Author: Erica Ezeifedi

It’s soup season! Well, for me, every season is soup season, but I know that normal people prefer theirs when the temperature drops. This one stood out to me because it looks easy, sounds like it would be a comforting addition to any book club meeting, and I’ve been tearing up Trader Joe’s frozen Asian-inspired food lately, so I know in my spirit these wontons hit.

You’ll need: Trader Joe’s chicken cilantro wontons, shrimp (or tofu), bamboo shoots, garlic, broth, mushrooms, bok choy, and a few other items. For a full list with instructions, check out Maxine’s Instagram.

Two girls in Nigeria are at the precipice of great change. Treasure and her mother struggled after her father died, having to beg for scraps in the marketplace just to get by. Then, a man promises to solve her problems. But his feet are hovering above the ground, and salvation through him comes at a terrible price. Then there’s Ozoemena, whose father said that the itch at the middle of her back is part of a great honor. It means she will become a Leopard capable of defending her land and people, something that girls were never before able to do. But all she wants is to fit in at her new boarding school. As the two girls travel on these new trajectories, they become wilder and soon ask the question of what girls must do to make it in the world.

Habib looks at what it means to find joy in traveling in the wake of climate change, capitalism, and the long-lasting effects of colonialism. She considers travel from a colonialist mindset — referencing everything from passports to flowers — and the history of travel while grappling with who is afforded the luxury.

Glass continues the nerd love, following The Love Con. But here, instead of a cosplayer, we have an influential gamer. Samara’s video pointing out the popular game Legendsfall’s shortcomings surrounding representation goes viral, and suddenly, its creator company, Artemis Games, is under fire. Since the company’s CEO, Aron Galanis, has been trying to make Artemis Games’ products more accessible, the bad publicity stings, which is why he decides to hire the person who made the viral video. Samara and Aron start off working together as enemies, but then later as something else…question is, what will going public with what they have going on do considering everything that’s happened?

This book is essentially a messy historical coming-of-age novel with lyrical writing. So, naturally, I’m here for it. It follows Delphine, a biracial writer just coming into herself, who leaves Paris following a tragedy. The journey she embarks on is self-discovery, but with a twist: she’s on the hunt for her missing father who she believes to be literary icon Ernest Hemingway. Tracking down the elusive Hemingway takes her everywhere — from Harlem to Havana — but the scariest part of the journey may be what it would mean if everything she imagined about her father (and, therefore, herself) was wrong.

This is a book that covers something I hadn’t directly thought about but that I feel may have been a nebulous thought lurking in the back of my mind. It asks why, given the enormity that is the philanthropic industry, does nothing seem to change? Billionaires stay rich, and the struggling poor don’t seem to be receiving the millions (billions?) in aid. Schiller looks at the history of philanthropy — from the philosophy of St. Augustine to LeBron James’ work — and argues that philanthropy shouldn’t be focused on everyday survival for the people it sets out to help. Instead, public institutions should cover things like food and shelter when needed, and philanthropy’s main goal should be to help make people feel more fulfilled. I haven’t read this one yet, so I don’t know how she fully fleshes out her ideas, but I’m looking forward to getting into it.

From the author of Trespasses comes a new collection of stories that looks largely at heterosexual relationship dynamics in Ireland — especially as they relate to class. A woman has an affair with a man who resents her “posh” ways, another woman contends with her husband’s revenge, and a man realizes that maybe his wife isn’t the best mother. The writing is melodic and damning but still has glimmers of hope.

Rebecca Schinsky, Book Riot’s Chief of Staff, shared a ridiculous-looking recipe for braised short ribs, and though I haven’t tried it yet, I don’t see how it could miss.

You’ll need bone-in short ribs and potatoes, obvi, as well as onion, garlic, chili de arbol, cumin seeds, fennel seed, coriander seed, ground cinnamon, tomato paste, white wine vinegar, beef or chicken broth, lemons, and cilantro.

For a full list of ingredient amounts and instructions, visit Alison Roman’s page.

I do love a honeyed biscuit, and these look ridiculous. Listen, these may even replace rolls for tomorrow…

You’ll need:

all-purpose flour, unsalted butter, frozen and grated, baking powder, salt, honey, very cold buttermilk, Honey butter, butter, and honey.

For exact ingredient amounts and instructions, go to homeandbelly’s IG page.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this one in the last month. It’s definitely one of the memoirs to get this year, if you get any of them at all. Or, maybe I should say it’s the audiobook to listen to — if you haven’t heard, Britney Spears recorded most of the audiobook, with Michelle Williams stepping in to do parts that were too traumatic for Britney. And let me tell you, William’s impersonation of JT will have you gagging. If I were him, I’d leave the country.

As far as the contents of the memoir go, it covers about what you would expect: Britney Spears’ life of fame, motherhood, relationships, and more. I grew up listening to Britney and remember trying to learn the choreography of her music videos with my older sister in the early aughts. After her conservatorship, I’m glad to see her have a win.

Now I know a collection of poetry as a gift is not for everyone — even some readers — because a lot of people are still not used to reading it regularly. But even if someone has just an inkling of interest in poetry, I think this National Book Award finalist would make a great gift. Olivarez explores the many forms of love — from romantic to familial and platonic — and how aspects of society complicate it. Even as he examines race, identity, and culture, he still goes back to love, and poet David Ruano provides a Spanish translation to accompany Olivarez’s poems.

Another celebrity memoir! I don’t read many memoirs throughout the year, but I feel like they make great gifts if you’re looking for bookish things. I’ve noticed that whenever my non-reader friends ask about books, they usually are more interested in memoirs, so maybe that’s why. In any case, Sir Patrick Stewart’s story starts in Yorkshire, England, and continues to the top of Hollywood — where he starred as Captain Picard in Startrek and Professor Xavier in X-Men — and a knighthood in 2010.

Here’s a fun holiday romance that takes place when Ramadan, Hanukkah, and Christmas overlap. It follows Maryam Aziz and Anna Gibson, strangers sitting next to each other on a plane. Maryam is on her way to her sister’s wedding, and Anna to her boyfriend’s wealthy family’s place for the holidays. When the plane experiences severe turbulence, it shakes the women (ha) into confessing some of the things they’ve been holding close to them. An emergency landing leaves them snowed in in the picturesque town of Snow Falls, where the actor Anna has a crush on just so happens to be filming a romance movie. Now, if the two women could just realize what’s in front of them…

Books about books just hit different in winter, I think. Here, 25-year-old Takako finds out her boyfriend is marrying someone else and takes up her eccentric uncle’s offer to stay in a small room above the used Tokyo bookstore that’s been in their family for generations. Takako has never been much of a reader, but the books of Morisaki bookshop turn out to be excellent tools for mending broken hearts.

I love a good, cozy mystery series during the winter, and this is the third book in the food-centric cozy series Caribbean Kitchen (you don’t need to have read the first). Here, Miriam keeps getting called away — first to her parents’ in the Dominican Republic, where she investigates a possible property vandal, then to Puerto Rico to film a special for Three Kings Day. Two of her friends keep her company in Puerto Rico, but there are mysteries surrounding their boyfriends — one is a telenovela heartthrob who goes missing, and the other is an image of perfection…with a suspiciously large duffle bag of cash. Through pages of delicious food descriptions and African drumming, Miriam will sleuth her way to tying everything together.

The name of this alone sounds ridiculous. For this, you’ll need a lot of the usual cake-baking ingredients, as well as ripe bananas, coconut oil, chopped nuts, maple syrup, honey, lemon juice, and powdered sugar.

For a full list of ingredients, visit dessertribe’s Instagram page.

In these essays, Good tells the truth about the Indigenous experience in Canada. Looking at both historical and contemporary issues, she speaks on everything from unhonored treaties to cultural appropriation, to flat-out racism. Canada’s current treatment of its Indigenous population and how it values their lives are explored, as well as how to right the wrongs of the past and the present.

I don’t know who needs to read this, but this has to become a docuseries on Netflix. It tells how Officer Jeff Babauta infiltrates the world of illegal alligator poaching by — get this — becoming a Florida Man. He develops a pony-tailed, whiskey-laden alter ego and gets in good with people who deal in glow-in-the-dark alligators and other Florida-specific things I’m sure you didn’t realize you’d be reading about today. But as Officer Babauta soon learns, many of the so-called criminals he’s gone undercover to catch are really just trying to make ends meet under the crushing weight of capitalism.

Propelled by feminist movements around the world, Cristina Rivera Garza wrote a request to the attorney general concerning her sister Lilian, who was murdered 29 years ago in Mexico City. Garza’s family is certain her sister’s abusive boyfriend was the culprit, but he was never brought to justice. Here, Garza brings her sister’s last summer back to life while also confronting the culture that normalized violence against women, allowing for such a tragedy.

For the longest time, people thought of autism as only applicable to boys. Times have changed, and people’s understanding has gotten a lot better, but there is still a ways to go. In The Autists, Törnvall hopes to help people see another side of autism, specifically another side of women on the spectrum. She uses her own experiences as an autistic person to explore things like pop culture, myth, and society through the lens of autistic womanhood. In doing so, she shows all there is to gain from stepping outside of the neurotypical perspective.

Dumplings and wontons are such satisfying comfort foods, and I imagine a grandma’s recipe will be the most comforting. Maxine’s granny’s wontons look delicious and her Instagram page includes vegan modifications.

You’ll need: ground pork or tofu, shiitake mushrooms, ginger, water chestnuts, soy sauce, sesame oil, cornstarch, and wonton skins.

For a full list of ingredients and instructions, visit her Insta post.

This is the second book in a series that has an award-winning first book — Clark and Division — but I don’t think you need to have read the first to appreciate this one. It’s 1946, and the Ito family has been released from the Manzanar detention center and allowed to return to their home state, California, like many other Japanese Americans who were forced into incarceration camps. Aki Ito returns to life as a nurse’s aide and comes across an abused elderly man who turns out to be the father of her husband’s best friend, Shinji Watanabe. The case has her wondering if her husband’s friend could really be guilty of elder abuse, but then a shooting sets her on the path of answering even bigger questions.

This is another second book in a series that you don’t have to read the first one to enjoy. Here, Detective Inaya Rahman is caught between two cases that deal with deeply embedded racism and prejudice. In one case, officer Harry Cooper is following up on a report of vandals in Blackwater Falls, Colorado, when he comes across a young Black man who he said was armed. But the alleged gun was actually a spray paint can. Then, in Denver, a Latine teen is killed during a drug raid that goes south. As people protest on both sides of the cases, Rahman gets a visit from Officer John Broda, a man who assaulted her when they worked together in the past. His son Kelly is the cop who shot the teen during the drug raid, and he wants her help in exonerating him.

Here’s another example of our fascination with serial killers, but from a refreshing perspective. This time, the tragedy is told up front, and the lives of the victims and those they cared about are expanded upon rather than the inverse. In 1978, while the news of a serial killer terrorized the Pacific Northwest, the young women of a sorority at Florida State University’s Tallahassee campus are preparing for an exciting night. What they don’t know is that that same killer from the other side of the country will visit them and that Pamela Schumacher’s decision to stay home will make her the sole survivor of something terrible. Meanwhile, back in the PNW, Tina believes her girlfriend Ruth was a victim of the same person responsible for the Tallahassee Tragedy. Both Pamela and Tina are set on a course to uncover the truth that sends them hurdling towards each other.

To be cute, I thought I’d add in a book that mixes in some fantasy. This is described as “Stranger Things meets the Golden Age of Detective fiction” and follows Artie Quick, a young Bostonian woman living in 1909. During the day, she’s a regular ole salesgirl of women’s accessories, but at night, she dons men’s clothing and explores her interest in criminal investigation by taking classes at the YMCA’s Evening Institute for Younger Men. In a bid to apply her learning, she and her bestie Theodore, a well-off young man interested in the occult, investigate a number of violent abductions that lead them to those in power.

Orange cookies are something I’d never thought of, but they sound so right. The recipe also looks pretty simple! You need the usual cookie fare: baking soda, sugar, butter, flour, egg, and salt, but add orange zest, orange juice (obvi), and powdered sugar (for the icing).

For full instructions and ingredient measurements, go to the Preppy Kitchen site or follow along with the video.

This fiction debut from the award-winning Porter follows generations of Métis women and the bison that lived around them as everyone tries to figure things out. Young mother Carter is trying to find out more about her heritage, even as she struggles to balance her emotions, while her mother is trying not to make the same mistakes as Carter’s grandmother. This is all while Geneviève struggles with internal demons, and Mamé, who is in the Afterlife, sees her legacy being realized in her descendants but must cut her ties to the land of the living and let them forge their own path into the future.

Here’s a murder mystery set in a place I don’t usually see with murder mysteries: Nigeria. Philip Taiwo starts working on a case based around a megachurch in Ogun State, where a bishop’s wife was murdered, and a young woman went missing. As Taiwo will soon learn, there are secrets that, if uncovered, will threaten the entire church.

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Hours serves up a meditation on the complexities of family. Dan and Isabel are married and also both “a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie” (I haven’t read the book yet, so I am also curious what this means). When the pandemic hits, each family member’s anxieties manifest in different ways: young Violet obsesses over her family’s safety, while teenage Nathan focuses on breaking rules. Meanwhile, Isabel and Dan are having communication issues, and Robbie is stranded in Iceland with little more than his secret Instagram life as solace.

Smith is another Pulitzer winner but for poetry. In To Free the Captives, Smith explores the questions: “Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?” Using both personal and collective history, she looks at how we as a country have related to each other, how this has influenced our current state, and what the future may hold for us. She contends with the dichotomy of being a successful Black person in America — her father returned from WWI as a hero but with no job prospects as a Black man, for instance — and she looks to our ancestors for sources of hope.