Category: Read This Book

Set in the summer of 2013, Aria Tang West is not at all happy that an incident at the end of her senior year has ruined her plans for the summer. Originally, she was supposed to spend the summer with friends on Martha’s Vineyard before heading off to college at MIT, but instead she’s shipped off to California to live with her grandmother for the summer. But it’s not all bad — her grandmother is the famous artist Joan West, and she has a gardener named Steph whose friendship Aria appreciates. But as the summer slides by and many of Aria’s perceptions about the world and herself are challenged, she soon finds herself falling for Steph, no matter the consequences.

I was very intrigued by this book and the chosen setting of 2013. It’s long enough ago that I think Aria’s general cluelessness about queer issues, despite growing up in a progressive place, feels realistic and yet it’s not so long ago that I am wholly comfortable labeling it at historical fiction. (Mainly because I was not much older than Steph in 2013!) Having lived through it, I thought that Lo did a great job of capturing that particular point in time where queer issues weren’t quite at the forefront and part of the mainstream society, but were definitely heading in that direction. What Lo does so well in Last Night at the Telegraph Club is craft a narrative about a girl realizing that she is queer slowly, through very specific moments and feelings, and she does it yet again here, but in an entirely different time period and context — dyke marches instead of underground dyke clubs, and a circle of queer friends who are out and proud help inform Aria’s journey. Aria is naive, a little self-centered, and curious, and despite her less-than-great choices, I felt myself rooting for her because of her generosity and interest in the world. I loved how Lo played with time here, as well. The prologue starts in 2008, the bulk of the book takes place in 2013, and an epilogue takes place in 2023. It’s not often that you get glimpses of YA characters over those long stretches of time, and I really appreciated that little peek into Aria’s life ten years into he future — not what you expect, but that’s okay!

I will continue to read and love everything that Lo puts out, and this might just be my new favorite book of hers! I highly recommend it, even if you haven’t read Last Night at the Telegraph Club — the connection is small, although it is sweet if you loved that book!

From 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. Journalist Tanya Talaga investigates these deaths and discovers that each one of them moved from rural locations in the northern part of the province to attend high school. 

Talaga pieces together the students’ lives, trying to better understand why each student died. Woven throughout these students’ stories is the dark history of the residential school system across Canada and its lasting effects on Indigenous communities across the country.

She connects the seven students’ stories with that of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Native boy who froze to death while running away from a residential school. After Wenjack’s death, an inquest was called and it made four recommendations for improvement to residential schools. These recommendations were never implemented.

Now the residential schools have closed, but that created a vacuum where many Native Nations struggled to create brand new educational systems from scratch with little to no funding. As a result, many Indigenous parents living in rural, Northern locations felt like they had little choice but to send their middle school and high school-aged children to cities in the south. Removed from their families and communities, many of these students struggled to adjust to their new lives in the city.

Residential schools. The murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and 2Spirit people. The mental health crisis in Indigenous communities. Everything is connected. The atrocities of North America’s colonialist systems are an ongoing, ever-present devastating dark cloud over Indigenous youth. Talaga returns again and again with more evidence, copious notes, and first-hand testimonies illustrating her points. Talaga’s work on this book earned her the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction.

This is the first book in N. K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology and it picks up right at the end of the author’s short story titled “The City Born Great,” which is in Jemisin’s short story collection titled How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? In “The City Born Great,” the city of New York is born. Not settled, colonized, or created but born in that it becomes alive as a living, breathing thing. There is an avatar for the city who themself is New York.

But some evil is trying to kill the city before it fully comes to life and there is a battle where the avatar wins but is badly injured. When the avatar is injured, the city itself is injured. Buildings crumble and bridges collapse. The city of São Paolo — that is, the avatar and person São Paolo — was supposed to be helping New York be born and it goes wrong. That is the story of “The City Born Great.” This novel includes it as a prologue and the rest of the story begins there.

New York’s primary avatar (the injured one) is not the only avatar out there. Each of the five boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, also have avatars. Do they know what they are? Eventually. Do they know what they’re doing? Not really, but that’s some of the fun. Each of the avatars for the boroughs has a really strong personality and I love them all so much. Well, almost all of them.

The evil that is trying to kill New York is personified in a number of ways but it is a clear metaphor for gentrification. As a person who lives in a city that has many pockets of gentrification myself, some of the scenes were horrifying. This is not just because of everything awful about gentrification, but in the book there are tentacled creatures taking over bodies, paintings that drive onlookers insane, and really triggering racism from outright aggressive to microaggressions.

All of the boroughs are going to have to find each other and work together to save the city and there are so many times when it seems utterly impossible. This book is incredibly fun and the second book in the duology, The World We Make, just came out in November!

Betty was once an influencer, but now that she’s lost all her money she’s squatting in a dead woman’s house and fervently hoping her successful, rich family members don’t find out. Of course, the ruse becomes impossible to maintain as Christmas approaches and Betty’s not sure how she’s going to get through it until she accidentally drunkenly summons the Holiday Spirit. Hall, for short. Hall is handsome, exuberant, and he loves the holidays. At first Betty thinks his magic is just what she needs in order to convince her family that she’s doing great actually, never been better, but it’s not long before Betty has to admit that the holiday spirit might be growing on her.

I saw this book described on Instagram as “delightfully unhinged” and I can confirm it is indeed that, and much more! This is a romance novel for people who like Schitts’ Creek and enjoy watching Elf every December, and I struggle to remember the last time a book made me laugh out loud as much as this one did. Hall is basically everything you’d expect him to be — over the top, magical, endlessly enthusiastic, and full of quirks. Betty is mostly grumpy and vain to start, but even though most of us would be rolling our eyes at her shallow tendencies, Hogle does a great job of giving readers peeks at the real, vulnerable Betty from the beginning, so you can’t help but want to root for her.

This book also does a great job of packing in a lot of the spirit of the holiday season, which is in fact full of mayhem and angst as well as happiness and cheer. I ended up loving the dysfunctional family, and the plot took some truly wild turns that had me laughing and always wondering what was going to happen next. (The Dancing with the Stars scene undid me.) If you want to laugh and you’re willing to go with a banana-pants Christmas book, then definitely pick this one up!

I didn’t expect to be listening to Tiny Beautiful Things while flying across the country to visit family in California. But there I was, tearing up on a late direct flight as Cheryl Strayed dealt out her incredibly thought-provoking advice. 

Strayed began writing anonymously as Sugar for an advice column on The Rumpus over a decade ago. She answered letters requesting advice, often sharing intimate memories from her own life. She had a way of creating deep emotional intimacy and teasing free the subtleties of the letters she answered.

I have to admit, I struggle to find self-help books that I like. Perhaps this is a fault of my personal taste (feel free to send me recommendations for your favorites!), but sometimes I find a book like Tiny Beautiful Things that knocks my socks off and reminds me of how helpful this genre can be.

She answers many questions about relationships, parenting, dealing with loss, and friendship. But she gives advice in a way that validates these common and relatable questions. In one question, she answers a teenager about why it’s important to understand that your friends will inevitably date people they don’t like. She writes to a trans man who has had a difficult relationship with his parents. She writes to new moms and older moms. But whoever she’s writing to, she invests her whole heart.

Strayed’s columns remind me that I’m not the only one who struggles with navigating life’s ups and downs. We’ve all struggled with similar things. And during those times the answers might be staring us square in the face, but we still wonder if we are doing the right thing. I think this is why the book works. We all have moments in our life where we might know the answer, or maybe we just need reassurance. Whatever it is, Strayed seems to know just what to say.

In this 10th anniversary edition, Strayed adds some columns that she wrote for her Substack, the newest manifestation of her column. So if you’re like me and missed the Tiny Beautiful Things phenomenon the first go around, now is the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon. Plus, if you’re an audiobook fan, she performs the audio!

Tricia Hersey is the founder of The Nap Ministry and she wants us all to rest. She believes that liberation does not come from exhaustion; that burnout is not our path to freedom. Much of Tricia Hersey’s movement is rooted in capitalism’s tie to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Enslaved Africans and eventually enslaved Black people were not allowed to rest much less have leisure, to daydream, or to imagine a better future.

This ministry is the antithesis of productivity and the opposite of grind culture. Hersey doesn’t want us to hustle. She wants us to lie down and to divest completely from productivity culture, capitalism, and the addictive machine that is social media. Rest is Resistance is not only about avoiding the urge to fill every moment with productivity, but also having rest for rest’s sake. That is the part that utterly blew my mind: to rest without the goal of then having more energy to do more. Not resting to fill your empty cup to just pour yourself out again for other people. The author wants you to break the cup. Just naps and daydreams and not taking part in the attention economy.

Hersey makes it very clear that rest is not a privilege and it is not something to be earned. We all deserve rest by merely existing. She addresses the folks who are saying “If I rest then I can’t pay the bills and feed my family.” She’s been there. In fact, that is where she was when she began the Nap Ministry.

After the preface and introduction, the book is broken into four main parts and each is a call to action: Rest, Dream, Resist, and Imagine.

This is an absolutely phenomenal book and if you think it’s not for you because you’re not Black, I promise, it’s for you. If you are living under capitalism, if you are on social media, if you are tired not only physically but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually tired, this book is for you.

Prue Perry is a Ladybird Scout legacy, but what most of the world doesn’t realize is that the Ladybirds are more than just a philanthropic social group—they’re also guardians against interdimensional grubs that feed on human emotions. And when the grubs get big enough, they don’t just stop at emotions—they’ll eat humans. Prue is still reeling from the death of fellow scout and best friend Molly three years earlier, and she’s quit the Scouts altogether. But she’s lured back in when she’s given three new recruits to train to take her place, and by the promise of being able to rid herself of the Ladybird life for good. However, training new recruits stirs up old memories, and when another Scout is killed, Prue’s knowledge and skill are needed more than ever.

First off, I love, love, love this premise and I thought that Anderson did such a great job of coming up with a super convincing Ladybird Scout organization and culture that felt realistic. Her world building was excellent, and I enjoyed all of the little details, from an app to social initiatives to various handbooks that evolve over the years. Prue’s backstory keeps the novel from being as light as say Lumberjanes—part of the reason why she no longer wants to be a Scout is because she feels as though Ladybird HQ sees her and her fellow sisters as expendable in the fight against evil, and that can’t be easily solved. But the journey is balanced with lots of humor and levity, particularly in Prue’s recruits: her middle-school-aged cousin and her best friend (who also happens to be the little sister of Prue’s oblivious-to-grubs boyfriend) and her rebellious and maybe slightly dangerous misfit friend, Beast. This unlikely crew has to learn trust and friendship, especially as the stakes get bigger, and I loved watching that journey. Anderson also does a great job of balancing a large cast of characters, which ran the range from lovable to difficult to despicable. I am not at all cut out for hunting inter-dimensional grubs and stabbing them to death, but this book made the Ladybird Scouts seem so cool I sort of wish I could join!

As a food lover who lives in the South, I’m always looking for more books that sit at the intersection of cuisine and culture. Founding Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance John T. Edge gives us all of that and more with his wonderful book The Potlikker Papers. Edge writes about how the South’s culture is reflected in cuisine. He takes us on a tour of the American South, along the way to describe the key places and why they have become landmarks for Southern Cuisine.

Edge is part of the new South, a growing cultural movement that aspires to make a better South, much in the vein of The Bitter Southerner’s famous campaign. The Potlikker Papers writes about Southern cuisine from this more progressive perspective, giving us the history of Southern food, both the good and the bad.

Edge gives a very broad overview of Southern food, describing the various communities that helped create modern Southern cuisine and illustrating how it will continue to evolve over the coming decades. Most importantly, he notes vital contributions of Black chefs throughout the years. He describes how Southern cuisine would not exist if not for these incredible taste makers who are in many ways the cornerstones of Southern cooking.

I especially love the audiobook, which Edge performs himself. There’s just something perfect about listening to Edge’s incredible accent as he describes mouth-watering dishes. I think it’s also important to note that The Potlikker is just an overview, one tile in the mosaic of Southern food. Books like, High on the Hog and The Cooking Gene are key texts about the contribution of African Americans to Southern Cuisine. And chefs like Edna Lewis have done incredible work on bringing Southern Appalachian foodways to the forefront of Southern Cuisine. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. 🙂

In the introduction, the author dissects white supremacy and details some of the ways in which it works according to design. White supremacy is not a broken system. The system is absolutely working as intended. In discussing the title and the thesis of the book, Oluo makes it incredibly clear (because there are always people who are going to play ignorant) that no, she is not arguing that every white man is mediocre or that any race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity; however, our society focuses on preserving white male power regardless of skill or talent. She calls us all in to examine the complacency throughout society that maintains this system.

This book explores and interrogates things that have been normalized in the U.S. like some men’s obsession with cowboys and westerns or the obsession with American football. I learned a staggering amount of history from this book. The chapter on cowboys and Buffalo Bill in particular left me speechless. I know I am not the only one who has a father, uncle, in-law, or grandfather who romanticizes cowboys and westerns. This chapter hit really close to home and has shed some light on many things that I thought I was familiar with.

Oluo writes about the centering of white men in social justice movements including but not limited to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. She talks about the assault on higher education and how as soon as people of color were allowed to attend universities, suddenly sentiments around higher education took a dive.

This book is so extraordinarily good and necessary. It is a phenomenal read and it’s definitely one you will want to read as a book club pick or at least get a copy for a spouse or friend so that you can discuss it because believe me, there is a lot to talk about and contemplate after digesting this hard-to-swallow book.

Frankie is a bored teenager in 1996 when she meets Zeke, who is spending the summer in her tiny Southern town because his parents’ marriage has hit a rough patch. Frankie and Zeke have an instant connection that’s only a little romantic but a lot to do with the fact that they’re both aspiring artists who want to create something memorable. Hours holed up in Frankie’s room leads to a collaboration that unexpectedly takes their town by storm, leading to a cultural phenomenon that will go down in history as the Coalfield Panic. Twenty years later, Frankie is a semi-famous author who receives a phone call from a reporter who thinks she might have found a link between Frankie and the panic…sending Frankie on a journey of reckoning through the past.

I really loved how this book unfolded, and how I immediately was drawn to Frankie. She is a misfit 16 year old who wants so much more out of life than what she’s got, and feels pretty trapped by circumstance. Her yearning to create something memorable and amazing comes to fruition in a wholly unexpected way, and both she and Zeke have to reckon with very different reactions to the panic and fascination that their creation brings about. I thought that Wilson did such a great job of exploring exactly how a small Southern town in the ’90s might react if a strange poster with a bizarre message started appearing everywhere, and it was really fun to see a mystery begin from the inside. Interspersed between the chapters set in the ’90s are chapters from Frankie’s adult life, where she reckons with the fact that she created a social phenomenon but no one knows about it, not even her family. This was such a weird, big-hearted novel about art and aspiration, and dealing with the consequences of your actions, and it packs a big emotional punch.