Author: Erica Ezeifedi

A man wakes up with poor memory, a bottle of painkillers, and little else. If I said this didn’t sound like he had gotten up from a really good nap, I’d be lying.

Well, it’s 2010 and much of the surrounding area where he is has been abandoned. He focuses on learning to survive, even as he struggles to remember his own name. One day a kid named Clay shows up, decidedly different from what you’d expect a kid to look in an apocalyptic California. He’s clean, for one, and it’s clear that he’s well taken care of. It also soon becomes clear, though, that Clay is not going to be too forthcoming with information. Slowly, the narrator explores his surroundings— finding odd things like a number of totems and a paper Christmas tree— and gets clues from Clay that help him piece together his memory. Things begin to make more sense, but there are also memories he would have rather stayed forgotten. The pace of this book is slower, but steady, and it’s more character than action driven.

The movements for civil rights in America have been marred by respectability politics, which this book hopes to correct. It restores queer women’s position within the suffrage movement, showing how they were not only present, but also key players in helping women attain equal rights. What the movement achieved owes so much to the most marginalized amongst its ranks.

Vincent has been living it up in Paris. She strolls its streets as she wants, teaches at the modern art museum, and has a fab group of friends. It’s not all (half-blown) roses, though. She’s there because her husband recently published a book spilling all their marital tea, even confessing to a child he had and abandoned as a teenager. Her time in Paris is meant to be a get-it-together moment, and she’s fallen into a nice little routine. It gets interrupted, though, by young musician Loup, and how enamored with her he becomes. As Cillian, her husband, sends frequent apology letters, the attraction between Loup and her grows. She’ll eventually have to decide what her Paris stay will mean for her as far as the rest of her life is concerned.

The stories here can be extremely odd or endearing— or both! They follow the lives of Cambodian Americans, some of whom were born in the U.S., and some who have brought memories of the Khmer Rouge genocide with them. The refugees of Afterparties adapt to new lives in California while their children try to forge their own identities, contending with sexuality, race, and community along the way.

Women and queer people fight for agency, belonging, and love in a world full of hoodoo, body-stealing witches, and Amish vampires. The magic here gets real, and the dangerous women who wield it get even realer. The first story, for example, is about a girl in Kentucky who has no family and has to murder men with hoodoo because of the witch who threatens to take her soul. Sis is… going through a lot. Liu’s writing is lush and this collection, which ends with a novella, feels like an update on the original Grimm’s fairy tales.

This collection was written and edited by an award-winning team of female and nonbinary Chinese writers and has stories that haven’t been translated to English before. These science fiction and fantasy stories celebrate China’s rich culture while still looking to the future. There’s a restaurant at the end of the universe, a woman and her admirer who travel on the backs of giant fish so spring can bloom, and immortality that gets cultivated in the high mountains.

When Koh was a teenager, her father was offered a really good position back in Korea, which he accepted. The plan was to leave her and her brother in California for three years while both her parents lived in Korea. Only, her father’s work contract kept extending, making Koh ultimately feel abandoned by her parents. After some years pass, Koh rediscovers the letters her mother had written to her in Korean when they were separate. In them, her begged her for love and to forgive her for leaving. As she sets to translating the letters, she revisits that time and others in her family’s history. She starts to see the experiences of the women in her family in new ways. The image of her mother becomes more nuanced and she begins to better understand her grandmother, who witnessed the 1948 Jeju Island massacre. Poetry further serves to help her work through her feelings of abandonment, as well as understand the intergenerational trauma present in her family.

Telesa Vasa Loloa is the otherworldly guardian of the ocean and all of Oceania who was crafted by Tongan god Tangaloa. When the island of Niua is threatened, marine biologist Daniel Tahi has to make the decision to embrace the gods of his people, or risk letting the island succumb to an ancient danger. A mutual love of the sea may unite Daniel and Telesa, and hopefully save the island in the process.

It’s not that Kareena doesn’t believe in love, it’s just that she’d rather be restoring her classic car than actively searching for a partner. That is, until her father says he’s going to sell her mom’s house and she makes a deal with him. If she gets engaged in four months, he’ll give her the house. A wrench in her plans comes in the form of Dr. Prem Verma, who is the host of the Dr. Dil Show. They get into an argument that goes viral. Now she has a man in her life, but in the worst way. The viral argument doesn’t do Dr. Verma any favors, either, since it’s messed up his plans for getting the funding to build a local community center. Kareena’s aunts come out of the cut and offer him funding for the center if only he can convince her that they were meant to be together. This is enemies-to-lovers that gets a little spicy. IYKYK.

Nell Young’s father, Dr. Young, ain’t ish. While he’s a legend in the field of cartography, he coldly fired his daughter Nell after a disagreement over what seemed at the time to be a basic gas station map. Since destroying his daughter’s reputation, Dr. Young has turned up dead in his New York Public Library Office with the very same map hidden in his desk. Naturally, Nell is curious and starts to investigate. Turns out, the map wasn’t so basic after all, and is in fact quite rare. What’s more, the map is connected to some secrets in her family and she learns of a group called the Cartographers who are willing to kill to get the map. There are some great twists, turns, and a little magic as Nell unravels the secret.

Book Club Bonus: What did you think of the reveal? Do you feel like it was plausible? Also, how did you feel about the addition of maps throughout the book?

This is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and the second in a new series being published by Disney’s first adult publishing project. The first, a Cinderella retelling, was If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy. Here, Isabelle has succumbed to the quarter-life crisis I’ve noticed a lot of millennials going through. Although, I think she’s technically Gen Z, so it’s their turn, I guess.

In either case, she’s simply not where she thought she’d be at the age of twenty-five. She’s back at home with her parents and working a suffocating publishing job that doesn’t pay her enough. It also seems to be stifling her ability to become a writer, and she constantly feels doubt about whether she should speak up or silence herself as the only Black person at her publishing house. Then, she sees an opportunity to stand out at work. If she can wrangle troublesome celebrity writer Beau Towers and convince him to finish his book, maybe she can make her job less depressing. Once she finds out where he’s been hiding, she convinces him to let her stay with him to encourage him to finish writing. She realizes that Beau is actually dealing with some issues, and it turns out they have things in common. Romance readers will appreciate the sunshine/grumpy and forced proximity tropes.

Side note: I don’t know about you, but I totally did not see Disney publishing a contemporary, adult fairy tale retelling, but I’m not mad in the least.

Book Club Bonus: Beauty and the Beast has been called out by some for being problematic for encouraging women to accept and try to change toxic behavior in relationships. Discuss aspects of the story you liked and didn’t like and how this book improved or could be improved. How does it stand up to critics of the original fairy tale?

Nora is a great lover of books and a cutthroat literary agent who prides herself on getting great deals for her clients. When her sister Libby wants to take a trip to a small town as a little getaway, Nora goes, but comes across Charlie, an editor who seems to keep brooding in her general direction. He also has the nerve to be cute and funny. Pah! Charlie and Nora are two big city-loving people stuck in a small town for the time being, and have all this great, witty banter between them. As something starts to develop between them, Nora starts to give more much needed attention to the relationship with her sister.

Book Club Bonus: I liked how Nora isn’t a “typical” romance heroine, with her expensive shoes and assertive personality. Discuss what you think of how, many times, romance heroines have a “softer” personality than Nora’s.

This is a collection of the young activist’s speeches. At 15, Greta decided to skip school in Sweden to protest climate change. She’s been protesting ever since and has even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. One thing I, and many others, appreciate about the little sis Greta— a part from her tenacity— is her straightforward manner of speaking. She doesn’t beat around the bush and is just very real about the situation we’re in.

“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Where’s the lie?

What’s cool about this little collection is that it clocks in at just 112 pages, so you’ll have extra time to watch the documentary I Am Greta after.

I’ve noticed how a certain group of people have started using the term “woke” as a pejorative. To me, it’s a very obvious and defensive response to a demand of accountability after there hasn’t been any for so long. You ever come across people like this and wish you had a more concise way of telling them why they’re wrong, or even explaining to anyone why “environmentalism, racism, and privilege” are inextricably linked? Here’s a primer just for that. It’s also for everyone interested in learning how best to show up for the planet. Thomas shows not only how BIPOC people are the most affected by environmental injustices, but also how truly fighting for the environment involves fighting for civil rights. What was that about an injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere?

This one is a little different as it’s not just about the environment, but rather everything and the environment. Sustainability isn’t viewed as a separate thing to be worked on. Yunkaporta uses the wisdom of his Aboriginal elders to show that it’s something that could already be woven into our everyday lives if we adopt some other ways of thinking.

A few years ago, I was studying for a standardized test for grad school and there was a passage in the book I was using to study that showed how colonialism in America ruined the environment, the effects of which we can still see today (like in the Antarctic ice cores!). I was super surprised I’d never heard about it before then, but knowing it now makes me that much more receptive to Yunkaporta’s premise here. A lot of us in North America live within a culture that is rooted in a mindset that led people to rejecting and leaving their own land to destroy another. With that in mind, how could our culture be one that is inherently sustainable? It makes sense to learn about how to live in better harmony with the land from people who have been living with their lands for thousands of years (it’s estimated to be about 65,000 years).

This is another book about trees that this pair has worked on. Here, forester Wohlleben and editor Billinghurst share poetic observations on forests in North American they’ve visited, making the case of how we should spend more mindful time outside amongst the trees. We should go for walks, forage, and even become “forest detectives” who know things like what path water takes in a given landscape and the frequency of fire. By using all five senses when we’re in nature like this, the authors believe we will come to appreciate it more and find adventure more often.