Author: Erica Ezeifedi

So Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gets to be an NBA star, be in movies with Bruce Lee, and write Sherlock Holmes-adjacent books?! I’m not mad at it. Here, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft is newly out of college and already starting to get noticed within the British government. His world gets shaken up, though, when his friend Cyrus Douglas starts hearing about these weird things happening back home in Trinidad. There are disappearances and talks of children being led away by a lougarou (basically a werewolf) to their deaths. Mycroft and Douglas go there to get to the bottom of it.

In February 2014, Ukrainian police fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing dozens. The protestors had been gathering for months at that point to speak out against President Yanukovych’s siding with Russia at the expense of other alliances. This book centers around Ukraine that winter by following four people: engineer Misha, who lost his wife; Slava, a young activist; Katya, a doctor treating protestors at a monastery; and Aleksandr, an ex KGB agent. The four people’s lives intersect during this time of unrest, and the story is told by a chorus of Ukrainian singers who were killed by the Russian czar. Yeah, it’s a lot in the best way.

The titular character is raised by her grandparents in Philly because her Black mother is perpetually touring with a theatre troupe, and her Jewish father has just always been gone. When she comes of age, she sets out to find her father in NYC based on a clue he left behind hinting at some grand mystery regarding her birth. This is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth and is described as a funny, “feminist picaresque.” It’s a satire that’s as humorous as it is scathing.

Lydia is 23, fresh out of art school, annnd a vampire. We meet her as she’s all set to start adulting in London, having just placed her mother in a nursing home. Except it seems like nothing is really working out for her. Her internship isn’t a paying one, she’s down bad for a guy who’s dating someone else, and she can’t find fresh pig blood (her blood of choice). So she’s hungry. All. The. Time. Her solution is to stay in her studio apartment, alternating between watching videos of people eating on YouTube and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (lulz). She longs to feel a connection to other people so many experience through food that she can’r eat, and she has to work through trauma from abuse, disordered eating, and feeling isolated to be her best self.

Voter suppression is somehow still an issue in this country and Stacey Abrams has been vehemently fighting against it in her state of Georgia. Here, she confers with experts and scholars and offers her own experiences on how to empower citizens and bring voter suppression to an end. I feel like watching the work she’s been doing in Georgia has made people see how much power there can be in organizing. I also think it’s pretty cool how she writes thrillers like While Justice Sleeps. We stan a versatile Queen!

RBG! This book took 15 years to write, and Ginsburg as well as her friends and family were consulted throughout. It details the life of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, showing how influential the Justice was on laws, which was in part because of her unique perspective and experience as a Jewish American, Columbia Law student, and Rutgers professor fighting gender pay discrimination.

Sotomayor was the first Latinx person and third woman to be elected to the Supreme Court. In this autobiography, she recounts her life growing up in housing projects in the Bronx and her struggles with having a father dealing with alcoholism. She even had her own struggles with health when she was diagnosed with junior diabetes. Despite not having many professional role models to look up to, she made up her mind to become a lawyer and went on to basically be The Best, graduating from Princeton and Yale Law School with top honors. An icon, in other words.

For the first few years of my life, we lived a few hours from Memphis. Then, when I was a teenager, we moved to a town just half an hour drive from it. I also have a good college friend from there. Basically, what I’m saying is that I’ve been anxiously awaiting this book and I feel like I know the women in it.

Here, Joan, her sister, and her mother go back to their family’s home in Memphis, TN in the mid ’90s to escape her abusive father. The house they returned to was built by her grandfather, who was lynched 70 years prior. This wouldn’t be the last time violence touched Joan’s family, and the trauma from all these experiences manifest within the generations in different ways through the years. As an artist, Joan channels this trauma through her portraits of the women of North Memphis. The narrative travels through time to paint a full, and at times heartbreaking, picture of a Black, Southern family.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss Joan’s mother’s decision to move her daughters back into a house where she knew abuse had taken place.

A couple characters from Mandel’s The Glass Hotel make an appearance here, but it’s not necessary to read it before picking this one up. Mandel weaves together the stories of several people who all hear a brief moment of notes from a violin, followed by a whooshing sound. Weird, right? What’s weirder is that these people inhabit different times— a teenager is exiled from his rich, British family in 1912, a composer plays a video his late sister shot during a concert in 2020, and an author writes a pandemic novel and lives on the moon in 2203. The Time Institute of the year 2401 sends an investigator back in time to sort out the glitch that made all these people experience the same thing at different times. It sounds like a lot of moving pieces, but the narratives complement each other, coming together to make some interesting observations on existence and even pandemic living.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss investigator’s Robert’s findings. Do you think it tied the narratives together well? What do you think Mandel is trying to say about reality?

This is a follow-up to Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad  and has a few familiar characters and their children. This is another case where you don’t really have to have read the first book, though. Here, Bix is a super rich tech guy (think of one of the CEOs or founders of Twitter/Facebook/etc., except he’s Black) and develops a new platform that can hold your consciousness called “Own Your Unconscious.” Naturally, this develops into “Collective Consciousness” where people can upload their memories, which allows them to share with others who have done the same thing. As cringe as it sounds, it also low-key sounds likely to happen. Not everyone is down with sharing consciousnesses, though, and a movement rises up to counter it. Egan uses a number of different view points and chapters that have totally different narrative styles to explore just how far this social media thing can, and will, go.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss how likely you think the premise is. Do you think the platforms are possible, and if so, do you think people will really be as enthusiastic?

The stories in this collection are gathered and told by the spirits of Lagos, Nigeria. This chorus of spirits see all of the abuse and suffering going on as a result of homophobia and sexism, and people unwilling to conform to society’s rules. These outcasts, or vagabonds, in these stories are the poor, queer people who are used up by the rich with seemingly no consequences. There is hope, though. Osunde’s Lagos has devils and spirits that avenge and protect abused girls, teenagers reading about queer love and finding hope in Akwaeke Emezi novels, and a mysterious power that lets abused women find absolute escape. As gritty and real as the stories can get, the inherent magic of the Vagabonds give the city, and the collection of stories, its beauty.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss the story “Johnny Just Come” and what parallels Johnny’s predicament has to not speaking out on other issues.

So, I wasn’t just mimicking the example animal in the prompt, cats are actually my favorite animals. People who know me know I love all animals, but love-love cats. I got into a random conversation with a stranger a couple days ago (in person, which is kind of weird for me these days) and they were saying how they thought that cats were especially suited to people with lots of books since they are small and quiet (usually!). I’ve also noticed a lot of bookish people having cats rather than dogs, so I feel like ole dude was on to something. Anywho, Japan also loves cats , especially cats who love books because this book is about a cat named Tiger who pops up into socially withdrawn high schooler Rintaro’s life after his grandfather dies. As he’s in the process of mourning for his plain spoken, book loving grandfather, he’s also tasked with running his grandfather’s bookstore and preparing to go live with an aunt he’s never met. With Tiger, he goes on a quest that rivals those of mythological heroes and involves rescuing books from people who don’t seem to fully appreciate them. He learns some valuable life lessons along the way.

The last page (which is just a paragraph in the edition I came across) is f i r e. I’ll include it in the next paragraph with a spoiler warning, if you’re interested.

This is about Vern, who is pregnant with twins when she escapes from a cult and the only life she’s ever known. She hides out in the woods, killing animals as necessary and dressing her newly born babies in their hides. As she tries to survive, she realizes she’s being hunted and followed by ghosts. The superhuman changes going on in her body point her towards a truth that involves exposing the secrets of the compound she left and the horrors of how the U.S. has objectified Black bodies.

**major spoiler alert**

Here is the last page, which I think makes a good argument for reading the rest of the book:

“They both sat down, sweaty arm to sweaty arm. They remained until the woods were black but for the patches of moonlight. They remained until they could hear the night calls of one thousand living things, screaming their existence, assuring the world of their survival. Vern screamed back.”

Whew!

I don’t know anyone in real life who has a mortal enemy, but what a spicy life to live! Anyway, I asked my good friend what his least favorite book was and he said The Great Gatsby. Annnnd, I totally see where he’s coming from. He’s a program coordinator at a public library in Jersey City and he led a book club discussion through the library a few months ago where we discussed the book. When I read it a second time as an adult, I was able to find things I actually appreciated about it. Mostly, I think it’s great for providing a snapshot into what American life was like for a certain group of people in the ’20s. It also gives such great (and damning) insight into the concept and construction of whiteness. So much so, that I feel that the attitudes portrayed by the rich and white characters in the book can be directly tied to many attitudes held today.

A pleasant consequence of following some of these instructions is the other things you discover. This made me use the “shuffle” function on Spotify, which I never had before. I basically just asked it through a voice command to “play something” and the first song it played was No Love by Summer Walker, featuring SZA (who I LOVE) and Cardi B. Once I got a gist of what the song was about and its general vibes, I immediately thought of Luster.

The book is about Edie, a Black twenty-something year old artist who is just trying to make it. Once she finds herself without her admin job, she starts to live with her lover who’s twice her age and in an open marriage. She realizes that part of the reason she’s been invited into their lives is to help their Black adopted daughter, Akila, become more adjusted. The dynamics of the four people— Edie, her lover, his wife, and their daughter— is just as odd and interesting as you could imagine as it constantly juggles power, sex, and race.

This is being described as Rebecca meets Mexican Gothic, and is about Beatriz trying to get right after the Mexican War of Independence. Her father, General Hernandez, is executed as a result of the war and Beatriz is desperately trying to reestablish her security when widower Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes to her. He’s handsome and monied, so she says yes. Let’s call this “when securing the bag goes wrong part 157” because when she gets to his estate, she starts having terrible dreams, the housekeeper is putting magical symbols on the kitchen door, and maybe worst of all is the Don’s sister is gaslighting her (the nerve!). She starts to suspect that the former lady of the house was murdered and it’s her ghost that haunts the halls, and the only person she can trust to help her unearth the truth is a priest that practices witchcraft.

Olivia grew up in an all-girls school as an outcast because of her muteness. The only person who could communicate with her was the matron who taught her to use sign language, and who is now gone. She can barely even seek solace in her mother’s journals as they eventually descend into madness as she reads them. Well, one day she seems to catch a break when she gets a letter from her uncle inviting her to his estate called Gallant. Naturally, she goes, but finds out that no one actually sent for her. On top of that, there are ghouls and her cousin Matthew is super shady. The Gallant house does hold answers to secrets about what happened to her parents, though, even if it’s not what she expected.

Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic also really belongs on this list, but I won’t list it separately so as to not be redundant. This is a remix of The Island of Doctor Moreau and takes place in Mexico in the 19th century. Carlota, the daughter of Dr. Moreau, dreams of a life outside of her father’s invention. She also wonders about Eduardo, while Montgomery, Dr. Moreau’s assistant who suffers from alcoholism, wonders about her. While all of this pining transpires, Dr. Moreau’s half-human, half-animal creations lurk in the shadows, struggling to attain independence even though they were meant to obey. Yeah, there’s a lot going on here. In the best way.

This is described as The Haunting of Hill House + Get Out. It’s about Marigold, who moves from California to a Midwestern city with her new stepfather and his obnoxious daughter. Their picturesque house on Maple Street in Cedarville seems perfect, but things keep disappearing, one of her stepsister’s new friends wants her gone, and the ghosts Mari keeps trying to outrun (including that of her past addiction) may not be imaginary.