Welcome to Read This Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that should absolutely be put at the top of your TBR pile. Recommended books will vary across genre and age category and include shiny new books, older books you may have missed, and some classics I suggest finally getting around to. Make space for another pile of books on your floor because here we go!
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Today’s pick is by a talented Black, queer, and trans writer, poet, and cultural worker from Texas.
Pretty: A Memoir by KB Brookins
Brookins writes, “Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort.” This memoir, interspersed with poetry, contains Brookins’ own experiences of the particular flavor of marginalization that happens when a person is Black, queer, and trans. Some of this is exacerbated by religious community but don’t let anyone lead you to believe this marginalization doesn’t happen outside of those spaces as well. Brookins’ birth mother had them very young and they were adopted by and raised by another couple. These folks, their parents, are, according to them, very religious and very Texan.
My heart broke over and over, reading about the bullying and the discomfort of elementary school, and then I shook with rage reading about the sexual assault they suffered at the hands of teenage children of fellow church members. Needless to say, this book is an emotional read filled with multiple kinds of abuse and homophobia and transphobia but there is always, always hope written between the words.
For 60 years, the author’s family has had two gospel-singing troupes made of dozens of family members. The family is well-known in churches in the Fort Worth, Texas area and they write about the effects of this on them growing up. They also write about their eventual escape from the toxic culture that surrounded and terrorized them, which coincided with going to college. During all of this is their struggle to figure out who they are, where they belong, and who they belong with. Maybe I’m biased, but one of the reasons I always find Black queer memoirs so powerful is that there is always hope as the through line. If there was no hope, then the memoir wouldn’t exist. If there was no hope, then Black queer people would not exist.
I feel so fortunate that this book exists and I get to share it with you.
That’s it for now, book-lovers!
Patricia
Find me on Book Riot, the All the Books podcast, Bluesky, and Instagram.
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