Best of Book Club Books, Part II

Reese has managed to become the trans woman she always wanted to be. For her this means that she has a loving partner, a pretty chill job, and is fairly content. That is, until her partner detransitions, going from being the trans woman Amy to the man Ames. Now Reese is trying to pick up the pieces, but does so by hooking up with married men (because mess). Meanwhile, Ames gets his boss/boo thang Katrina pregnant and invites Reese to coparent with them because he knows a baby is something she always wanted. She agrees to the arrangement because she has always felt that having a baby would be gender confirming. Despite inviting Reese into this potential little family, he doesn’t even want to be a father himself (more mess). The characters here offer a witty, engaging and real look at gender norms, motherhood, and how complicated we all are.

tw: s*xual assault

Between growing up poor, Black, and a girl with a tenuous relationship with her mother, Ford needed something to remain tethered to hope instead of despair. The idea of her father, born from doting letters he wrote her over the years, provided that grounding. By imagining her father as someone who might be like her, and as someone to look up to, she found solace in knowing he was out there in the world despite him being incarcerated for reasons unknown to her. As she grows a little older, she gets into a relationship with a boy who ends up sexually assaulting her. She’s still dealing with the secret of this when she finds out why her father is in prison.

This coming of age memoir with fully formed supporting characters has been likened to An American Marriage and Educated.

The 18th century poem from an Irish noblewoman lamenting her husbands violent, untimely death takes root in Ghríofa, anchoring itself in her throat and later other parts of her life. The precarious balancing act of young motherhood brings Ghríofa to see parallels between herself and this other female writer who drank her husband’s blood upon his death. The journey she sets out on in order to flesh out the other writer’s life brings her to a monastery, the town of Derrynane, and a tattoo parlor in this unique and lyrical blend of auto fiction, history, and memoir.

“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” 

Josephine Baker said these words in her fifties as she returned to America, having fled the country for France earlier in her life. Abdurraqib sets out to give Black America its flowers for its large contribution to American culture, and let’s be honest, world culture. He highlights the beauty, pain, and grace of Black American performers through the ages with fitting lyricism. Throughout the book— even when he examines his own experiences with grief and performance— he incorporates humor and thoughtfulness.

Books made the time Tookie, an Ojibwe woman, spent locked up more tolerable, so it’s only natural that she work at a bookstore upon her release. When one of her most annoying customers, Flora, dies on All Souls’ Day with a book beside her, her ghost starts to haunt Birchbark Books (where Tookie works and a real place in Minneapolis owned by Erdrich). Tookie tries to figure out why Flora’s ghost haunts the bookstore as COVID-19 and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder looms large over the town and the rest of the country. Told with humor and profundity, this novel explores America’s ghosts, large and small, and especially as they relate to its history of the abuse of Indigenous and Black people.