Happy Monday! I hope you had a fun weekend (or a bad weekend, if that’s more your thing, my little Wednesday Addams.) I am quite under the weather today, so I am keeping it brief, but I still have a couple of great things to share with you today. And as always there’s a kitten picture. (Three more months and then I will have to refer to it as a ‘cat picture.’ HASHTAG SOB.) Enjoy the rest of your week, and remember to be excellent to each other! I’ll see you again on Thursday. – xoxo, Liberty
Sponsored by Doubleday
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
Here’s Monday’s trivia question: Whose bones were supposedly found at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191? (Scroll to the bottom for the answer.)
Deals, Reels, and Squeals!
Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls is being adapted for television.
Phoebe Dynevor & Regé-Jean Page to star in Shondaland’s Bridgerton adaptation for Netflix.
ALL THE MUPPET ARMS: Congratulations to Rioter Jenn Northington! She’s publishing an anthology of Arthuriana retellings with former Rioter Swapna Krishna! It has an AMAZING line-up of contributors.
Poet and former Youth Laureate Amanda Gorman has a book deal.
HarperCollins Children’s Books has announced plans to launch HarperAlley, a graphic novel imprint, in the fall of 2020.
Cover Reveals
Here’s the first look at So We Can Glow, the upcoming story collection for Leesa Cross-Smith. (Grand Central Publishing, March 10, 2020)
And the first peek at Infinity Son from Adam Silvera. (HarperTeen, January 14, 2020)
Book Riot Recommends
At Book Riot, I work on the New Books! email, the All the Books! podcast about new releases, and the Book Riot Insiders New Release Index. I am very fortunate to get to read a lot of upcoming titles, and learn about a lot of upcoming titles, and I’m delighted to share a couple with you each week so you can add them to your TBR! (It will now be books I loved on Mondays and books I’m excited to read on Thursdays. YAY, BOOKS!)
Loved, loved, loved:
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (January 7, 2020, G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
I went on and on about this book on All the Backlist! last week, so I’ll try to keep it brief, but OMG. I think I may have just read the best book of 2020, and it’s only July of 2019, lol. It is an absolutely perfect novel about race, privilege, white guilt, power, money, and love. It starts with a young black woman being confronted by a security guard when she takes the white child she is babysitting into the grocery store, and every chapter ratchets up the tension and the hard truths from there. Mark. This. Down. Now.
What I’m reading this week:
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
The Second Sleep by Robert Harris
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar
(I have been reading like fifteen bits of books at a time. I need to wrap a few of them up, LOL.)
Pun of the week:
What did the duck say when she purchased new lipstick? “Put it on my bill.”
Here’s a kitten picture:
Zevon is unsympathetic to my pain.
And this is funny.
All books for all seasons!
Trivia answer: King Arthur’s.
You made it to the bottom! Thanks for reading! – xo, L