Category: Read This Book

Our protagonist, Yadriel, lives in a cemetery in Los Angeles with his whole brujx community. He is 16 and should be a full-fledged brujo by now except his community is not supportive because he is transgender and gay. The way that the brujxes think that magic works is that there is men’s magic and women’s magic. So while they’re attempting to be loving, they end up being really transphobic. The person who was his biggest support, his mom, has died but soon it will be the first Día de Muertos since she has died, and Yadriel intends to tell her that he is a brujo now after he sneaks off to do his ceremony in secret.

When a brujx turns 15 they’re presented to Santa Muerte aka Lady Death. She then gives them a blessing and ties their inherent magic to their chosen conduit. For women, it’s usually a rosary. For men, it’s usually a dagger. This conduit is called a portaje. Yadriel’s best friend, Maritza, is super supportive of Yadriel and she makes a beautiful dagger for Yadriel so he can perform his own brujx quince and show everyone that he is just as much of a brujo as any other man. So, he does his secret quince with Maritza and it seems like it works.

Meanwhile, Yadriel’s cousin Miguel dies that same night but they don’t know where his body is. So Yadriel hatches a plan to find Miguel’s portaje and free his spirit and then no one can deny he is a brujo. He and Maritza go poking around and find a necklace, which definitely feels like a spirit is tethered to it. What Yadriel doesn’t expect is that it’s actually the spirit of Julian Diaz, known troublemaker at their high school. Julian wants to make a deal. If Yadriel and Maritza help Julian find his friends and let them know he’s gone, then Julian will let Yadriel sever his tie and set him free to prove to everyone he is a brujo. Seems straightforward, but it really really isn’t. On top of that, spending all that time together, Yadriel isn’t sure he wants to let Julian go.

This book is fun and suspenseful and heartbreaking and heartwarming and I totally have a crush on this book.

Michael is an aspiring journalist living in a sleepy Minnesota town when a serial killer sweeps across the Midwest. Someone is murdering people, seemingly at random, and their bodies are found completely drained of blood. The crime scenes inspire rumors and put everyone on edge, especially Michael’s dad, the Sheriff. Then, the unthinkable happens and the murderer strikes Michael’s town. But this time, it’s different. A teen girl named Marie is left behind, covered in blood. She’s taken into custody, but she refuses to speak about what happened, who is responsible, or even where she comes from. The only person she will talk to is Michael, but even he isn’t sure if he’s prepared to hear her full confession.

This is a chilling and eerie book that takes the staples of In Cold Blood and throws in a speculative twist that will leave the reader guessing. Michael is a grounded character who loves his family, wants to follow his dreams, and discover a life outside of Minnesota. He’s curious about Marie, wants to understand her, and even feels sorry for her…but his motivations for taking Marie’s confession are not altogether altruistic—he’s thinking about the story he might be able to write and how it could help him get into journalism school. But his plans are turned on their heads when Marie tells him something he can’t quite believe, and he must confront the slippery nature of truth. Along the way, he is forced to see his town and community in a different light, and learns the hard way that scared people aren’t always rational people. I thought that Blake did a great job capturing the vibe of the 1950’s Midwest, and this is a good book that reminds readers that darkness is always lurking, no matter how wholesome your town might appear.

This story begins on the East Coast with our two main characters, Patricia and Laurence, as children. We first meet Patricia when she is six. She finds a wounded bird and tries to soothe it by saying she’ll take it home and put it in a cage until it gets better. Much to Patricia’s surprise, the bird speaks up against that and we learn that Patricia can speak to birds. The bird is also very surprised that Patricia can speak to it and tells her she’s probably a witch. The bird tells her who can both fix its wing and figure out if she is a witch, so they set off to find them.

We then meet Laurence, a kid whose parents desperately want him to be outdoorsy and he is very much not. He’d rather be tinkering with his computer and playing video games. He finds some schematics on the internet and builds a clever little piece of tech that I’m not going to tell you the details of because I find it charming and I don’t want to spoil it for you.

Flash forward to when Patricia and Laurence are around thirteen. They meet and Laurence commissions Patricia to help him convince his parents that he’s spending time outdoors and has a friend. When Patricia is at Laurence’s house, he shows her the supercomputer he is building and developing AI. He sets it up so that Patricia can “chat” with it and help the AI develop.

Meanwhile, there is an assassin trying to murder them both because he thinks it will save the world. He ends up separating them from each other. Patricia goes off to a witchcraft school and Laurence goes off to study science.

Their paths cross again in adulthood, now in San Francisco, and their paths continue to cross in the most awkward and mysterious ways. You can feel something building as you read these encounters, but you’re not quite sure what it is.

This book is both fun and funny and one of my favorites to escape into.

The premise of this anthology is simple: Ellen Datlow asked a variety of writers to come up with a short story that’s inspired by Shirley Jackson’s work. No retellings or twists on her original stories, but just each writer’s own spin on some of the themes, elements, and motifs that make up a classic Shirley Jackson story. Which, to be frank, is quite a recognizable vibe. The writers include Josh Malerman, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Cassandra Khaw, Benjamin Percy, Seanan McGuire, and more.

The result is an anthology that is readable and varied. Anthologies can be hit or miss for me, but I thought this one was pretty consistently solid, with some stand-out stories that I know will haunt me for a long time, and some that I will want to revisit each spooky season. The various ways that the authors chose to interpret Shirley Jackson’s sensibilities is really fun. Some have a delightful mid-century nostalgia to them. Some are just eerie enough that you know something uncanny is going on, but it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what. Some have that dreamy, slightly philosophical air to them that both intrigues and unsettles. My favorites include “For Sale by Owner” by Elizabeth Hand, which is an unconventional haunted house story. “Hag” by Benjamin Percy had me convinced that it’s never wise to visit an island in the off-season. “Refinery Road” by Stephen Graham Jones had a twist that made me re-read the story as soon as I’d finished. “Special Meal” by Josh Malerman reminded me of “The Lottery” in a way no story ever has, while also being its own delightful, dark thing. And I am forever and always going to read anything Kelly Link writes, so her closing story, “Skinder’s Veil” was everything I hoped it’d be and more, with beautiful language and a beautiful full circle plot.

I highly recommend picking up this book if you’d like to wade into some unsettling, creepy, but not necessarily hardcore horror stories for the month! I imagine these will be perfect stories to read right before bed on a cold, dark October night!

Jasmine Mans is a spoken word poet and the book is described as “an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity,” but in my opinion that’s a huge over-simplification. The poems in this book are just so much. So much what? So much everything. So much pain, so much joy, so much passion, so much memory, so much generational trauma, so much community. It’s just so much. I’m amazed I read it as quickly as I did because every few poems I would come across a line or a stanza and I would have to put the book down and stare into space. Or take a walk around our apartment. As if her words made my brain bluescreen and I had to wait for my mind to get back on line.

Some of these poems were very hard to read, not due to complexity but due to the raw emotion. For example, one of the poems is from the point of view of one of the little girls that died in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. The poet also offers many poems as memorials. In honor of Sandra Bland. In honor of Whitney Houston. In honor of the countless Black women mutilated and terrorized by American doctors in the name of science.

There are poems of love and loss and love that lead to loss. And not only romantic love, but love between a mother and daughter, or the love of grandmothers and aunties. There’s a poem titled “Footnotes for Kanye” which I happened to read right after his divorce from Kim Kardashian was announced and though I do not care about Kanye West, this poem hit extra hard when I read it.

I am both changed and seen by this poetry collection and I highly recommend it.

Lily is a teenager living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1953. She’s always known that she is different, but is unable to put into words what that means until she sees an ad for a male impersonator at the nearby Telegraph Club. Then a chance encounter with a white classmate named Kath provides Lily with a chance to sneak out, and they discover an underground community of independent, queer women who welcome them. At first, Lily and Kath are convinced they’re just friends, but when feelings develop between them, they’re unsure how to navigate them. There are more than a few reasons to be cautious in 1953—and when Lily’s family finds themselves a little too close to suspected communists, the stakes for Lily are even higher.

What I love about this book (and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this) is that this novel is a realistic and sometimes heart-wrenching look at what it was to be queer in the 1950’s, but it’s not a tragic book. Lo does a brilliant job at capturing the uncertainty that Lily feels when she first begins to understand what it means to be attracted to other women, and the euphoria at finally having the language to identify herself and the context to understand her feelings. The sense of community is also really strong—both within Lily’s Chinese American family, and at the Telegraph Club, where many of the women have learned the essential value of found family the hard way. For a book that’s largely about self-discovery, it shimmers with tension—there’s Lily’s fear of getting caught sneaking out, her anxiety about her family finding out about how she feels about girls, her tumultuous feelings for Kath, the constant threat that the club will be raided, and the heightened fear that if Lily is arrested it could jeopardize her family’s status in the U.S., despite being citizens. I found myself racing through this book, fearing the worst and yet hoping for the best. The ending wasn’t what I expected, but it left me deeply satisfied.

Bonus: Malinda Lo just announced that her next YA book, A Scatter of Light, out next fall, will be a contemporary companion to this one, set in 2013. I can’t wait to see how Lily and Kath fit into it!

This Stonewall Honor Book is about Charlie, a Black, queer 13-year-old who is guilted by her parents into attending an all-white girls’ Christian youth backpacking camp. When Charlie’s parents drop her off, she is immediately apprehensive that there will be anything that caters to anyone who looks like and believes like her.

The head counselor is Bee and she co-facilitates with her daughter Penny. On top of the subtle micro-aggressions and sometimes clear ignorance on the part of the head camp counselor (and sometimes, even other campers), Charlie is also struggling with her faith in god.

The camp is part of a wider tradition in the area where one of the town colonizers settlers was Beatrice Tillson. Beatrice Tillson is referred to as a feminist who, once a year, would take all the women in the town on a week-long, 50-mile expedition to a place where they created a women-only shrine and they would spend a day of worship and do some kind of special ceremony at that point. What that ceremony entails, exactly, is kept a mystery. This camp that Charlie is at recreates this expedition for teenage girls.

We learn really early on that Charlie is not much of a hiker and on the first day, Charlie is paired up with another camper, Sydney, to be in charge of filling the water supply. In a private moment, Sydney shares with Charlie that she is trans, but no one else at the camp knows. It’s pretty clear that if this information was known, it would probably be even less of a welcoming space. Sydney and Charlie bond over the shared experience of being in a space that was never intended for either of them.

As the Crow Flies is not a complete story and it looks as though the creator is taking a hiatus from updating the webcomic so it’s unclear when more comics and subsequent volumes will be available. Still, I think this story is one worth getting into.

Evie is on the cusp of achieving her wildest dreams: She’s just graduated from high school and been cast in a major movie, following in the footsteps of her legendary grandmother, the actress Evelyn Conaway. But when she puts her trust in the wrong person, Evie’s acting career is sabotaged and she finds herself fleeing LA to visit Gigi in New York, where her grandmother has been living rather reclusively for the past ten years, hoping that her famous grandmother can help her get back on track.

But Evie gets a shock when she discovers that Gigi isn’t living alone—she’s taken in a young man Evie’s age named Milo, who does her grocery shopping and keeps her company. Evie suspects that Milo is out to take advantage of her grandmother’s wealth, but before she can prove it, Gigi takes off and vanishes, leaving a note that says she’ll be back “soon.” With the clock ticking down on Evie’s last chance at acting success, she turns to Milo to help find Gigi…and learns some surprising truths about herself and her family along the way.

First off, I loved that this book is about Hollywood without being about the shallow trappings of Hollywood. Even though Evie is on the outs and desperate for a way back in, the story is far more grounded than you would expect. Gigi taking off and not lending a hand forces Evie to confront herself and her own ambition, and decide just how far she’ll go to achieve her goals. She must also reckon with how the world perceives her, and how the people who matter to her perceive her. That makes this book especially impactful as she and Milo go on a whirlwind scavenger hunt across NYC and through her grandmother’s past to find her. Evie’s goals shift throughout the story, taking you to unexpected and unexpectedly wonderful places, and there’s just enough romance to keep you satisfied and swooning. This is a book about staying true to yourself while chasing your dreams, and tending to your relationships, all told in a really relatable way…although most of us probably aren’t likely related to movie stars or Hollywood hopefuls ourselves. I was thoroughly charmed by the story and the characters and I’m actually sad that none of the fictitious movies and actors that Forest filled this story with are real! I highly recommend this is you’re looking for a funny and romantic book that has some hefty family issues, but isn’t dark!

Happy reading!
Tirzah

I remember this graphic novel being very popular back when I was in graduate school in the library science program and each time I reread it, it still holds up. For most of the book it seems like there are three different stories being told in alternating chapters that have a similar theme, but at the end it all comes together and you learn the deep interconnection between the stories and the characters.

In one story we meet the Monkey King who is a prominent figure in Chinese mythology and learn how the other deities do not accept him because he is just a monkey. He masters many various disciplines of kung-fu and repeatedly tries to prove himself as a fellow god, even changing his body shape so he is more human-like. But the gods just keep saying, “No, you’re a monkey. Quit trying to be anything other than that.”

The second story being told is that of Jin Wang, a Chinese-American boy who wants to be white and blend in instead of standing out. Part of the reason is because he has a crush on a girl who is white and the other giant part is because of the anti-Asian racism he has to deal with all the time. The microaggressions and flat out aggressions are just a constant onslaught. Two months after Jin arrived at his new middle school, another student arrived. This student, Wei-Chen Sun, just moved to the U.S. from Taiwan. In an effort to reject his own heritage, Jin initially rejects the friendship of Wei-Chen but that doesn’t last for long and they become best friends.

The third storyline of this book is told as if it were a sitcom with a laugh track. It’s about a high school boy named Danny, who appears white, but gets a yearly visit from his cousin Chin-Kee who is a wildly racist caricature of a Chinese person. It’s incredibly awful. It makes me so uncomfortable to even read. Danny is deeply ashamed of his cousin and doesn’t want to be associated with him at all.

This graphic novel expertly explores internalized racism, self-hatred, and eventually self-acceptance and it’s a great read.

When Kieran was a teenager, a horrific storm hit his small coastal town in Tasmania and as a result of a mistake he made, they lost his older brother Finn and Finn’s business partner. Another life was lost that day as well, but no one really knows what happened to the teenage girl who was presumably swept out to sea. Now an adult with a new baby of his own, Kieran and his partner head back for a visit for the first time in years. It’s clear that some wounds run deep, but Kieran is unprepared for how the past gets stirred up when the body of a young woman is found on the beach.

I think one of the things that Jane Harper does really well (aside from really vivid settings!) is balancing dramatic or impactful moments in her characters’ pasts with a contemporary mystery. We’ve seen her pull it off in The Dry and The Lost Man (both excellent books and worth checking out, too) and here in The Survivors she really makes you feel the tension in this small town as a result of the painful past and the storm years earlier. It’s something that touched everyone’s lives, and all of the characters are living with the consequences of it still, albeit to varying extents. The details she drops are expertly planted and everything comes together in a really smart, surprising way, interspersed with memories and flashbacks that really give you a lot of insight to the characters and their motivations.

I also really enjoyed the Tasmanian setting! I’ve read a fair number of books set in Australia but I’d never really explored Tasmania through fiction, and I appreciate that the small town, the beach, and the rugged wilderness of the area really leapt off the page and added to the unsettling vibe of the book. The depictions of the storm were also really chilling. What’s scarier than being at the mercy of Mother Nature when she’s in a rage?

Overall, if you like a moody mystery that doesn’t get too dark or graphic, you can’t go wrong with Jane Harper’s work and her newest book is certainly a winner!