Hooray, It’s Time for New Books!

Get your tissues ready: This is a gorgeous, heart-squeezing story of motherhood, family, and faith, When Harris’s son Tophs starts exhibiting symptoms that alarm her, she takes him to the doctor. This begins a long, anxious journey of tests, and waiting, and more questions than answers. Harris describes what it’s like to be a Black woman trying to get help from the medical field, which is historically more difficult for marginalized communities, as well as her strong faith that helped her as she worried through the unknown. It’s a beautiful story of a mother’s love for her son, and how the ordeal changed her. (CW for child illness and peril, and racism.)

Backlist bump: All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

Okay, all my little story fans, get excited! Because these are fun, feminist stories of women who have had it. From Cassandra and the Trojans to present day, these brilliant and acerbic tales will have you pumping your first in the air. Kirby has created a blazingly original collection that you will be thinking about long after you turned the final page. It’s wacky and wonderful. (CW for mentions of sexism, violence, and assault.)

Backlist bump: Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Obviously, you can already tell from the title that this is a very difficult subject to read about. But it’s also an amazing Erin Brockovich-ish story about criminals of means, the world’s largest sex traffickers, who avoided getting caught for years, and how one prosecutor worked tirelessly with a team to finally bring them to justice. Krell does a great job presenting the facts, the setbacks, and the small victories that led to the final triumphs. It’s a fascinating glimpse into people fighting the good fight. If you like reading about real cases involving lawyers and courtrooms, or like hearing about good defeating evil, this is an engrossing read. (CW for sexual assault and exploitation of children and adults.)

Backlist bump: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

And I predict this novel is going to be one of the big sci-fi books of 2022. It’s perfect for fans of The Martian. It’s set in the future and is the story of Mickey, an “expendable”. So here’s the set up: The Earth is coming apart, and now that space travel is possible, humans are seeking new planets to inhabit. But there are always a variety of unknown dangers, so expendables are used as test subjects to make sure the water is drinkable, the air is breathable, etc. And because scientists have figured out a way to duplicate human consciousness, when an expendable dies, a new version of their body is printed and their consciousness is uploaded to the new version.

So Mickey is aboard a space craft that has reached a new planet far in the galaxy. He volunteered to be an expendable to get off Earth for…reasons. When the book opens, he’s the seventh version of himself, and he’s just had a terrible accident away from base. Assumed dead, his coworkers create a new version when they return from their mission. But Mickey7 isn’t dead, and when he gets back to his room, he discovers Mickey8. Ruh roh.

The immediate problem is that the base is run by a man who thinks the expendables go against nature, so they can’t let him know two exist at once, because he’s looking for any reason to cancel the expendable program. If he finds out about them, he’ll destroy them both and delete Mickey’s consciousness for good. But with only 200 people around, as the Mickeys are existing on half rations and trying to hide, plus a potential new threat creeping up on the base, how long can the two Mickeys keep their existence a secret?

This is a fun and funny story about friendship, human existence, and consciousness. Mickey is very snarky and quite clever, and it was a lot of fun to read this Multiplicity-like adventure story in space.

(CW for violence, prolonged death, suicide)