Author: Erica Ezeifedi

I recently discovered Ms. Shi on YouTube, and I have to say that she makes some seemingly complicated recipes seem more accessible. This is one of those recipes. There are plenty of steps to making these crème brûlée donuts, but each step is fairly simple (depending on your ability and experience, of course) and the ingredients are what many bakers already have in their pantry and fridge: milk, eggs, flour, cornstarch, yeast, butter, sugar, cooking oil, and salt. Seriously, I barely bake and already have most of that. For a full list of ingredients and written instructions, you can visit Ms. Shi’s page.

In this lyrical debut, readers try to piece together the remnants of a family torn asunder by the imperialist-driven corporate greed of an American banana plantation. It’s 1968 in Costa Rica when a devastating fire takes hold of the American Fruit Company’s most valuable banana plantation, killing many and destroying evidence of its wrongdoing. Lyra’s father, José María, seems to be among those who perished. Twenty-seven years later, Lyra and her family have left Costa Rica and are in shambles — she’s estranged from her mother and is raising her nephew after his mother died by suicide. An encounter with someone who used to work at the American Fruit Company sets Lyra on a course that travels through different times and puts her up against different spirits as she tries to suss out the truth of what happened that day at the plantation.

*Beautiful cover alert!* Here, we follow Alejandra, who wears her usual roles of mother, wife, and adopted daughter, even as she slips into a familiar darkness. The same darkness that she learns plagued her biological mother. And her mother’s mother. Once she starts learning more about her biological family, she finds out that the women in her family were tied together through the years by tragedy, specifically tragedy brought on by the Mexican mythological La Llorona, or the weeping woman. The murderous apparition wants to cover Alejandra’s life in despair, but she, like the women before her, is not so easily conquered.

When the French invade Mexico in 1862, Ana María Luna Valdés and her sisters get sent to London for their protection. While they are originally meant to lay low, their uncle convinces them to socialize in high society, with the hopes that the neutral Queen will become sympathetic to their plight. While there, Ana María meets the stoic Gideon Fox, who has worked hard all his life to achieve his current status as a member of Parliament. Fox is on the brink of permanently abolishing slavery — and its loopholes — as he begins to (reluctantly) fall for Ana María. But the two know that their social statuses are precarious in Victorian England — hers as a foreigner, and his as the descendant of a formally enslaved woman. This is an interesting break from the usual historical romance setup.

With this collection of essays, Gurba is snatching edges. She looks in depth at creeps — the actions and people who we actively label as “creeps,” as well as things that we maybe should. Instead of looking just at the more offensive, overt actions, Gurba also looks with nuance at things that are taken less seriously, but are on the same spectrum. People who commit sexual assault and get away with murder are creeps, but so is the society that lets them. But Gurba also makes this collection personal, weaving in pieces of her own story throughout, including her experiences with sexual assault. She even reckons with sources of inspiration and how they’ve missed the mark (specifically Joan Didion and how little she’s had to say on Indigenous populations as a California writer).

Acevedo is the National Book Award-winning author of The Poet X, With the Fire on High, and more, and Family Lore is her adult debut. In it, Flor Marte has a gift that lets her predict when someone will die. It’s because of this gift that, when Flor tells her family she wants to have a living wake for herself, they’re worried. Has she seen her own death? Someone else’s? She keeps her sisters Matilde, Pastor, and Camila in the dark. Meanwhile, in the three days leading up to the wake, we learn of the rich inner lives of the Marte women — Matilde’s marriage issues, Pastora’s drive, and Camila’s need to stand out. We even learn of their cousins, Yadi and Ona, one of whom is being reunited with their love, who’s been imprisoned since they were young, and another who is struggling with the decision of having a child.

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Have you ever heard of cinnamon crunch banana bread? Yeah, me neither, but I now know that I 100% need it in my life. The video @healthfulradiance posts on it makes it look so comforting!

In The Fraud, bestselling and award-winning author Smith gets into some Victorian-era messiness. As The Tichborne Trial — in which a poor Australian butcher claimed he was heir to the Tichborne family fortune — takes hold of England’s attention, we follow the lives of a few of its citizens. There’s Scottish housekeeper Eliza Touchet, who knows that her employer, washed-up writer William Ainsworth, can’t write to save his life. And then there’s Andrew Bogle, the formerly enslaved man from Jamaica whose testimony may very well decide the entire Tichborne case.

Does your book club ever read horror? Here, the author of Cackle brings us a supernatural cult tale just ahead of spooky season. Vesper left her oddly religious family’s community when she was 18, even though she was told doing so would mean she couldn’t return. But now she’s been invited back to attend her friend and cousin Rosie’s wedding, and she is curious why the rules are being broken for her. She’s also wondering what happened to her father and why everyone seems uncharacteristically happy to have her back…

She of Scandal fame is publishing her memoir! Washington details her life as an actor, director, mother, daughter, and activist, showing how she’s overcome setbacks and even kept traumas from the public view. She shares more of her private world and everything — including the mentors and journey to self-discovery — that has led to all her success.

The smog that covers the city where an unnamed chef is still trying to eke out a living means that the fresh ingredients the land once produced have turned into canned products. That is, until the chef takes a job at a mountaintop colony where the privileged have been able to escape many of the negative effects of the climate disaster. Finally, she’s experiencing a clear sky, and she’s able to make recipes with some of the world’s last fresh ingredients. She’s also isolated from her clientele, and learns that the purpose the unseen investors have for her goes beyond just cooking.

Another question for you and your book club activities: do you prefer to have snacky, appetizer-like items or more substantial dinner-type things? I could personally go for either, so today I’m hitting you with my latest food obsession: Rose tteokbokki. It’s basically just tteokbokki with cream/milk added. I have to admit that I “cheat” and use the frozen pack from Trader Joe’s and just add the dairy component, but if you want a more detailed recipe, click here.

In the ’80s in a national forest in New Mexico, bodies are found that belong to two children and a young woman. How they got there remains a mystery for 30 years until two women try to figure out what happened. Now, each woman — librarian Laura and detective Jean — has their own reason for solving the cold case. Laura is trying to keep busy as a way to keep her mind off her cancer treatments, and Jean is trying to prove that she shouldn’t retire yet. Even with their baggage, they’re both willing to risk it all to give a voice to the slain.

This collection of essays from different writers looks at Black history, nature, and Black folks’ relationship with the outdoors. Starting with an archival object — like Benjamin Banneker’s 1795 almanac and a statue of Haitian revolutionary François Makandal — each of these essays reaches back generations and crosses thousands of miles to tell the story of how Black people have related to the land they’ve lived on, even as that relationship has been marred by colonialism.

The structure of this one is interesting. It’s basically a collection of flash fiction pieces that come together to make a novella. Each miniature story shows another aspect of the apocalypse in a ridiculous way that juxtaposes things like pop culture with the trappings of the end of the world. *Bonus points for the inclusion of Barbie as a character.*

Here’s another collection of stories, this time from the author of the bestselling Strange Weather in Tokyo. In these eccentric tales, Kawakami explores the very human need for love and wonderment. A goddess uses her spiciness to control followers, a con man shape shifts, a woman has a string of husbands until she’s able to return to the sea, and more.

Though @lifewithmarq made this video for Cinco de Mayo, it can, of course, be made at any time and I think it’ll come in clutch in the (hopefully) last days of this heat.

All you need is fresh strawberries, water, condensed milk, and regular milk.

Blend the strawberries and water to make a puree, strain the puree into a pitcher with the condensed milk, add the regular milk, and that’s it!

Here is a more exact recipe with amounts included.

Hsu writes of the friendship he had in college with Japanese American Ken. He and Ken became close friends despite their seemingly immense differences — Ken was mainstream, while Hsu was more of a rebel. Their friendship came to an abrupt end when Ken was killed during a carjacking only a couple years after they met. Stay True is a tribute to this relationship — it’s about coming of age as an outsider and finding where you belong.

Cooper has lived a life! He broke ground at Marvel Comics as the writer who introduced the first queer storylines and has long advocated against racism and homophobia. Once he discovered his love for ornithology, it led him to birding expeditions in the Americas, Africa, and beyond. It was an incident that took place in New York City that put him more in the public eye recently, though — he was the Central Park birder who a white woman called the police on during one of his routine birding excursions in 2020. The video went viral, and while Cooper explores that incident here, he also explores the other avenues of his life that have made him who he is — from the relationships with his father, mother, and grandmother, to his experiences as a Black queer, nerdy kid growing up on Long Island.

Poet Felix weaves her childhood dyscalculia, a disorder that influences how numbers are understood and interpreted, into her miscalculations in her adult life. This is a clever and raw memoir that will have you in your feelings, even as it makes you laugh.

In Starstruck, El-Badry Nance shares a love for space that started with gazing up at the stars with her father when she was a child. But the field of astrophysics isn’t the most welcoming for A) women, and B) people of color. Nevertheless, El-Badry Nance fought her way through misogyny, racism, and personal issues — like family-induced trauma and a cancer diagnosis — to make a space for herself within the field of astrophysics. And here, she weaves illuminating lessons on the cosmos with her own personal history to tell a unique story.

The payoff for this seems way too big for how easy it is to make.

You just need: sugar, butter, eggs, lemon zest, lemon juice, flour, baking powder, milk, and blueberries. @lovevivvv shows how to do it on her Instagram, as well as in print on her Substack.

The Sealey Challenge is named for Nicole Sealey, the award-winning poet who started the challenge in 2017. This collection looks at the ways Black lives have been erased — both literally and physically, as well as in public records — by honing in on what happened in 2014 to Michael Brown in Ferguson. And I have to say, the way she goes about it is striking: she uses the Department of Justice’s official report — which described the policing and justice system of the city as racist — and redacts it. The contents of the report are visible just past the words that Sealey has bolded, which gives an entirely new interpretation of the text.

This collection has won the Whiting Award and the Alice James Award. Lush and rich, these poems look at how Brown bodies are nourished, by food, language, and wherever they call home. Cariño looks beyond trauma, instead focusing on community, bonds, and how those across the diaspora connect to each other.

The publication date has shifted a bit with this one, so just make sure to keep an eye out for it. James looks at the body, and how one connects to their own. How the dynamics — between self and body and body and society — change, as well as how the world relates to Black queerness.

Tibble dives into the many aspects of her identity. She looks at how Indigenous Māori traditions fit into her modern reality, discussing everything from the Kardashians to Twilight with lyricism and humor. Mythologies, stereotypes, pop culture, and the effects of colonization are all broken down and looked at, and Tibble shows where you can find her in them.