2021 Nonfiction Highlights: Part II

It’s so good! Broome tells the story of his growing up in less than ideal circumstances, including when he burned down his house, and what it has been like being a queer Black man who feels tremendous isolation. The book is centered around the Gwendolyn Brooks poem “We Real Cool” and is excellent and everyone should read it.

This book just makes me want to pull out my Breyer horses and start drawing them like I did in fifth grade. It’s a collection of essays written by self-professed horse girls, including Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, and Sarah Enelow-Snyder— who writes about growing up as a Black barrel racer in central Texas. So many horse-related career and hobby options!

This graphic memoir and history of women-led slave revolts rejects the popularly-held idea that slave revolts were solely led by men. Hall, the granddaughter of enslaved people, combs through “old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the ‘negro burying ground’ uncovered in Manhattan.” Deeply researched AND illustrated AND about a little-known women-centered topic.

You know how sometimes, someone is such a nerd about something that it just grabs you? Ok yes, this might be connected to the horse girls book in terms of passionate nerdery, but THIS time, it is about life in the treetops, or “the eighth continent” as Lowman will have. She’s a “tree-top scientist” and goes from Australian rainforests to the Scottish highlands, and shares what life is like up in the trees. So cool.