Category: In The Club

I found this book in a recent roundup by Refinery 29 on books to better understand the Israel-Palestine conflict (is “conflict” even the right word here? My words feel so inadequate). As a boy, author Meron Benvenisti accompanied his father, a distinguished geographer, on a trip through the Holy Land. The purpose of that trip? His father was charting a Hebrew map that would rename Palestinian sites and villages with names that linked these places–ones that, ya know, already existed–to Israel’s ancestral homeland. If you’re having a “I am criminally misinformed” moment right about now, you’re not alone.

Book Club Bonus: The Refinery 29 blurb for this book calls this “the perfect book for anyone who was ever under the misapprehension that Zionists came to Palestinian land and found nothing, establishing a country whose past was conveniently free of the people who had lived there for centuries. Benvenisti chillingly demonstrates how easy it is to erase generations of history when trying to create a new one, and makes clear the danger of looking at Eretz Israel/Palestine from a binary perspective.” Oof. Sound familiar? Hint: colonialism.

This book was part of a Palestinian SFF spotlight in Friday’s edition of our Swords and Spaceships newsletter. Written by a Palestinian journalist and novelist from the northern Jaffa town of Taybeh, this unsettling book imagines a world in which all of the Palestinians disappear all at once from the land of historic Palestine. I added this one to my TBR so fast; it feels insulting to call it “of the moment” right now when it’s been “of the moment” for Palestinians for literal decades. Still, this feels like an important time to read it.

Book Club Bonus: Take some time to examine the themes of loneliness, memory, loss, and definitely erasure. Discuss those factors as you try to better understand the weight of the humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

Naji al-Ali, who grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, was a talented artist whose thirty-year career saw his cartoons published daily in newspapers from Cairo to Paris. “Resolutely independent and unaligned to any political party, Naji al-Ali strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people; the pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. Through his most celebrated creation, the witness-child Handala, al-Ali criticized the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the regimes in the region, and the suffering of the Palestinian people, earning him many powerful enemies and the soubriquet “the Palestinian Malcolm X.”

Book Club Bonus: I picked this collection because of the accessibility of the format. It allows readers both a bite-sized approach to understanding the Israeli occupation with the individual cartoons and a connected thread with the character of Handala present throughout. Discuss how viewing the conflict from the eyes of the child changes your own perspective.

I saw this book being compared to Friday Night Lights a lot when it came out. It’s about the small and struggling community of Beartown where the junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals. They actually have a shot at winning, which also means they’re carrying all of Beartown’s hopes and dreams on their shoulders. The pressure of representing an entire town is heavy, and those tensions lead to a violent act that leaves a young girl traumatized. The accusations that follow leave the town in turmoil.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss the pressure placed on young athletes and how it contributes to the larger culture around youth athletics, one that creates unrealistic expectations at best and is devastatingly toxic at worst. The book also foregoes the use of first names for a lot of its characters; discuss the significance of this choice.

Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine is a biracial, unenrolled tribal member with dreams of studying medicine, dreams that are put on hold when she defers enrollment to care for her mother and grandmother. Then she witnesses the murder of her best friend, a killing tied to drug abuse that’s then followed by a strings of other deaths linked to a new lethal cocktail of meth. Daunis gets pulled into an undercover investigation into the source of the meth, one that brings her into close contact with a new boy in town who might be hiding something. She also pursues her own secret investigation, using her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to uncover buried secrets in her community. (This book involves a hockey team, in case you wondering where the sports part comes in).

Book Club Bonus: Daunis has to decide far she’s willing to go to protect her community, which often means working in direct opposition to law enforcement. Discuss the community’s distrust of non-native legal intervention and treatment of indigenous peoples as a whole (You have twelve hours to dedicate to book club, right?)

Ibtihaj Muhammad grew up in New Jersey as the only African American Muslim at school, so she was used to having to forge her own path. Then she discovered fencing, a sport traditionally reserved for the wealthy and one that didn’t exactly welcome with her with open arms. She didn’t let the hate stop her, though. She went only to defy expectations in becoming the only woman of color and the only religious minority on Team USA’s saber fencing squad. This story of her unlikely and odds-defying path towards Olympic glory in inspiring as it is thought-provoking.

Book Club Bonus: Muhammad is known for being the first woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics. That was all in the last decade, and the Olympics have been around for (checks notes) A LOT LONGER THAN THAT. Discuss the ever-present challenges for women of color in athletics.

Darius knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian customs and speaks better Klingon than Farsi. The son of a Persian mother and a white American father, he’s never felt like he fit in anywhere, a worry not at all helped by his clinical depression. When his family travels to Iran to visit his mother’s family, Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door. Soon the boys are spending their every moment together, and Darius realizes he’s never felt more like himself.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss how two people with the same diagnosis can have very different experiences and won’t necessarily relate, and how challenging it can be to communicate mental illness to a different generation or culture.

Gifty is a Ghanian American working on a PhD in neuroscience, studying depression and addiction by observing the reward-seeking behavior of mice. This work is very personal: she was just a kid when her brother injured his ankle during a high school basketball game, then got hooked on Oxycontin and died of an overdose. Gifty turns to science to understand Nana’s addiction and the depth of her family’s loss, but also finds herself pulled in by the allure of salvation offered by the faith she thought she’d long abandoned.

Book Club Bonus: There’s a meaty discussion to be had here about the relationship between mental illness and religion, specifically how so many faith systems handle mental illness with a lot of dismissal and instructions to just “give it God” and pray.

Retired orthopedic surgeon Dr. Jennifer White is battling dementia and all of the life adjustments that come with her diagnosis. When her best friend is killed and found with several of her fingers removed with surgical precision, Dr. White is immediately the #1 suspect. The worst part: Dr. White could very well have done it, but she doesn’t know if she did. This thriller is well-paced and handles the subject of dementia with a lot of care.

Book Club Bonus: Dr. White’s dementia added a layer of complexity to what otherwise might have been a more straightforward thriller—explore that! Discuss the frailty of memory as both a blessing and a curse.

This one I haven’t read yet, but it was recommended to me by a reader (thank you so much!) after I talked about my love of Jane Eyre retellings.Wide Sargasso Sea gives a new voice to one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre. Bertha, born Antoinette Cosway, is a protected young woman when she’s sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Her reputation is ruined by rumors about her past fueled by some really puritan attitudes towards sexuality, and her prideful husband becomes emotionally abusive and unfaithful. As he flaunts his affairs in her face, Bertha is continually gaslit until she reaches her emotional breaking point.

Book Club Bonus: Makes it kinda hard to write her off as “crazy,” doesn’t it? Discuss how a deeper examination of Mr. Rochester makes him a much more unsavory character than the one we’ve come to know in the original story, and how unfair Bertha’s narrative has been to her (and women in general).

Otto and Xavier Shin have been gifted a trip on a very special train as a not-honeymoon honeymoon present from their aunt. They appear to be alone on this former tea-smuggling train and soon realize that it’s not your average locomotive; it seems to be customized to their particular tastes in ways that don’t exactly make sense, and they don’t know the train’s destination. Totally normal! Fun! While boarding the train, Otto spots a woman who be believes to be the mysterious owner, a woman who resides on The Lucky Day. She was holding up a sign—but did it say “hello,” or “help?” As the pair tries to get to the bottom of that little mystery, the trip upends everything they think they know about each other and their pasts. Oh and there’s a pet mongoose. Can’t forget the mongoose.

When I think of authors who continually blow me away with their impossibly beautiful sentences and truly weird books, I immediately think of Helen Oyeyemi. The things she does with words! The book asks us to consider what it means to be understood (or not) by the person you most want to perceive you, and I promise, you will find yourself highlighting all kinds of passages.

This question speaks to my soul! I am such a playlist person and music person in general. I’m constantly thinking of book soundtracks in my head when I’m reading and I think a lot of you probs do the same.

Because my job is pretty cool, I got to dream up a playlist for two SFF titles while filling in for Jenn on SFF Yeah earlier this month. It was SO much fun! Do this with book club and see what your playlist looks like. My picks for the super fun space romp with psychic space cats that is Chilling Effect? 1977 by Anna Tijoux / La Torre by Gabriel Rios /Quimbara by Celia Cruz / Ring the Alarm by Beyonce / Bitch Better Have My Money by Rihanna (I could have gone on for days!)

Mike Hayes’s childhood was brutal, dark, and lonely, but that was all before he met the love of his life, Verity Metcalf. With V by his side, Mike has learned how to love, how to care for himself, how to thrive in his career, and turn his life around. Together they will build something beautiful and be happy for the rest of their lives. Never mind that she’s not returning his calls, or that she’s technically engaged to someone else. It’ll all just a part of a secret game they play. Right?

I absolutely picked this one because the ending is super polarizing, and because I would read the crap out of a version of the book told from V’s perspective (assuming the ending is what I interpret it to be). Wish I could say more, you’ll have to read to figure it out for yourself!

This novel is such a trip, a very not-subtle piece of commentary on climate change with some light Lord of the Flies vibes. A group of kids and teens are spending the summer at a lakeside mansion where their parents are having lots of booze, drugs, and sex while they mostly ignore their offspring. When a massive storm descends on the estate, the kids run right out into the apocalyptic chaos outside, one of them with a children’s bible in tow. As they seek refuge in an abandoned farm house, the events in the pages of the bible begin to bleed into real life.

This book takes place in the 2020s (join me in a laugh sob) where climate change has made basic resources scarce. Most find themselves at the mercy of a few corporations holding all the jobs and money (okay maybe it’s just a sob). Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives in Los Angeles inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the goings on of the outside world—for a while. As the anarchy grows and her world falls apart, Lauren struggles to make her voice heard while trying to protect her loved ones the imminent doom her small, insular community stubbornly insists on ignoring (more sobbing). Making matters more complicated: she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to other people’s emotions. You’ll want to pick up the second book in this biology, Parable of the Talents, too.

Botanist and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation, and this book of environmental science and indigenous wisdom is practically a classic in nature writing (not to mention a Book Riot fave). It’s a call to action for each of us to play a more active role in the protection and restoration of the natural world and in climate change initiatives, reminding us of the harmonious relationship indigenous communities shared with nature before some other humans (hint: colonization!) came in and messed sh*t up in epic and tragic fashion.

I love telling people about this book and watching them go all “huh?” on me. The Compton Cowboys are a group of 10 Black riders on a small ranch in Compton, California, one of the very last in an area that’s been home to African-American horse riders for decades. Yeah, decades! The story starts with The Compton Jr Posse, a project founded by Mayisha Akbar in 1988 to offer local youth an alternative to street life. Today’s Cowboys are a group of Black men and women defying stereotypes in a community built on “camaraderie, respite from violence, healing from trauma, and recovery from incarceration.” This is just so cool. Find the young reader’s edition here.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author of several middle grade books and adult nonfiction. This is her memoir, a chronicle of her family’s migration to the US from a small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero. In search of a better life for their family, Reyna’s parents leave her and her siblings with their grandmother for years to go establish themselves in the states before eventually sending for the children. Both that awful period of waiting—during which the grandmother cares very little for Reyna and her siblings, spending the money their father sends for them on a cousin whom she clearly favors—and the harrowing journey across the border leave their mark on Reyna (and how could they not). Grande shares this very personal story and the resulting trauma in a plea for folks to think more critically about the issue of immigration. Find the young reader’s edition here.

sings while doings Rockette kicks 🎶The history you’ve been taught in school about indigenous people is a lie (is a lie!) A big ol’ lie! 🎶 That’s just a lil’ diddy I made up, an In the Club exclusive (you’re welcome) to introduce this book, the first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples. It spans more than four hundred years and radically reframes US history. Spoiler alert: Columbus didn’t discover sh*t and our history ain’t pretty. Find the young reader’s edition here.

Book Riot staff recently read this book together and it was truly a surprising read. I thought I knew plenty about imposter syndrome, and you might think you do too! But this book was full of aha moments and connections that I for one had never made before, from the way I was parented to the way my workplace surroundings themselves shaped how I often process/view/undermine my abilities and accomplishments. In short: it dragged me, but it needed to be done.

Book Club Bonus: I think you’ll watch the convo flow pretty organically here since I’d be willing to bet almost all of us have experience with imposter syndrome (that’s another thing: imposter syndrome casts a much wider net than you might think of in your current definition). An added layer I suggest you discuss is how some workplace environments force us to reinforce the behaviors of imposter syndrome.

An actual message I sent to my friend (and Book Riot Contributing Editor) Nusrah Javed while reading this book: “I was not prepared for ‘granny eating raccoon guts straight from the source’ but I persevered.” Billed (most correctly) as Steel Magnolias meets Dracula, this book follows a women’s book club in Charleston that reads grizzly true crime books almost exclusively (but their husbands all think think they’re studying the Bible, lol). After a series of mysterious events in their neighborhood, the women find themselves fighting to protect their little community from a pale-skinned stranger with an appetite for blood. It’s mostly pretty campy horror and so much fun, though I cringed a lot because I am a weenie and terrified of <redacted to avoid spoilers. Hint: it’s in the attic scene>.

Book Club Bonus: So much to discuss! The main character Patricia Campbell is a white woman feeling bored with her life (she has a workaholic husband, teenage kids going through that “I hate you!” stage, and a senile mother-in-law whose condition is worsening by the minute). So when the unspeakable happens in her neighborhood and she tries to do something about it, she’s gaslit repeatedly and written off as just a bored housewife. Discuss that pattern of gaslighting, but also dive into the idea of “nice Southern ladies,” both the good and the bad. Also unpack the root of the real horror in this book and the ways in which communities of color continually get left behind.

This phenomenal book comes with some bonus content: white knuckles, blood pressure spikes, and fits of panic, all free of charge! Beauregard “Bug” Montage is an honest mechanic and shop owner, a devoted husband, and a loving father who’s just trying to stay out of trouble and do right by the people he loves. He’s also known as the best wheelman on the East Coast, but that life is behind him—or so it was, until a new auto shop moved into town and ate up his clientele. Now Bug is drowning in debt and the bills keep piling up. So when he’s approached by a shady character who did him real dirty on a past job, Bug knows he shouldn’t trust him and the big, shiny payout he’s promising once again. He should say no, but he can’t. So he agrees: one last job and then he’ll be out of the game for good.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss Bug as a character. You’ll find yourself rooting for Bug, but he’s a complicated man. He’s flawed and makes a lot of poor choices, some that feel avoidable and others made with his back against a wall. You feel for him even when he goes down the path we as readers know will not end well, and you also have to leave space to consider that so much of his experience as a Black man in the south plays into the choices made available to him in the first place. Whew. Such a good book.

How any of you read that theme and immediately thought, “Here goes Vanessa pushing that Circe stuff again!” Congrats, friend, you know my heart. I will never stop singing the praises of this absolute gem of a book wherein the sea witch you probably first came across in The Odyssey tells us her story from her perspective. There’s nothing I don’t love about this lyrical, powerful reclaiming of Circe’s narrative.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss the ways in which women have been vilified in lit (and movies, tv, etc) since the dawn of time. I know I talked about this book earlier this month, but Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters would be an amazing companion read for an exploration of this trend in mythology.

Ooooookay bro: so you marry me when I’m just a rich hottie to you, but then your ass locks me in an upstairs closet for the rest of my life when you realize I’m battling addiction and mental illness? Then you have the nerve to be all, “I’m so sorry, she’s just so crazy” to the woman you now want to replace me with and wonder why I had the audacity to tear up her veil? Kick rocks, Rochester!

Book Club Bonus: I’d like to point out that I absolutely love Jane Eyre but the older I get, the more I realize that Bertha kinda got a raw deal. Was Eddie Rotch really acting in her best interest, or was his solution really more about his own convenience? Or is it both? How we do still push aside people dealing with mental illness today for the sake of not having to inconvenience ourselves? Discuss!

Writer and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi is more widely known for her bestselling graphic memoir Persepolis. Embroideries is often slept on though and I’m here to tell you it’s both poignant and absolutely hilarious. This honest, intimate, and revelatory peek into the lives of six Iranian women is a blend of graphic memoir and graphic novel. In 1990s Tehran, Satrapi’s mother, grandmother, aunts, and their friends are all gathered for their regular afternoon tradition of sipping—and spilling—tea. Their chat includes talk of love, sex, and each of the women’s various dealings with men. It’s like if the Golden Girls were Iranian and swapped cheesecake for piping hot tea.

Book Club Bonus: This book should inspire some good chat on the social and cultural stereotypes that are shattered in these women’s candid conversations on sexual politics. This should also lead to an examination of women’s sexual agency and related stereotypes in modern society here in the U.S. of A.

Linking the essays in this blend of memoir, history, and cultural critique is Cathy Park Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” She uses this term to refer to the shame, suspicion, and melancholy that characterized Hong’s upbringing as the daughter of Korean immigrants. These feelings, the result of American optimism contradicting your lived experience, then make you begin to believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Her story is a starting point for a broader, deeper discussion about racial consciousness in America.

The Yellow Peril, the Yellow Fear, the Yellow Terror: sadly all of these racist metaphors painting East Asians as an existential threat to the Western world are far (so far!) from new. Published in 2014, this book was the first comprehensive archive of anti-Asian images and writing, documenting the rise of Anti-Asian fear-mongering and paranoia through an extensive collection of paintings, photos, pulp novel drawings, movie posters, comics, pop culture ephemera, and more.

Nicole Chung was a preemie and transracial adoptee who was raised by a white family when her Korean parents put her up for adoption at birth. She grew up in a sheltered Oregon town and was told a mythologized version of her adoption story since childhood, one that framed her biological parents as making the ultimate sacrifice to give her a better life. “But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from,” she began to question whether the story she’d been told all her life was the truth, a lie, or somewhere in between.

Marilynn and James Lee, a white woman and Chinese man, are raising their family of five in 1970s Ohio. All their hopes and dreams seemingly rest on the shoulders of their favorite daughter Lydia, their perfect golden child who will surely go on to live the life they each once envisioned for themselves. But when Lydia’s body is found at the bottom of a local lake, the gossamer threads holding their family together come undone. Told in flashbacks and from multiple perspectives, the truth of what happened on the night of Lydia’s death is slowly revealed, as is the web of secrets and lies the Lees kept from each other and from themselves. I included this title because there’s a lot of discussion to be had here on the idea of the “model minority.”

I just finished this YA novel on audio and I had to scream into a pillow every few chapters. Lo and Bea Denham were teenagers when they lost their parents in a tragic accident that very nearly killed Lo too. After Lo’s long and difficult recovery, Bea joins an organization called The Unity Project and leaves Lo in the care of their great aunt. On its surface, the group appears to be doing great things for its members and the community, but Lo suspects The Unity Project isn’t what it seems when Bea cuts off all contact. Lo uses her job at an online publication to start a not-altogether-sanctioned investigation into “the project.” Her determination to uncover the truth behind the group and its leader Lev Warren will put her in some very hot and murky water. (tw: emotional and physical abuse)

Side note: Lo is referred to by her last name at her job and I thought her boss was calling her “Denim.” Oh… it’s Denham. Got it got it got it.

For more YA books about cults, here’s another list for you, this one from just last year.

I knew I wanted to read this after Rebecca read it and told staff that it compares the language of actual cults to the language of cross-fit and basically concludes they use the same tactics but to different ends. Whew! In no uncertain terms, the book “analyzes the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power.” Well alrighty then!

It’s 1970 in Chicago and Jerry Walker is six years old. His parents are members of the Worldwide Church of God, a community that believes they’ve been divinely chosen for a special afterlife and that all others will perish in a fiery hell. Jerry finds the church’s beliefs both confusing and terrifying (like its prohibition against doctors and hospitals), but his parents see the church as their salvation: they joined the church when they were living in poverty in a dangerous housing project with the first four of their seven children and were both were blind as a result of childhood accidents, and they took comfort in the promise of that special afterlife for them and their children. They remain staunchly faithful to the church, even if it means following a religion rooted in white supremacist ideology and tithing to a megachurch that rakes in millions. This is Jerald Walker’s story of living through that experience.