Category: In The Club

I’m late to the air frying thing, but am a total convert. I just came across this recipe, and have yet to try it, but am definitely saving for the next time I’m seriously craving chocolate. I have a short video option for you, as well as a detailed recipe.

You’ll need (courtesy of Tanya Harris at My Forking Life):

6 Tbsp butter 

4 oz semi-sweet chocolate in pieces

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk 

3 Tbsp white sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

3 Tbsp all-purpose flour

A pinch of salt

This memoir is a reflection on motherhood, examining the author’s relationship with her mother, the surrogate mothers she’s had throughout her life, and even how her own children will remember her mothering. Nguyen was only eight months old when she was separated from her mother. Her father, grandmother, sister, and uncles fled a war-torn Saigon for the U.S., and the next time she’d see her mother was when she was 19. Since becoming an adult, her mother and she have spent no more than 24 hours together. Nguyen writes of how she dealt with this absence, how she came of age in the Midwest, and the life of a refugee.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead’s continuation of his Ray Carney saga — which first started with the uber-popular Harlem Shuffle — is divided into three parts that see the former fence Ray reverting to his old life of crime. But he doesn’t start off with that intention. Actually, in 1971, after having sworn off his old life of moving stolen goods, he tries his best to make a legal go of things with his furniture store. That is, until his daughter starts yearning for Jackson 5 tickets, then he turns to crooked NYPD officer Munson. But to get the tickets, Munson has a favor to ask of Ray. One that will exact quite the physical toll. The second part sees Ray in 1973, teamed up with Pepper, his partner in crime, and hobnobbing with the odd world of Blaxploitation movies. Finally, in the third section, set in a burning 1976 Harlem, Pepper and Ray set out to get to the bottom of a firebombing that injured a kid.

We all know Moreno-Garcia writes banger after banger, so of course I had to let y’all know of her July release — and this one sounds like so much fun. Montserrat is a talented sound editor but is at the mercy of a sexist film industry in ’90s Mexico when her friend and crush Tristán — a former soap opera star — realizes he’s neighbors with the cult horror director Abel Urueta. Urueta promises to change their lives forever if they help him finish a movie about a Nazi occultist that he was never able to finish — one that he thinks has cursed him (if ever there were a curse-causing movie, it would be one about a Nazi occultist, I think). As the two help the legendary director, Montserrat starts noticing a lingering dark presence and Tristán may be seeing a ghost. This one is full of old-school moviemaking and occultism, all set in an immersive ’90s Mexico.

Earth is ruined and the future of humanity lies in the hands of 80 graduates of a rigorous program that began when its participants were just 12 years old. Now the graduates are on a ship heading towards a new planet where they will be expected to birth a new generation. Except halfway through their journey, a bomb goes off, killing three people and knocking the ship off course. Worse yet, Asuka is the suspect as the only surviving witness. Thing is, she never really felt like she belonged on the expedition in the first place, as the representative of Japan — a country she barely has ties to as a half Japanese person having been raised in the U.S. — and as someone who barely passed training. But as the crew turns on each other, it’ll be up to her to find out who on board is the true guilty party.

I’m still learning about certain aspects of the history of Juneteenth, and through this recipe, I first learned of the significance of red-colored drinks and food during the holiday (if you’d like to read more, here’s an interesting article). The holiday has passed, but I still plan to make this punch this summer, and will have something on the drink roster for next year.

To make it, you just need:

cranberry juice, ginger ale, pineapple, orange, and lemon/lime juice, strawberry sorbet, and some fruit to top everything off with. For amounts, click here.

This book showed up on Amazon’s and Goodreads’ list. It follows William, who grew up in dysfunction. That’s why the basketball scholarship that pays for school far from his parents feels like a godsend. Eventually he comes across Julia, a lively young woman who appreciates his still waters. Soon, William finds himself being incorporated into Julia’s tight-knit family, which includes her three sisters — the artist Cecelia, the dreamer Sylvie, and the steadfast Emeline. For the first time, William gets to experience what it’s like to be in a caring and warm familial environment, but this feeling is torn by a disruption that spans generations.

I’ve mentioned this one more recently, and I’m not surprised it’s being counted as one of the best this year so far (according to Amazon, Goodreads, and B&N). Kuang only dabbles in bangers! Athena and June were meant to be twinning. Or so June thought, since both graduated the same year from Yale and debuted in publishing the same year. But June soars into literary darling-hood, while June does not. One day, June sees Athena die in a random accident and impulsively steals her manuscript, a guaranteed masterpiece about the contributions of Chinese laborers during WWI. She edits Athena’s work, sends it to her agent as her own, and reaps the benefits. She even undergoes a rebranding, which involves her going by Juniper Song and using an ethnically ambiguous author photo. But the truth starts to creep out, even as June goes as far as she can to protect her secret.

This one popped up on Goodreads’, B&N’s, and Esquire‘s. Get ready to laugh, ki, and fall over. Irby is hilarious, and in these essays, she shares what her life’s been like since having gained even more success. She talks about Hollywood job offers, Sex and the City, as well as funky teeth problems and upset stomach. Listen, nothing is off limits, okay? Her willingness to bare it all coupled with her natural humor makes this book feel like you’re just kicking it with a friend.

Emily Henry is just that girl when it comes to contemporary romances (and Amazon and Goodreads members agree). Here, a friend group takes their annual, weeklong retreat to a cottage in Maine. Harriet and Wyn are sharing the cottage’s biggest room since they’ve been the ideal couple since forever. Only problem is that they actually haven’t been. Not really. Not for awhile. They broke up months ago, but don’t have the heart to ruin their friends’ last getaway in the cottage before it gets sold. They’re also a teensy bit in denial about their residual feelings for each other.

Yes, chocolate chip cookies are a little basic, but they’re also really good. And Buzzfeed’s Tasty people reviewed 50 recipes and found the best one. I felt like that was knowledge I should share with you. Here’s a link to the video as well as the page with the recipe listed out.

This is a natural place to start for this list. This is the first novel that tells Miles’ story, and it being written by Jason Reynolds is beyond perfect. Miles is a seemingly typical teenager in Brooklyn — he goes to school, plays video games with his bestie, and has a crush on another student. But the added responsibility of being Spider Man weighs on him. Lately, his powers have felt off, he gets suspended from school, he’s having recurring nightmares —and all of this is starting to make him doubt his ability to be a hero. This adds some of the very real elements that come with being a Black kid going to a mostly white private school to a comic book character’s story.

At the beginning of the 20th century, January, a mixed girl, is living comfortably in Vermont. Kind of. Though she has everything she needs, she’s also kind of treated like a prop by those in high society. Her father is employed by Mr. Locke, for whom he travels the world to procure odd creatures. After her father disappears, she finds a book that uncovers secrets about doors to other worlds. As she travels to these worlds, she learns more about herself and the truth of things.

Read this because of Bigolas Dickolas, but also because it’s a beautifully written epistolary romance blended with truly creative speculative worlds. Red and Blue are two agents fighting on opposite sides of a time war. Blue’s side is a sort of organic hive mind, while Red’s is peak technology. Throughout the book, the two women travel through time on missions to change the outcome of the war and eventually notice the other’s handiwork. This leads to what is, at first, an exchange of taunting letters, but turns into admiration and love. Technically, they aren’t really traveling to parallel universes, but the times they travel to are so different that they feel like different worlds.

In this award-winning, world-hopping story, traveling the multiverse is possible, under one condition: the counterpart of the person traveling can’t still be alive. Cara’s other world counterparts often die, which means she’s able to travel to the more than 300 worlds her world knows to exist. Because of this, Cara is recruited by the Eldritch Institute of Earth Zero to travel the multiverse gathering information. This job somewhat boosts her social status, but her family still lives in what’s called “the wastes,” and she doesn’t fit in the privileged world, nor the marginalized one. Eventually, she uncovers something that could change life for everyone.

I love the freshness of this gyro recipe — whose chicken you can replace with tofu if you’re meatless. The recipe involves marinating a chicken breast in Greek yogurt, minced garlic, oregano, salt and pepper, baking it at 375, and letting it cool before dicing into cubes. The cucumber salad topping needs cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, lemon, parsley, and the tzatziki sauce Greek yogurt, minced garlic, lemon, dill, and salt. Then you need lightly toasted pita bread, of course.

There’s a lot of crunchy freshness going on here, and side note, but all bodies are summer bodies. Enjoy!

It’s barely been a year since Titus Crowne became the first Black sheriff in Charon County, VA when there’s a school shooting. And before he can talk down the young suspect and get him to surrender, he’s shot by Crowne’s deputies. The subsequent investigation leads to Titus uncovering that the shooter — and other Black kids like him — were victims of abuse by the slain teacher. As he continues down his path of inquiries and finds secrets, bodies, and a killer, he must contend with the deep-seated racial vitriol of his surroundings.

We stan a gun-totin’, revenge-gettin’ queen, and 16-year-old Bridget is exactly that. After her raggedy father dies from a snakebite, Bridget must cross the Kansas prairie with no money and her one mule. When she reaches Dodge City, her red hair attracts one of the women who runs the Buffalo Queen Saloon, a respected brothel run by women. She takes to being a “sporting woman,” a sex worker, even enjoying her time with the other women. Like, she really enjoys it, and comes to realize her sexuality through them — particularly the gender-bending gunslinger Spartan Lee. But the peace she’s found through the Buffalo Queen eventually becomes unsettled.

Oliva — whose family has an intimate relationship with the U.S.-Mexian border and who has worked as a translator for people coming into the U.S. — lays out the complexities of immigrating to the United States. She reflects on how refugees’ trauma must be mined and packaged for the immigration system, ponders who should be considered worthy of American citizenship, explores how many immigrants are not immediately welcomed but end up handling our most precious industries, like food harvesting, and more.

I’ve seen this messy book referred to as belonging to the millennial genre, and I appreciate how millennials are seen as quintessentially messy. I truly love that for us. Here, 21-year-old Rachel is about to be granted her degree in English in 2009, just as the recession fosters job insecurity. She develops a crush on Dr. Byrne, her married English professor, and her friend James encourages her to pursue him. James also has a makeout session with Dr. Byrne that Rachel walks in on. Interestingly enough, Rachel doesn’t feel a type of way about it. Instead, she gets closer to James, and the novel follows them and all their messy decisions.

This is such a good idea for a light-feeling food that also feels kind of fancy. I love the combination of shrimp, sriracha, Kewpie mayo, and crispy rice. It’s also fairly simple, as all you need are:

-Shrimp

-mayo

-scallions

-rice

-breadcrumbs

– soy sauce

And a little technique!

Here, Snorton details the rich history of Black transpeople, especially how they have been cut out of the narrative of trans and queer history. By using the narratives of enslaved people seeking freedom, Afro-modernist literature, journalism, and other sources, Snorton shows just how much race has determined how topics like queerness and gender have been represented.

In this unique collection, Rose documents the many voices of queer people across the country. Various members of different queer and trans communities — from activists to artists to healers — speak on their experiences. We hear about the dire issue that is Black mental health, disability healthcare, the issues Pacific Islander writers face, and more — all illustrated through colorful and interesting artwork that embodies each individual.

This award-winning book shows how the U.S. has been in the business of homophobia. Many know, for instance, of the Red Scare, but the Lavender Scare of the ’50s was a similar moment in U.S. history when queer people were considered a threat to the country. Through declassified documents, interviews with people who worked in D.C. at the time, and a lot of research, Johnson details just how damaging this persecution was. He also highlights how it led to the Gay Rights movement.

This collection of essays is essential reading for any intersectional feminist, queer history, Black history, or social justice reading list. In it, Lorde dissects the various ways each social justice movement — of the time, and now in many ways — falls short of their purported goals. She speaks about her experiences as a Black queer woman, and all the ways Western patriarchy is damaging. But she also offers a way towards healing, too.

This is more of a good idea for summer than a recipe-recipe. You just need a fresh, ripe pineapple, tequila, pineapple juice, simple syrup (or agave), and lime juice. Soak your cut up pineapple over night in the liquid and stick popsicle sticks into each piece the next day. Sprinkle with tajín. For a visual, check out Bustle’s instagram account.

Similar to Taylor’s latest release, The Late Americans, Filthy Animals explores the messy personal lives of young creative people living in the Midwest. Following a stay in a psychiatric hospital, a queer mathematician meets a dancer and enters into a tenuous open relationship with him and his girlfriend. Other stories show the same situation from different perspectives and bring in characters connected to each other, but also struggling with their own relationships.

Keiko Furukura has never quite fit in, but since she was 18 and applied to a convenience store job in Tokyo on a whim, she feels like she at least has some things figured out. Like, she knows how to dress and act when she’s at work in order to look like she belongs, even if there is a “real” her that exists outside this persona. But now at 36, the normalcy she thought she’d maintained since her teenage years starts to crumble once her younger sister gives birth, and those close to Keiko start pressuring her to achieve society-set milestones. Giving in, she attempts a deal of sorts with a questionable co-worker, and though her life now appears to be “normal,” to her it feels like anything but.

Grace Porter has thus far adhered to her strict (and financially supportive) father’s path for her — at only 28, she’s just achieved a PhD in the very white male-dominated field of astronomy. Despite the accomplishment, she doesn’t feel quite fulfilled. And when she goes on a trip to Vegas with friends to celebrate, she totally shakes up her life. By getting married one drunken night. When she wakes to her new wife, Yuki, she decides to stray from the path her father has set, and even her supportive group of friends, to try to make a go of it in New York with Yuki.

I discussed this book not too long ago, but it also fits here perfectly. Ro is freshly 30 and is suspended in the past and is slowly becoming even more unmoored from the present. She has a distant relationship with her mother, her boyfriend broke up with her to colonize Mars, and her bestie is getting married. All she has left is the giant octopus named Dolores that she cares for at her lackluster job at the mall aquarium. But Dolores has been sold to a wealthy investor and will be moved soon. As Dolores leaves Ro’s life, all of Ro’s childhood trauma comes bubbling back to the surface.

I randomly decided to try a Japanese sweet potato when I came across some in a grocery the other day and subsequently wondered where they’d been all my life. If you’ve never had one, they have a drier, fluffier texture than the usual American variety, and are really sweet. Like, sweet sweet (they low-key taste like cake!). I had prepared them as I’d seen before, which is just by cutting them in half and air frying/roasting them, but now I’m going to shimmy my way on back down to the store to try a recipe like this one by Marc Matsumoto. Glazed sweet potatoes are a popular sweet snack in Japan, and are relatively healthy (especially considering what I usually get into).

You’ll need:

Japanese sweet potatoes, oil, brown rice syrup, and black sesame seeds. Matsumoto shows how to prepare it.

This one had me by the throat! It’s a historical YA novel that’s part murder mystery, part haunting, and an immersive look at what life was like for queer Jewish people in the late 1800s. We follow Alter, who now goes by the name his parents gave him instead of the Americanized “Alex.” After having lost his dad on the way to America, he, like so many other Jewish immigrants living in Chicago, is trying his best to survive. He lives in tenement housing with three other young men his age and works at a printing press, scrimping as much as possible to bring his mother and siblings over from Europe. His life gets interrupted when a close friend of him dies, and the police, not wanting to tarnish the image of the Worlds Fair, want to brush it aside as an accident. But Alter knows better, and soon starts to lose his mind as he becomes possessed by his deceased friend’s dybbuk. He has to once again lean on Frankie, a friend from a past life that he had tried to leave behind. A friend that he might want be a little more. Together, they try to free Alter from the dybbuk before it completely takes over.

The award-winning author of books like The Good Lord Bird, Deacon King Kong, and others, writes about his mother’s life. McBride and his 11 other siblings were raised in poverty by a mother who regularly avoided questions about her past, insisting that she was “light-skinned” when asked about her race. Turns out that she was the Polish-born daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe with her family. Once in America, she’d have to flee, still, from her abusive father, and would find solace in Black neighborhoods. McBride speaks of her life — her struggles, her accomplishments — as he does his own.

Here’s another memoir! This time about the half Hawaiian Chinese, half Jewish niece of shoe designer Steve Madden. T Kira Madden grows up at the conflicting intersection of being privileged, biracial, and queer, witnessing firsthand all of the ugly that can come with the lifestyles of the wealthy. Though she lives the lavish life of a daughter within a shoe mogul family, her father’s alcoholism leads to him physically abusing her mother, which is followed by her mother struggling with a drug addiction. Meanwhile, T Kira is left to her own devices. Eventually, she finds her tribe — that is, of fatherless girls — which grants her the support and understanding she had missed in her younger years.

Maybe as a coping mechanism or something else, I feel like there is always some form of gatekeeping that goes on within communities that are targeted and othered. Tamkin explores this within the Jewish community by sifting through the last 100 years of Jewish American life. From the Sephardic Jews who arrived in America in the 1600s, to Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated in large numbers to the U.S. in the early 1900s, and the civil rights era decades later, Tamkin gets to the bottom of what makes a “bad Jew” and what makes a good one. Turns out, the concept of what constitutes as Jewish within the community has shifted through the years.

Though the year feels like it’s zooming by, it also feels like people are super ready for summer. Or, I guess maybe people are always super ready for summer, it’s just that this time, I am too. Either way, I’m looking forward to trying this spicy watermelon lemonade! I’ve never thought to make lemonade spicy, but I have enjoyed the spicy margaritas I’ve tried, and lemonade has similar sweet/tart vibes going on.

Looks like you’ll just need:

– watermelon, cut up

– 4 fresh lemons for juicing

– 1/2 jalapeño

– sugar

– water

Then blend and garnish!

Before we get to the books, don’t forget to check out First Edition, the new podcast started by Book Riot co-founder Jeff O’Neal. It explores the wide bookish world, with interviews, lists, rankings, retrospectives, recommendations, and much more, featuring people who know and love books. Subscribe to First Edition on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcatcher of choice.

This is definitely one of our most-anticipated books of the year. With a premise that involves top women gladiators fighting for their lives within a corrupt prison system, it’s understandable. The author of Friday Black tells the bloody story of Loretta Thurwar and “Hurricane Staxxx,” two women who are friends, lovers, and popular Chain-Gang All-Stars. As All-Stars, they’ve fought against other prisoners in lethal battles to win shortened sentences through a highly contested program that’s run through the controversial Criminal Action Penal Entertainment organization in a (not so) alternative United States. Loretta nears the day she’ll finally be free, but the burden of all she’s done — and still has to do — weighs heavily on her in this damning look at America’s prison industrial complex and culture of violence.

The bestselling author of Cutting for Stone is back with a family saga spanning more than 70 years. The story of a girl who would come to be known as Big Ammachi — which essentially translates to “Big Momma” — twists and turns, intertwining as the waterways that her and her would-be family live by in Southern India. Big Ammachi’s family, part of a Christian community with a long history, will be as gifted as they are cursed, with the curious incidence of drowning being a common theme reoccurring through the generations. Starting in 1900, we experience the change and advancements time brings as Big Ammachi experiences them.

Alex is a certified mess, but I have to admit she’s also pretty bold in ways I could never be. After she commits a faux pas at a party, the older man she has a lil something going on with sends her on her way with a ticket back to where she came from. But she’s not ready to leave the bougie part of Long Island and all the potential ways its inhabitants could support her. So she drifts from place to place, using her people-reading skills to melt into each new social situation, seamlessly fitting in..until she doesn’t. Alex is the type of person who has random thoughts about how easy it’d be to steal things she comes across, so while she is pretty morally reprehensible, the narrative of seeing rich people’s worlds shaken up a bit makes for an interesting read. The premise of how she’s able to so easily pass in new social groups says a lot about privilege and race, I think. It also reminds me of a story from awhile back about a woman who pretended to be a German heiress. Supreme mess.

Kuang only writes bangers, and in this one, June witnesses the death of Athena Liu — who just finished a novel that promises to be a masterpiece about Chinese laborers’ contributions to the Allied forces during WWI. June decides to take Athena’s manuscript and claims the story as her own. To take full advantage (because, you know, stealing someone’s book wasn’t enough), she also lets her publisher rebrand her with an Asian-sounding name and an author photo of someone who is racially ambiguous (if you hadn’t guessed, June is white). The book is successful, but June can’t shake the feeling that it could all come tumbling down, and that the truth of Athena is about to be exposed.

*Bonus*: Kuang is interviewed here by author Zakiya Dalila Harris (The Other Black Girl) about the book and what inspired it. Here’s an excerpt I had to include:

“Kuang: “I really like the novelist John Banville and I was reading some interviews he’d done, and he mentioned that once he tried writing in an alternate voice, like a crime thriller, and suddenly he’d written paragraphs and paragraphs, and he thought to himself, ‘John, you slut.’ That’s how I felt drafting the first 3,000 words of Yellowface. It was just pouring out and I thought, ‘Becky, you slut. What are you doing?'”

Kuang, if you’re reading this, this paragraph makes us friends now.

In the late 1800s, Pirbhai, a young Indian boy, becomes a worker indentured to the British in his desperation to find work. He’s taken to East Africa to work on the East African Railway, where he’s pressured to commit an act that will haunt him and his family for generations. His children grow up in a Uganda that is starting to divest from British rule, and eventually his descendants have to leave because of Idi Amin’s South Asian expulsion. They end up in different parts of the world, with some eventually finding each other again in Canada. This covers five generations of a family with lives spread out over four continents as they reckon with what they’ve done and lost in the name of survival.

I’ve never heard of an Earl Grey pie, but it honestly makes so much sense. I love tea-flavored things, and am itching to try this. If you do, let me know how it is!

In addition to typical pie ingredients, you’ll need:

Pastry Cream

Earl Grey standard tea bags

Whole milk

Vanilla paste

Chocolate Ganache

Susan Burton’s life was turned upside down when her 5-year-old son was killed by a car in South L.A. Without access to professional mental health care, Burton turned to self-medicating with drugs. Because her struggles with addiction took place during the War on Drugs, she eventually landed in prison, and was in and out for the next 15 years. In all that time, she was never offered any kind of rehabilitation or help with her illness. She sought out a rehab facility on her own, underwent recovery, and set out to help women with similar challenges. In this memoir, she speaks about her experiences with addiction — including the systemic issues that lead to more incarceration rather than education and true recovery — and her organization A New Way of Life. This book, and Burton, have been recognized as vital to prison reform and social justice overall.

“Let’s deflate something monstrous, / and take its air inside us.”

From Ghana to Tuskegee, this debut poetry collection by award-winning Xan Phillips follows the Black body as it is subjugated to the horrors of enslavement and other atrocities across different settings and time periods. But through it all, they also illuminate the ways that joy is reclaimed in intimate and queer spaces.

Beautiful cover aside, I’ve seen this described as a fantasy novel that is perfect for frequent and infrequent fantasy readers alike, as its magic and world building feels a little easier to get into. Here, Kiah, who is essentially adopted by the queen of Alfajiri, sets out on a journey to discover more of her past. Accompanying her are her two close friends, and as the three journey on and learn about Kiah and the true nature of things, the structure of Alfajiri is threatened. Now the people of their country must choose between following the heir, or contending with an empty throne.

It’s the mid 1900s in the south, and 16-year-old Nell is married off and whisked away to Boston. Though she likes the idea of being independent, shy Nell lives in a time when the weight of the world rests on women’s shoulders, and opportunities are few. Once she has three children, her body feels the consequences, and her emotionally abusive husband Henry withdraws from her. She seeks comfort in another man, Charles, who she meets at church, and who she becomes pregnant by. Child Bride follows Nell as she does the best she can in a harsh and segregated world.