Must-Read August Book Club Books

I have never heard of watermelon fries, but I’m so intrigued! It’s essentially just watermelon cut into fry-like shapes, and @Feelgoodfoodie made a delicious-sounding dip to go with them.

All you need is: a watermelon, crinkle cutter (if you want to be extra cute), and yogurt, honey, and strawberries for the dip. Cut up the watermelon and blend the dip ingredients together and there you have it.

Bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo makes her adult debut with Family Lore. In it, the women of a Dominican American family prepare for a living wake. Flor Marte can see when other people will die, and so it worries her sisters when she requests a living wake for herself. But whether she will die soon or not she keeps to herself — and she’s not the only secret keeper. From a secret attraction to an old lover recently released from prison — the Marte women’s rich, complex, and magical lives are brilliantly brought to life here.

A dead body is discovered in a small town of Black, Jewish, and other European immigrants in Pennsylvania in 1972. To fully understand what happened, McBride takes us all the way back to 1925, when Moshe and Chona ran both the only integrated dance hall as well as the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store in the Chicken Hill community. It’s the Moshes who help their friend Nate, the leader of the Black community, when he needs to hide his deaf nephew to stop him from becoming institutionalized. But then racists interfere and something terrible happens. But the community comes together to protect its own. (Aug. 8)

I really loved Cañas’ The Hacienda and am super excited for this one. It’s the 1840s, and Mexico has long been threatened by invaders from the north. But there’s another kind of monster that threatens the country’s borders. And when Nena and Néstor were young, it was one of these monsters that attacked Nena and caused Néstor to flee. He’s been fleeing ever since, and doing his best f-boi impression to drown out the guilt of having abandoned his best friend. The two are united, though, when Néstor is part of a militia to fight off the Americans, and Nena is that militia’s curandera, or healer. She (understandably) feels some type of way about how he bolted nine years ago, but the real threat soon takes precedence over any long-held grudges. (Aug. 15)

This is part whodunit, missing persons case, meditation on race, philosophical exploration, and more. And it’s delightfully twisty on top of all that. The patriarch of the Parksons goes missing, and it’s only Eugene — one of the Parksons’ kids who has a rare condition that prevents him from speaking — who saw what happened. We follow the investigation, yes, but we also see how the family relearns how to communicate with each other and how they define what it means to be happy. (Aug. 29)