No matter which country they found themselves in over the years, they were, like Sara after her mother died, always tied back to Kuwait.

In this alternate version of Philadelphia, Hetty Rhodes’ reputation as a former Underground Railroad conductor is legendary. She used her magic to bring enslaved Black people to freedom before the Reconstruction era. The Civil War is over now, but Hetty and her husband Benjy, another magic user, still have work to do. They’re on a mission to bring justice to Black people who have been murdered because they know white people won’t. When one of their friends is killed, they use their analytical skills and constellation-based magic to find out what happened. Naturally, not everyone is as they seem. Even Philly’s Black elites. Even Hetty and Benjy themselves.

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro said that The Conductors “is a history buff’s dream fantasy novel. It is also a fantasy geek’s dream history novel.”

Daiyu’s name carries with it the tragic story of a heroine who is beautiful but cursed to be heartbroken. She starts to inhabit this narrative once her parents disappear from their small, quiet village in China, and Daiyu must flee to a calligraphy school where she is safe, for a time. She ends up becoming a victim of human trafficking and smuggled to a brothel in San Francisco,CA. She escapes and makes it to Idaho, where she begins work at a Chinese owned general store. Throughout, Daiyu always seems to narrowly escape a dark fate that seems to be chasing her, until it must be faced head on. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882— the first major law restricting immigration to the U.S.— and its anti Chinese sentiments looms over the entirety of this novel, which culminates in terrible violence.

This books is basically Mexian Gothic + Rebecca, and I am beyond here for it. After the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz is trying to pick up the pieces. Her father was executed and her home destroyed. That’s why, when handsome but mysterious widower Don Rodolfo  proposes to her, she accepts. She’ll have security again. Except she won’t. There’s something not quite right about her new husband’s estate, the Hacienda San Isidro. She starts getting bad dreams and feelings of being watched once Rodolfo leaves to work in the capital. Juana, her sister-in-law, says she might be losing her mind, but then why does the housekeeper refuse to work without being able to burn copal incense and write odd symbols on the kitchen door? As she begins to wonder what really happened to the late Mrs. Rodolfo, she realizes the only person she can trust is a priest: Padre Andrés, who uses his knowledge of brujeria to help Beatriz conquer what’s haunting her.

In an alternate England that has magic, Zacharias Wythe is born to enslaved African parents. He ends up being adopted by Sir Stephen Wythe and trained in magic. Now that Sir Wythe has died, Zacharias assumes the role of Sorcerer Royal, even as other members of the Unnatural Philosophers—a respected magic organization in Britain— think his skin tone is a curse. Nevertheless, he sets out to find out why England’s magic has diminished. He comes across Prunella Gentlewoman, another person of color who possesses magical abilities, and together they try to save England’s magic, all while dodging attempts on Zacharias’ life. This fantastical traipse through England during the Napoleonic Wars manages to be fun while calling out sexism and racism. It’s been likened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but is of course its own, wonderful thing.