Hiya, star bits! How’s tricks? I had hoped for a weekend full of reading, but instead, I got food poisoning. Womp womp. I didn’t have that on my 2024 bingo card! But I am feeling a bit better now, and I am ready to talk about books with you because today is an amazing day of new releases. Clear your calendar, because the Kelly Link novel is out today, and it is amaaaaazing. It should be a national holiday.
As for other new releases, at the top of my list of today’s books that I want to get my hands on are The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older, No One Dies Yet by Kobby Ben Ben, and What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher. You can hear about more of the fabulous books coming out today on this week’s episode of All the Books! Vanessa and I talked about great books we loved that are out this week, including The Warm Hands of Ghosts, The Fox Wife, and The Book of Doors.
2024 is the tenth year of the Read Harder Challenge! Join us as we make our way through 24 tasks meant to expand our reading horizons and diversify our TBRs. To get book recommendations for each task, sign up for the Read Harder newsletter. We’ll also keep you informed about other cool reading challenges, readathons, and more across the bookish internet. If you become a paid subscriber, you get even more recommendations plus community features, where you can connect with a community of passionate, like-minded readers in a cozy and supportive corner of the internet. Sign up today!
And now it’s time for everyone’s favorite game, “Ahhh, My TBR!” Here are today’s contestants!
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
If you’ve been listening to All the Books! or reading this newsletter even for a little while, you’ve probably heard me mention Kelly Link. She is an incredible writer of fantasy and fairy tale stories. Up to today, she’s released story collections. But now she also has a novel! THIS novel. It’s a 600+ page novel of magic and wonder, a story of teenagers in a small Massachusetts town brought back from the dead by their apparently magical music teacher. The magical tasks they are assigned seem to draw other magical beings to their town as they work to solve the mystery of their deaths and stop whatever destruction seems headed their way. (All while keeping the fact that they were dead and gone from their families and friends.) It’s an amazing, enchanting novel of family, friendship, love, loss, and of course, magic, told only as Kelly Link could tell it. I’m ready to read it again!
Backlist bump: Magic for Beginners: Stories by Kelly Link
An Education in Malice by S. T. Gibson
I haven’t read this one yet, but I am going through a vampire phase (which I assume happens to everyone in middle age?), so I am looking forward to reading it. It’s a retelling of the vampire novel Carmilla (which I also need to read), about two students at an isolated college in Massachusetts who are competing neck and neck (vampire joke!) for the attention and praise of their poetry professor. There are also some strange rituals that happen on campus. Bring on the dark academia! It sounds a bit like “The Secret History but make it vampires,” which is a thing I just realized I wanted. “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been undead for several weeks…” Camilla, Carmilla—it’s so close already! I may have to read this as soon as I finish writing the newsletter!
Backlist bump: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson
Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver
And, last but not least, this powerful posthumous collection of stories. Diane Oliver wrote these six stories about the horrors of racism she witnessed and experienced growing up as a young Black girl in the mid-20th century in America. There’s a young woman worried for her brother as he attends his first day at a desegregated school, a college student turning invisible at her college, a couple facing up to the truths of their marriage, and more. Sadly, Oliver died at the age of 22 in an accident while at college in Iowa. This book, her only collection, is haunting and incendiary and displays brilliant talent from a life lost so young. Fans of Tayari Jones, Danielle Evans, and just great short stories will love it.
Backlist bump: Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories by Kathleen Collins
This week, I am reading There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish by Anna Akbari, Devil Is Fine by John Vercher, and the eighth book in the middle grade graphic novel series, InvestiGators: Class Action by John Patrick Green. Have you read this series? I adore these books, as well as the Agents of S.U.I.T. spinoff. I am also over the moon because they just announced the second book in the Fry Guys series, which I talked about a billion times last year. And there’s a second Officer Clawsome book on the way! Between all these books, I’m pretty sure they have all the puns. ALL OF THEM. The song stuck in my head this week is “Into Dust” by Mazzy Star. And here is your weekly cat picture: Zevon decided the other day to see if he could open a locked door. Spoiler: He could not.
I appreciate you more than I can say, friends. Thank you for joining me each Tuesday as I rave about books! I am wishing you all a wonderful rest of your week, whatever situation you find yourself in now. And yay, books! See you next week! – XO, Liberty