Author: Patricia Elzie

There are a number of books on the Black Panther Party and on (and by) its members. It can be hard to know where to start because the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was incredibly complicated. This book organizes the information with neither overly glorifying nor sugarcoating the complexity and I think it’s a good entry-point.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later shortened to the Black Panther Party) was a radical political organization that was founded here where I am, in Oakland, CA. Many people associate the Black Panther Party with violence and while that is not completely unfair, it is definitely not the whole picture. I think that’s one of the things that I really love about this book. It gives you the tough stuff right alongside the wonderful, truly transformative stuff that the Black Panthers did.

It is very notable that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense rose as a response to and in contrast to the non-violent civil rights movement. Congressman John Lewis’ and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violence stance did not mean there wasn’t violence. The activists practiced nonviolence but their opposition, the police and others who upheld white supremacy, were still incredibly violent. This context is what gave birth to the Black Panthers: that Black people have the right to protect ourselves and our community from brutality. This graphic history has the text of the original Ten Point Program, of what the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense wanted and believed. I’ll be honest: reading that was really hard because it’s stuff we’re still fighting for decades later.

This book teaches about so many radical things the Black Panthers accomplished, like the free breakfast program, community clinics, and schools. We learn about many of the key members and how the Black Panthers inspired other such groups around the nation as well as satellites of the Black Panthers themselves. Readers also learn the many ways in which the party was taken down, both externally and internally, much at the hands of the FBI.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the artwork, which is perfection. There are so many people mentioned that I could not fully keep track of all the moving parts without the artwork. It helped the story feel more real, especially when at least in my life it always felt a bit like legend.

Content warnings for violence, police violence, racism in particular anti-Blackness, and substance use.

Kindred is one of my favorite pieces of speculative fiction. It’s one of those books that is so intense that I find myself frequently clenching my jaw or holding my breath while reading. The book is pretty violent both physically and psychologically and this graphic novelization adds multiple new levels to the terror.

The first page is the prologue. It is artwork of our protagonist, Dana, in a hospital bed. The words, “I lost an arm on my last trip home” are the only words on the page. The artwork is a gut-punch and if you haven’t read Kindred at all, you won’t know why until much later.

The present time in the book is June 1976. Dana, a Black woman author, and her husband Kevin, who is white, just moved into a house in Altadena, California down in Los Angeles County. Dana and Kevin are working on unpacking boxes and Dana starts feeling funny, like she’s going to pass out. She suddenly finds herself not in her new house but on the bank of a river and there’s a little boy that looks like he’s drowning. His mother is screaming his name (Rufus) and Dana jumps in the water, grabs the kid, and brings him to shore. His mom starts hitting Dana and yelling that Dana killed the kid and Dana starts administering CPR and saves Rufus’s life. Suddenly there’s a voice yelling “What’s going on?” and a click. Dana turns around to see there’s a rifle in her face and then instantly she appears back in her home with Altadena a few feet from where she had disappeared right in front of Kevin. She’s wet, covered in mud, and terrified. Kevin says Dana had disappeared for a few seconds, but to Dana, it felt like she was in that other place for a few minutes.

Some time later, maybe a few days, it happens again. Dana disappears from her dinner table with Kevin and suddenly finds herself in a bedroom, where Rufus, who is a bit older, has put himself in danger and Dana saves him again. Rufus and his mother were both white, and the clothes they were wearing look like they’re from a hundred-fifty years earlier. Dana learns that it’s the year 1815 and they are on a plantation, owned by Rufus’s father. Dana’s present and Rufus’s past are inextricably linked as she keeps getting sucked back to this awful, terrifying time to save his life.

Content warnings for graphic violence, racism, suicide, and sexual assault.

Bree Matthews and her best friend Alice are attending the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Early College Program. Bree is Black and Alice is Taiwanese-American and they saw this program as the best way for two girls from marginalized backgrounds to get out of their small, rural North Carolina town. Bree’s mom attended UNC and it’s always been a dream of Bree’s to go, though her mom didn’t like that idea for reasons unbeknownst to Bree.

During their first night on campus, Bree and Alice find themselves at the traditional (and illegal) first-year student cliff-jumping at Eno Quarry. At the quarry, things take a turn for the magical and frightening. After witnessing a little too much, Bree runs away and is arrested along with Alice who takes them back to campus. The next morning, the dean’s office summons them both and they are assigned peer mentors, second-year Early College Program students who have made better choices. Bree’s peer mentor is Nick Davis. He’s trying to be friendly and walk her back to her dorm when things get weird, magical, and terrifying again. Bree stumbles upon some large, glowing, absolutely frightening creature. It tries to attack but Nick jumps between her and the monster and tells her to run. Bree passes out and wakes up in one of the giant stately homes off campus. Nick brought her there, to their healer.

Nick is part of a secret society and is what is called Legendborn, a direct descendent of King Arthur and his round table. They assume Bree must be one of them, because she saw the hellhound and normal people can’t. Meanwhile, Bree has close to no idea what is going on but everyone else there thinks she knows more than she is letting on. Once Bree knows this little bit, she can’t unknow it. And maybe she has more of a connection than she realizes. So she plans on infiltrating this secret society.

There is so much in this book. Different kinds of magics, lots of monsters, both the human kind and the fantastical, Black girl magic, of course, and tons of fun.

Content warnings: the book immediately starts with our main character’s mother’s death and additional content warnings for lots of racism. This is the first book in a series and the second is due out later this year.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

Full disclosure: I have not read the original novel by Gabby Rivera but this graphic novel is incredibly good. It starts with a letter from our heroin, Juliet Milagros Palante to Harlowe Brisbane, the author of Raging Flower, a feminist book that Juliet is reading. In the letter, Juliet interrogates the author’s white feminism and asks if there is a place for her, a queer Puerto Rican teen from the Bronx. She hears that Harlowe is working on writing another book and offers her services as an intern to help inject more melanin into the content.

Three months later Juliet will be heading to Portland, Oregon to be Harlowe’s intern. But before she gets on the plane she is determined to come out to her family. They don’t know she’s a lesbian. Well, her little brother Melvin does. Juliet’s family doesn’t take her coming out very well and she heads off to Portland on a sour note. Juliet has a girlfriend, Lainie, who she is head over heels for but to an outsider Lainie just looks like a whole field full of red flags. Juliet gets to Portland and is starstruck by Harlowe. We quickly learn that Harlowe might be a bit too head-in-the-clouds-and-the-clouds-are-in-fairyland and also she is a mess. Again, lots of red flags here.

This story has so many layers. Yes, it’s about Juliet coming into her own but it’s also a story about queer people of color doing all kinds of groundwork and then a white queer woman taking the credit. It’s such an accurate portrayal of a queer white woman feeling guilty because she has privilege but then somehow making that the problem of the people of color in the queer community. It’s also a beautiful portrayal of the importance of queer people of color being in community with other queer people of color. This book is a story about Juliet finding her people and it’s amazing and beautiful and heartbreaking and really, really important.

KC Davis is a therapist who has a really popular TikTok account, @DomesticBlisters. A lot of her content is about cleaning. I’m not talking about vacuuming your mattress every night or labeling everything you own or organizing all your belongings in Roy G Biv order. I’m talking about the chores, or as Davis calls them, the care tasks, that seem like they’re simple for other people but when you have depression, ADHD, physical disabilities, chronic pain, trauma, lack of support etc. even the thought of doing these things can be overwhelming and fill you with deep shame when you can’t bring yourself to do them. It could be folding laundry, doing laundry at all, changing your sheets, brushing your teeth, washing dishes, or something else. If you are a person who does all of these things regularly and without issue, then this book is probably not for you. But if you, like me, have ever sat on your kitchen floor and cried at the prospect of doing a mountain of dishes, then I think you will get something out of this book.

The center of this book is this: You do not work for your home; your home works for you. KC Davis offers a helpful perspective on ways to make your home work for you. This book isn’t all tips and tricks (though honestly, why do baby onesies need to be folded?). The author wants to help put a stop to the shame that builds up over care tasks and not having the capacity to do them. She tells readers over and over that we are not bad people if we have a messy home. We still deserve things like love and rest and fun even if the laundry isn’t done.

This book is big on self-compassion and practicality. It stresses the importance of care tasks as kindnesses to yourself, sometimes your present self, sometimes your future self, like how washing the coffee pot tonight is a kindness to your morning self so you have a clean pot to make coffee in. If you’re into different tidying methods or cleaning shortcuts, there are definitely some of those offered in this book as well.

In the introduction, the author asks, “Where are all the stories about little swarthy-skinned robber trans girls waving tiny knives made of bone? About trans teenage witches with golden eyes who cut out their own hearts and lock them in boxes so that awful guys on the internet will never break them again? About trans girls who lost their father in the war and their mother to disease, and who go forth to find where Death lives and make him give them back?” This novel is a reply to these questions. Not only a reply, but a scream, a yell, and a song.

The protagonist is an older teen, Asian trans girl who runs away from a city called Gloom. She leaves her parents, who have expectations of her to not be trans and to go to university, among other things. She also leaves her little sister Charity to whom she writes letters that are scattered through this book. Our protagonist is a kung-fu expert and she has a companion who is a ghost. One more thing: our protagonist is a pathological liar.

Upon her arrival to the City of Smoke & Lights, she is found by Kimaya, a fierce femme who takes in all the trans girls seeking love, community, safety, and home. The epicenter of the city where the fiercest femmes can be found is called the Street of Miracles. The Street of Miracles has its own history/mythology and it keeps the inhabitants safe. We meet more fierce femmes as well. Kimaya runs the Femme Alliance Building, known as FAB, which is a health and social services center for trans women and sex workers.

At one point, one of their group gets murdered. A number of them then form the Lipstick Lacerators, a revenge gang who runs around terrorizing and beating the crap out of the men who would see trans women as victims. Remember, our protagonist is a kung-fu expert and things get very violent.

Content warnings for rape and molestation, transphobic hate speech, violence including murder of trans women, and self-harm.

Harvard University professor Annette Gordon-Reed is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a Texan. In this quintessential book, she explores the confluence of the various historical happenings that brought us to Juneteenth. This book was actually written and published just prior to President Joe Biden signing Juneteenth into law as a federal holiday in June 2021. This doesn’t surprise me as there have been activists fighting for years to get Juneteenth recognized as a federal holiday.

Juneteenth, at its heart, began as a uniquely Black Texan holiday and it’s important to remember that. It originally commemorated June 19, 1865, the day that enslaved Blacks in Texas were freed. Texas was the last state in the Confederacy to have enslaved people and Juneteenth was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Gordon-Reed unpacks the labyrinthine history of Texas to explain why Texas was the last holdout of slavery. She also gives a very different history lesson than what we’re taught in U.S. schools about perhaps who the first Black people to step foot on this land were and how truly diverse Texas’s history and topography is. It’s not all white men, cowboy hats, and tumbleweeds as popular media would lead folks to believe.

The author also weaves in her personal story and family history as Black Texans, which only adds to the already fascinating writing. As she goes through the sordid and complicated history of the Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, white, Black, and more folks who converged in Texas and does not leave the racist portions of Texas’s history and present untouched, she also unabashedly loves her home state and tells readers why Texas is worthy of her love.

I learned so much from this very short book and it upended so many of my preconceived notions about Texas’s history and its present. It is definitely worth a read!

This story is told from the point of view of Abby. Abby is a plus-size fashion blogger with bright pink hair and a bold sense of style that I identify with heavily. Tropical prints? Bright colors? Clothes and accessories with a fruit theme? Literally half my closet. Abby is queer and laments that she is never going to get a girlfriend. She’s convinced herself that she is the sassy sidekick to the “star of the show,” her best friend Malia. (There is no actual show.)

Our heroine is seventeen and got an internship with Lemonberry, a fashion brand that she is obsessed with that also has their boutique within walking distance of Abby’s house. Walking distance is important because Abby pretty much walks everywhere. She doesn’t know how to drive and she really isn’t interested in learning. When she shows up to her internship on her first day, so does another girl that she has seen around her high school. This girl is Jordi Pérez and her style (all black everything) adds to her seeming cool and aloof. Maggie, the brand creator and owner, tells both girls that they both have a summer internship but that the resulting job in the Fall can, unfortunately, only go to one of them. Abby’s strength is social media, as evident by her own fashion blog with a robust following. Jordi’s strength is photography and she always has a camera on her, documenting her life. No one wants this internship to be a competition but it kind of is a competition.

And then Abby starts crushing on Jordi. Hard. We learn quickly that the feeling is mutual.

Abby’s best friend Malia is dating a guy named Trevor. Trevor’s best friend is a guy named Jax and Jax, like Abby, is tired of being the third wheel to Malia and Trevor so Jax and Abby become friends. Jax’s dad is working on an app and he asks Abby to do some field work with him to rate a bunch of different burgers around L.A. This is, in some small way, an act of rebellion from Abby. Her mom is a local celebrity who runs “Eat Healthy with Norah!” and is the kind of person who thinks it’s okay to replace tortillas with leafy greens. She doesn’t approve of Abby’s fatness or gayness or pink hair and they’re constantly butting heads.

This book is an adorable queer, YA romance but it’s also a good exploration on the ideas of public versus private as well as trusting the people who are closest to you you. And I laughed out loud multiple times.

The book is set in the U.S. in the late 1800s. There were witches at one time, for a long time, but then there were purges and plagues and witching is all but gone. It still survives a bit, mostly among women who are in the working class. That kind of witching, while not necessarily legal, is allowed to fly under the radar. It’s just domestic witching, not the trouble-making kind.

This is a story about three sisters and witching and so much more. The first sister we meet is James Juniper Eastwood aka June. She is the youngest and arrives in New Salem on the spring equinox of 1893. She is no stranger to witching, having learned from her grandmother. June is wild and impulsive and sassy and straightforward. When June gets off the train in New Salem she has no idea where she is going but she’s definitely not sticking around the train station where there are wanted posters with her face on them. She heads toward a rally in St. George’s Square.

Agnes Amaranth Eastwood is the middle sister. She’s strong and strong-willed. She works as a mill girl and she is also in New Salem. She doesn’t necessarily get along with the other mill girls and when we meet her she’s not feeling very well. She, too, eventually finds herself pulled to St. George’s Square.

The last sister, the eldest sister, is Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood. She is frequently lost in books which makes sense when we learn she works at the Salem College Library. She is wise and endlessly curious. Perhaps a little too curious as she is keeping a small journal of little rhymes and spells and notes about witching that she has found in her illicit research of witchcraft. She stumbles upon the beginning of a spell and she says it aloud. Nothing happens at first, but she too feels pulled to St. George’s square and she is also compelled to continue repeating that partial spell she found.

In the square it looks like perhaps the partial spell did do something, though incomplete. All hell breaks loose because witching makes people terrified. Beatrice, Agnes, and June find each other in the square after years of estrangement. And this is where our story really begins.

Everything I’ve mentioned is only in the first 25 to 30 pages. There is so much story and it’s beautiful and exciting and creepy and lovely.

Ring Shout is set in 1922 in Macon, Georgia. Our narrator and protagonist is Maryse Boudreaux. Her closest friends are Sadie and Chef and they’ve all set a trap for the creatures they are hunting. Nearby there is a KKK march/rally and it’s the 4th of July. While the human Klan members are awful, they are mostly vehicles for the real monsters called Ku Kluxes.

Ku Kluxes are terrifying beasts that are reminiscent of the aliens from the Alien films but Ku Kluxes are bone white with rows of eyes. So creepy. They gain power and feed off of hate and they often use human Klan members as disguises and hide right alongside them.

Maryse, Sadie, and Chef hunt Ku Kluxes. Sadie is amazing with a rifle and Chef is a delightful butch lesbian veteran who is brilliant with explosives. Maryse? She has a magic sword. Not everyone can see Ku Kluxes but these three have The Sight.

In the United States in 1915 there was a film released called The Birth of a Nation and it gave rise to and a lot of momentum to the KKK. This is actual history. In Ring Shout, the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation was actually a magic ritual that white men used to summon demons, aka the Ku Kluxes. Ring Shout takes place seven years later when there are plenty of demons to be hunted. The person at the center of the demon-hunting is Nana Jean, who is a Gullah woman with some psychic powers. From some of the research that their little group’s scientist is doing and from Nana Jean’s visions, they can tell something is brewing. Something real, real bad.

Through horror, the author also offers us a really great examination of hate and the different kinds of hate. It’s a novella clocking in at just under 200 pages and it had me on the edge of my seat the entire time.

Content warnings for violence, gore, racism, racist violence, and body horror.