Author: Patricia Elzie

This is an essay collection from a wide range of disabled folks. About one in five people in the United States is disabled which is a massive amount of people. It makes the already horrific disregard, lack of representation, lack of access, and more all the more egregious. The essays in this book are a wide range of experiences, which makes sense, because the disabled community is a wide range of people. There are essays that are heartbreaking, uplifting, anger-inducing, and joyful, sometimes all in a single essay.

So many of the essays lay bare the layers of oppression at the intersections of identities and they can be very, very heavy. I had to take several breaks while reading this book because some of the essays filled me with massive amounts of rage. The essay titled “The Erasure of Indigenous People in Chronic Illness” by Jen Deerinwater and the essay titled, “The Isolation of Being Deaf in Prison” by Jeremy Woody as told to Christie Thompson come to mind.

One of the essays that blew my mind was by Sky Cubacub, the non-binary, queer, and disabled Filipinx creator of Rebirth Garments which, from the website, are “fully customizable gender non-conforming wearables and accessories centering Non-binary, Trans, Disabled and Mad Queers of all sizes and ages.” The bit that just absolutely floored me was when they wrote about accessibility during a fashion show. Fashion shows often have loud music and are very fast-paced and it can be difficult for a person to offer live descriptions of what is going on on stage. So, they collaborated with a musician to integrate the descriptions of the fashion into the lyrics of music that they were writing for the show. I thought that was incredibly rad!

I read this book quite a while ago and it is one that stays with me. If you are a person that is reading all kinds of social justice books, all kinds of books on anti-Blackness and books on homophobia and books on intersectional feminism etc., you absolutely must read this book as well. Even if you’re not reading all those books, if you are an adult human, or even a young adult, this is a must-read.

There are content warnings at the beginning of each essay that warrants them and there is a range too large to fully list here but it includes infanticide, genocide, institutionalization, abuse, and more.

This book is simultaneously absolutely beautiful and wildly anger-inducing. One of academia’s problems is that there is no wiggle room for studying something outside of a rigid set of westernized, colonialist rules. Full disclosure: I work at a university and I appreciate the scientific method and also there are multiple ways of learning about the world around us.

Dr. Kimmerer is a biologist, environmental scientist, decorated professor, a mother, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Before I read this book, I imagined that trying to bridge the gap between Indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge would be like trying to walk a tightrope. Dr. Kimmerer makes it clear that it is actually more like examining something that is woven. They aren’t two separate thoughts and instead are intimately related, as if they are woven into each other.

One of the many ideas that rocked my world is to think of everything in the world as a gift instead of a commodity. When something is free, many of us will tend to take what we need and not be greedy. How different would the world be if we only take what we need? In fact, when used for ceremonies at powwows, sweetgrass cannot be bought; it must be a gift. Dr. Kimmerer walks us through some research about sweetgrass and the symbiotic relationship between the sweetgrass and humans. It must be shared from the Earth and harvested to survive.

I was particularly enamored by the section on sugar maples and what it takes to make maple syrup. I really appreciated the sections on salmon on the west coast and learning about the devastating effects humans have had. This is the first time I’ve been taught explicitly about what happened and what can be done to reverse the damage and how some people are trying.

I was surprised by the section on hunting. In fact, the author herself states, when talking about a fur trapper, “I have to confess that I’d shuttered my mind before I even met him. There was nothing a fur trapper could say that I wanted to hear.” I was also very skeptical but I went along for the ride and kept reading and my understanding has deepened significantly.

I love this book so much and I hope you do too.

This book is equal parts incredibly steamy sex and absolute hilarity. The romance trope that is central to this book is fake dating which historically I was ho-hum about, but this book totally ruined me and I was all-in after the first couple of chapters.

Dani Brown is a Ph.D. candidate who doesn’t suffer any fools. She has super short hot pink hair and just broke up with her girlfriend who teaches in the same academic department. The ex-girlfriend did the thing that Dani avoids at all costs, which is to start having Feelings. Yes, Feelings with a capital ‘F’ is the surefire way to send Dani Brown running. In the prologue, Dani prays to the goddess Oshun for a no-strings-attached sex buddy.

Her counterpart, Zafir Ansari, is the very fit security guard who works in the same building that Dani teaches in. Unbeknownst to Dani, Zafir is a former rugby player and he began a nonprofit teaching kids both rugby and how to talk about their feelings because Zafir has pretty serious anxiety and panic attacks. Also, Zafir is an absolutely hopeless romantic and full of feelings 24/7.

The two of them, Dani & Zafir, flirt shamelessly daily. Dani brings him coffee on her way from the cafe to her office. Zaf brings Dani a protein bar every morning because he knows she works a lot and never makes time to eat properly. This exchange is their ‘thing.’

So, Dani teaches her first class of the day and after class, Dani has an awkward interaction with her ex and then gets in the elevator which freezes to a stop when she is in it because there is a fire drill she didn’t know about. Meanwhile, Zafir is in his element, making sure everyone is out of the building. He’s been planning this fire drill forever, he’s checking off his boxes, and everyone is outside except, he notices, Dani Brown. She never made it outside. Zaf goes in, hears her yelling from the elevator, pries open the doors and carries her out firefighter style. The lust between is palpable, even to the dozens of students who are now taking photos of them.

Zaf and Dani end up trending on social media and it gets a bunch of donations for his nonprofit so they agree to fake a relationship for a month, you know, for marketing purposes.

I do love a book with a map in the front and a glossary in the back. To me, it’s a sign of some extensive world-building and the world-building in this book is phenomenal. Raybearer takes place in the land of Aritsar, which is made up of multiple unified realms.

The book starts with our hero, Tarisai, when she is a child. She lives in the realm of Swana in a large house with many tutors and caretakers. Her mother (aka “The Lady”) visits very rarely, even only once a year, and Tarisai is desperate for her approval and touch. Tarisai has the power to take someone’s memories if she touches them, so all her tutors and caretakers avoid touching her skin to skin. They teach her all the languages of all the realms, reading and writing, but unbeknownst to her, the history she is taught is heavily censored. In fact, she has never left Bhekina House, where she lives, and she’s also not allowed to interact with any other children.

When she is seven, Tarisai sneaks out of Bhekina House and gets caught by an alagbato, who is the guardian fairy of Swana. He shows Tarisai a troubling memory of his own, where the Lady tricks him and enslaves him and he must give her three wishes to be freed and one of the wishes must be fulfilled by Tarisai.

When Tarisai is eleven, The Lady makes her wish. She shows Tarisai a portrait of a boy Tarisai’s age and commands that she kill him, but only when she loves him and he anoints her as his own. Tarisai has no idea who this boy is and she’s just so happy to be with her mother she doesn’t pay much mind to this weird, troubling request.

Two of The Lady’s friends take Tarisai to the capital and unbeknownst to her, she is entered into a competition to become part of the Emperor’s son’s council. The council siblings have a magical connection to the Emperor or, in this case, the son and each sibling then makes it so that the Emperor is immune from being murdered and can only die from old age or if one of his council members turns on him.

When Tarisai meets the Emperor’s son she is shocked because he is the boy in the portrait that The Lady commanded her to murder.

You know a book is going to be quite an adventure when you open the cover and there’s a map inside. We’re talking about many different, distinct places and clans of people, a vast, complicated history, and this is the first in a trilogy, the second of which, Fevered Star, comes out on April 19th.

Content warnings for lots of graphic violence including violence against women and violence to children.

It begins in the Obregi Mountains with a child named Serapio. His mother performs a brutal ritual on him and claims he is a reborn god with a purpose. He is given a number of tutors that are supposed to teach him how to do what he is destined to do, some of whom are very abusive. He is supposed to live out his destiny in ten years when there is another solar eclipse which is referred to as the Convergence.

The Convergence is central to the entire book. Each chapter places us where along the timeline we are from that point of violence that his mother inflicted on him to the actual Convergence. For instance, 10 Years Before Convergence, 3 years before Convergence, 3 day before Convergence, etc. This is helpful because we also jump around to a lot of other characters who are slowly woven together.

Another character is in the city of Cuecola. Her name is Xiala and she is Teek, which is a race of humanoids that humans are very wary of. Her voice can kind of control the ocean. Xiala is a sea captain, who finds herself in a bit of trouble and is rescued by a wealthy patron, who hires her to deliver a special person to the city of Tova by the day of Convergence.

The city of Tova has a number of clans, some more wealthy and revered than others. They are overseen by The Watchers, who really don’t have that much power anymore and are more for show and ritual. The Watchers are made up of multiple priests. Usually only the upper class people get to be priests but the Sun Priest was picked from the lowest clan. Not even a clan, but considered so low that they are clanless. Her name is Naranpa. She has a big ceremony to lead on the day of Convergence.

Samin Nosrat knows her way around the kitchen. She got her start at the famed Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA and has gone on to be a New York Times food columnist, appear on Michelle Obama’s Waffles + Mochi Netflix show, co-create and co-host the Home Cooking podcast, and so much more. Most people see this book and think it’s a standard cookbook with end to end recipes and maybe little paragraphs of anecdotes to break things up. While this book certainly has recipes, it is so much more than just a cookbook. It’s part reference and part cooking instruction and it will change the way you cook forever (and for the better)! Cookbooks tell you how to make certain things. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach you how to cook.

I grew up in a family that cooked a lot and so much of what we did centered around food. Before the Food Network existed, I’d watch cooking shows on PBS in the morning while I got ready for school. I am good at following recipes and once I read this book, I became so much better at winging it in the kitchen and throwing things together on a whim.

The main idea of this book is that by mastering the four elements of salt, fat, acid, and heat, you will be able to cook just about anything. I was skeptical at first but just about every sentence is a goldmine of knowledge. This moves you beyond just using iodized salt from a shaker or any ol’ olive oil and Nosrat is brilliant at not only explaining the how but the why. Why does something taste better when you use x instead of y? What is the importance of adding an acid while you cook? Or why would you in some cases use an acid as a finish?

This book is also packed with gorgeous illustrations, charts, graphs, decision-helper flowcharts, and so much more. There’s one page that opens up to an illustration of a wheel of fat, which describes what fats are most common for the origin of the cuisine you are cooking. There is a chart on recommended grain-to-water ratios and an absolutely world-changing chart of how to cook certain vegetables depending on the season of the year.

This book has changed my life and it is a must-read, must-own for any home cook.

Congressman John Lewis was one of the key figures of the U.S. civil rights movement. This trilogy of graphic novels is a first-hand account of his lifelong struggle for civil and human rights. This was a particularly difficult read because we’re still fighting some of the same fights. It’s enraging. It’s heartbreaking. And it’s also motivating.

The books time hop, juxtaposing President Barack Obama’s inauguration with John Lewis’s childhood memories and civil rights movement memories. Of everyone who spoke at the March on Washington in August 1963, the one where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I have a dream” speech, John Lewis was the one still living at the time of writing these graphic novels.

Book One introduces nonviolent protest tactics. I think that when people think of nonviolence, they imagine no violence at all, which is wildly wrong. The protestors themselves were nonviolent and nonreactive, but the people they were against spit on them, tear gassed them, turned fire hoses on them, set dogs on them, set dogs on children. There is a lot of violence and violent imagery and violent language in these books and you should definitely know that going into it.

Book Two continues where Book One left off with the lunch counter sit-ins before diving into the freedom rides and ending with the march on Washington.

Book Three is a doozy. It’s a bit longer than the first two books and like the others it contains a lot of violence because nothing makes white supremacists and their organizations more violent than peaceful protestors. It begins with the bombing of the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama then immediately to a couple different shootings of teenagers. This is all in the first 10 pages or so of the book. The focus of the rest of the book is on the civil rights protests and marches with the goal of forcing Alabama’s governor out of office and making it so that everyone had the right to vote.

As you can imagine, these graphic novels are an intense read and I highly recommend them.

This comics collection is from The Nib, “a daily publication devoted to publishing and promoting political and non-fiction comics. We run journalism, essays, memoir and satire about what is going down in the world, all in comics form, the best medium. It was founded in 2013.” I love the variety and range of the contributors and the subjects of the comics contained in this collection. There are comics by creators I’ve mentioned on Book Riot’s All the Backlist! podcast, like Maia Kobabe, Archie Bongiovanni, Mady G, and Melanie Gillman. There are also comics by creators that I think you should know about, like Bianca Xunise, Scout Tran, Trinidad Escobar, and more.

There are comics about coming out and comics about creators just realizing that they are queer. There are hilarious comics about gender reveals and pronouns. This book has many comics on queer history, such as one about Gad Beck, who was gay, Jewish, and fought the nazis (the original 1930s nazis, not the ones we have right now). There are multiple pieces on the ways in which hairstyles reflect and confirm queerness. There are comics on birth control and comics on how some people define non-binary for themselves.

One of the comics I deeply appreciate is titled Decolonizing Queerness in the Philippines by Trinidad Escobar. It is such an important reminder that homophobic and transphobic beliefs in many non-Western countries are results of colonization. It’s so easy for some Westerners to harshly judge these countries’ views on queerness or women’s rights or contraception without acknowledging their own role and the roles of their ancestors in bringing these views to these countries in the first place.

Another piece I appreciated is I Came Out Late in Life and That’s Okay by Alison Wilgus because hey, not all of us knew we were queer since we were 3-years’ old. It’s such an important comic for those of us who may feel left out of the narrative of being and knowing we’re queer since the day we were born.

This is a thoughtfully curated collection that I highly recommend.

In addition to being intense, Hunger is a very important and sometimes difficult read. Roxane Gay is, in her own words, a woman of size. She wasn’t always “of size.” When Roxane Gay was twelve, she was violently sexually assaulted by a group of boys from her school. She says she “ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.” When you are big, you are both invisible and highly visible all at once. Everyone has an opinion on your body, but few have consideration for you. Roxane Gay shares, in painful detail, how others try to punish her for her body and how she would crave the punishment and even punish herself. She begins by telling readers that, “The story of my body is not a story of triumph” yet it is a true story. (Side note: Body positivity doesn’t play a role in this book. This is not that kind of book.)

A large portion of the book is a rapid firing of abuse upon abuse as a person of size riding on airplanes, abuse from trolls on the internet, lack of consideration for ability when being a speaker. Will the chairs suit her body? How high is the stage? She also lays bare our society’s normalization of the abuse of fat people on shows like The Biggest Loser.

As I mentioned earlier, this is such an important book to read. It can be so easy to look at a person or a photo of a person and make judgments based on what you see. But you don’t see their story and no one sees your story. Hunger is Roxane Gay stepping forward and sharing her body’s story. It is not always a happy one. She shows vulnerability in her honesty about learning to nurture both her body and her spirit. It serves as a reminder that we’re all learning this and we’re all at different stages in our learning. This book is also a harsh reminder and wake-up call to be considerate of the reality of the bodies of others.

Content warnings: violent sexual assault, emotional abuse, eating disorders and eating disorder ideation, anti-fatness, and verbal abuse.

Liz Lighty is a Black, awkward, over-achieving, adorkable senior in high school in Campbell, Indiana, a small midwestern town that is pretty white and affluent and obsessed with prom. You know how some high schools are obsessed with football? Well, Campbell is out of control obsessed with prom and this has gone on for generations.

Liz (or Lighty, as some folks call her), is desperate to get out of this small town and go to Pennington college. Liz’s family does not have a lot of money and the scholarship she is depending on to get her to Pennington falls through; however, not all hope is lost. The people crowned prom queen and prom king get a nice chunk of scholarship money.

The absolute last thing Liz Lighty wants to do is join the competition for prom queen. She hates being the center of attention. Of course her nemesis (and the nemesis’s crew) will try to do everything to stop Liz from winning, which given Liz’s gpa, she might actually have a chance at with the help of her friends. It also means that she is going to have to cooperate with an ex-friend, Jordan.

Liz and her brother live with their grandparents. Her mom passed away young and her brother has sickle cell anemia. Liz intends to become a doctor, like her mom, to do sickle cell research.

But that’s not all! There’s a new girl in town, named Mack. Mack is also an outsider, a skater girl, and not necessarily prom queen material and she’s joined the competition as well, which complicates things because every time she is near Mack, Liz Lighty gets major butterflies. This book is queer and sweet and funny and when Liz and Mack are around each other, even I got butterflies. Also, I went into this book thinking that I was going to be able to predict everything but it’s full of surprises.

Content warnings for racism and homophobia and a deceased parent.