Author: Vanessa Diaz

You can hear me gush about it on this week’s All the Books episode. Jess Zimmerman is the editor in chief at Electric Lit, and this is her cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology. She discusses 11 female monsters, including Medusa, the Harpies, and the Sphinx, breaking down how women have been labeled as monsters for daring to be everything from sexual to angry (ya know: human). This is a wonderful work of feminist cultural critique and a sweet sweet hit of dopamine for all my mythology nerds. (essays, nonfiction)

This one was read by the author and it’s great! On the podcast, I said I might have preferred this one in print. But! The only reason I personally felt that way is because mythology books *always* send me on a Google rabbit hole and I like to be able to go back and reference earlier parts of the book. It is still a fantastic audiobook!

The third book in the Brown Sisters series is finally here! Eve is trying to get her act together and her parents are about to cut her off I she doesn’t. She goes for a long drive that ends with her stumbling across a charming bed & breakfast and ends up in a (very)spontaneous!) job interview for a head chef position. It does not go well though, especially the part where Eve goes to leave and—accidentally? mostly?—hits the B&B owner with her car. Whoopsie! Guess she’ll have to stick around to help while he recovers for his injuries. Awkward! But also: steamy. See my full review below under Latest Listen! (contemporary romance, rom-com)

Leviathan is an aging nuclear submarine with a sacred and secret mission: to trigger the Second Coming when the time is right. Remy, who was taken from the surface world and raised to sing in a choir of young boys board the ship, is part of a strange crew who controls the Leviathan. Remy also has a secret: she’s a girl, and the ship’s old chaplain gave her the missile launch key just before he died. She promised to keep it safe, but the new chaplain has priorities of his own and safety doesn’t seem to be among them. Remy will have to decide for herself how to handle the fate of the world. (science fiction)

Read by Mia Ellis; I knew I wanted to talk about this book as soon as I heard a sample. Mia is new to me but her pace, clarity, and tone are exactly what I love in a tight sci-fi novel.

This is the latest from the author of Never Let Me Go and his first release since winning the Novel Prize in Literature. Klara is an Artificial Friend who spends her days observing the folks browsing inside the store and passing by on the street, waiting for a customer to choose her. This is “a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?”(fiction)

Read by Sura Siu (No Planet B by Lucy Diavolo) – I sampled this audiobook and found what I heard of Sura Sia’s performance to be simultaneously soothing and ominous? Or maybe just foreshadowing? Very interested in this one.

A costly mistake left Carmen Aguilar a few credits short of being able to graduate, so she’s retaking an internship class to earn her high school diploma. That’s how she finds herself working as a Dream, performing at kid parties dressed in a giant Disney princess gown in the middle of a Miami summer. The gig is actually not that bad though, one she gets to do with her best friend. But then the boy who broke her heart joins the Dream team (sorrynotsorry), which is awkward, just as the Dreams are hired to perform at the quinceañera of the bratty cousin who betrayed Carmen and ruined her reputation, which is even more awkward. If she wants to earn those credits, Carmen will have to manage dancing in the brutal Miami heat, fending off that papi chulo ex of hers, and stopping her spoiled prima from ruining her own dang quinceañera. If she can do all of that, she might just get her happily ever after. I’m listening to this one now and I am obsessed! contemporary YA)

Frankie Corzo (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow by Laura Taylor Namey) – Okay, so I’m doing it (have I done this?) I’m adding Frankie to my list of faves. I enjoy spending time with her so much and feel like she keeps getting better and better at her craft. She was a Cuban mom (and tia, and tio, and prima, etc) in this book.

This book had me at “constellation magic on the Underground Railroad,” then I saw Bahni on narration and, well, ya know. Sold. In this exciting work of speculative historical fantasy, the Civil War is over. Hetty Rhodes is a former conductor on the Underground Railroad who used a combination of wits and magic to shepherd dozens of people north to safety. She and her husband Benjy have settled in Philadelphia where they dedicate themselves to solving murders and mysteries that White authorities want nothing to do with. Then Hetty and Benjy find one of their own slain in an alley; they bury the body and head off in search of answers, but “the secrets and intricate lies of the elites of Black Philadelphia only serve to dredge up more questions. To solve this mystery, they will have to face ugly truths all around them, including the ones about each other.”

Read by Bahni Turpin (The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi)

I’ve been meaning to read Elly Griffiths for years, and how can I resist when her latest is pitched for fans of Anthony Horowitz and Agatha Christie?? A 90-year-old woman, Peggy, dies of a heart condition—nothing to investigate there, right? That’s what Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur thinks at first, then the deceased woman’s caretaker, Natalka, shows up at the police station with some interesting information: while clearing out the woman’s flat, Natalka finds an unusual number of crime novels, all dedicated to Peggy with a cryptic postscript. Detective Kaur suspects there’s more going here that meets the eye, especially when a gunman breaks into the house, steals one of the books, and the novel’s author is found dead shortly thereafter. That marks the beginning of a string of attacks on writers from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. Must! read! (mystery)

Read by Nina Wadia (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach)

This audiobook is a 19-hour listen (less at the 1.2 speed at which I listened to it, but still) but I finished it in a little over two days. I went on so many dang walks, took my sweet time folding laundry, cooked a bunch—any excuse to throw on this audiobook because I just couldn’t stop.

Plot refresher: What we’re getting here is Southern Black Girl Magic with a modern-day twist on Arthurian legend plus a little romance, too. After her mother dies in a car accident, 16-year-old Bree Matthews needs an escape from painful memories and her childhood home. She and her bestie enroll at a residential program for bright high school students at UNC Chapel Hill thinking it’ll be just the thing to bring Bree back to life, but things don’t go according to plan. On her very first night on campus, she witnesses a magical attack that she very much wasn’t supposed to see and almost gets kicked out of the program for being caught off campus. In the aftermath of the attack, Bree discovers that the memory erasure that was supposed to work on her has failed, so she starts asking questions and ruffling feathers. This is how she comes to find out that Chapel Hill is home to a secret demon-fighting society known as the Legendborn whose members are descendants of King Arthur and his knights, and that she possesses a unique magic of her own. Also… a giant magical war is coming and it’s bringing bloodthirsty beasts. This book is a RIDE, yo.

It really is so special to spend time with a heroine like Bree, one who’s dealing with the big evil forces/scary monsters/buried legacy stuff while also navigating the microagressions (and the macro ones) that come with being a young Black woman in the south. I was so ready for the Arthurian stuff with a Black girl lead, but I really didn’t know how deep this book was going to go—or in what direction—and I don’t know how much of it I should tell you either. Part of the “oh… snap!” fun is in finding those parts out for yourself. I figured we were going to see Bree deal with unprocessed grief, and watch her field all kinds of uncertainty as she came to terms with her powers and the secrets of her ancestry. I did not know the exploration of those themes would also be a condemnation of cultural appropriation and our country’s racist past (I am once again bursting with how badly I want to say more here!). Tracy Deonn has done something so incredible with this book, one that makes so many important statements both in its drop-the-mic moments and its asides. Arthurian purists are gonna be big mad.

Joniece Abbott-Pratt’s performance damn near had me in tears. Bree really goes through it in this book and Joniece Abbott-Pratt conveys every one of those ups and downs with such precision, such conviction. The way her voice goes all tender and soft in the romantic bits, or how it cracks in the emotional scenes? Listen, I did the whole Kerry Washington lip quiver at a local park as I sat there trying to keep it together. What a knockout narrator for a knockout book. And guess what? There’s a sequel coming.

On the banks of the Ganges sits India’s holy city of Banaras, the place where pilgrims come to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. Pramesh has lived quite contently in Banaras for ten years managing a death hostel, shepherding the dying who who come to the holy city in search of a good death. But one day a lifeless form of a man is pulled from the river, a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. It turns out it’s his estranged cousin Sagar, and his presence casts a shadow over the life Pramesh and his wife Shobha have built for their family. (fiction)

Read by Manish Dongardive (Mumbai Noir by Altaf Tyrewala) – I’m unfamiliar with Manish’s work, but that sample sold me in seconds! Soothing, smooth, very “tell me more.”

Toriiiii! I met Tori Telfer (and her mom) when I was still a bookseller in San Diego during an event for her first book, Lady Killers and I’m jazzed to hear about this next effort. This is a look at some of history’s notorious but often forgotten female con artists and the crimes they dared to commit. (nonfiction, true crime)

Read by Jaime Lamchick (Crooked Magic by Eva Chase) – Jaime is another narrator I’m not familiar with, but the sample feels like she’s the perfect person to read this book. Her reading gives me equal parts “this subject is fascinating” and “can you believe women get looked over even in the subject of crime?” Yessss.

Check this: in the far future nearly a thousand years removed from Earth, humanity survives inside of giant space animals called Zenzee. Cool cool cool. Humanity has also just about driven their giant space friends to extinction with this exploitation. Even better! The good news is that thanks to careful oversight by new minted ruler Doka Kaleigh and sacrifice by all of its crew, life inside the Parados I is now on the brink of utopia. But Doka’s rivals feel threatened by that success; “when a cataclysmic event on another Zenzee world forces Doka and his people to accept thousands of refugees, a culture clash erupts, revealing secrets from the past that could endanger their future.” The stakes are even greater for Doka, and that much stickier; he’s fallen for the one woman he is forbidden to love—his wife. (science fiction)

Read by Staci Mitchell (Colonize This! edited by Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman) and James Fouhey (The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert)

I said I was going to buy this one in print because look at that cover! I love me some Shayna Small though and I’m impatient, so I listened to it instead. Shayna (and Namima Forna) did not do me wrong!

It’s the day of the ritual blood ceremony that will determine if 16-year-old Deka be allowed to remain in her village and she really needs her blood to run red. But of course, her blood runs a brilliant gold, the color of the impure. In an instant, the village and family she’s known all her life want nothing to do with her, and she’s subjected to a fate worse than death. She wakes up some time later, dazed and confused in a room with a mysterious woman who makes her an offer: she can stay in the village and submit to her fate, or she can join an army of girls like her and go fight for the emperor. Seeing no other viable option, she follows the woman to join that army. The further she gets into the empire’s mission to eradicate a legion of demons knows as Deathshrieks, it becomes clear that none of what she’s taken for truth in her life is what it seems.

I loved everything about this conflicted heroine marching into battle armed with abilities she knows not the full power of, a young woman who though soft and tender is also as fierce as her blood is gold. Her origins are as much a secret to her as they are to us, and that slow revelation is just pure wow; it’s so satisfying to watch her question authority and trust her intuition, and of course embrace the power she was always taught to fear and despise. Then there’s the pure joy of the friendship she develops with the band of young women alongside her on the battle field, women with physical and emotional scars who ride as hard for Deka as she does for them. There is so much power and Black girl magic vibrating through this whole narrative, it gives me chills. I remember when there were little to no Black and brown girl heroines in YA fantasy (or you know, lit at large). Spending this time with (and rooting for) Deka was really special.

And if I haven’t sold it to you hard enough, here’s this amazing pitch: an African-inspired world that “basically imagines what would happen if the Dora Milaje from Black Panther were stuck in The Handmaid’s Tale and decided they weren’t going to take it anymore.” YES.

Shayna Small (The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson) delivers another solid performance here, giving us the full range of accent work in her repertoire. Small delivers all of them richly and passionately, bringing to life each of the characters’ distinct personalities. The audiobook clocks in at just under 13 hours, but it felt like half that. Go get it!

Evelyn is a brilliant scientist who’s just won a prestigious award for her research in the field of human cloning. She should be ecstatic, but her personal life has fallen apart. Not only did her husband Nathan cheat on her, he did it with a clone of Evelyn, a clone he created behind her back using her own research without her knowledge. The “oh snap!” moments don’t stop there though. That clone, Martine, is pregnant when she’s not supposed to be able to conceive, making her very existence an ethical violation. And another thing: she’s just killed Nathan in self defense after he attacked her first. This is a sci-fi light ride from start to finish that flips the domestic thriller on its head. Oh, to be inside of Sarah Gailey’s mind. What a place! (science fiction, thriller)

Read by Xe Sands (Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey, The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka)

Yesss we finally have the third book in C.L. Polk’s Kingston cycle! Robin Thorpe has kept her magic hidden for years to avoid imprisonment by the state, keeping her head down in Riverside. Then Grace Hensley comes knocking with wonderful news: Robin’s days of hiding are over! Freed witches are flooding the streets of Kingston and returning to the families they were ripped from. Robin begins hashing out a plot to ensure that Aeland remains free and just, but that won’t be easy. She’ll also have to face the “long-bottled feelings for the childhood love that vanished into an asylum 20 years ago.”

Read by Robin Miles (Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, The Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson, Just As I Am by Cicely Tyson)

Everyone who’s read this has told me two things: that it’s one helluva genre-bender and that you should go into it knowing as little as possible. So I’ll just give you this: “a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans” and then sh*t gets a little too real. I’m a huge fan of Lockwood’s Priestdaddy and can’t wait to see what she’s done with fiction! (fiction)

Read by Kristen Sieh (One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London)

For those not familiar with Christopher Marlowe, he was a famous Elizabethan poet and playwright, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s and probably his most important predecessor in English drama. He was a bright kid who went on to earn his B.A. from Cambridge and was soooort of working on his master’s a few years later. The university tried to deny him the degree, presumably due to a slew of unexplained absences and rumors that he’d converted to Catholicism and would soon be ditching Cambridge for a Catholic institution—how dare! Then a funny thing happened: advisers to Queen Elizabeth intervened, recommending that Marlowe receive the degree on account of his “services for the state.” In case you’re not picking up what I’m putting down here, it is pretty commonly accepted today that Kit Marlowe was a spy for the Crown. We’ll never actually know for sure because of how spying works, but historical records from that time (of which there are way more of than I expected!) make a pretty good case.

A Tip for the Hangman is an Elizabethan spy thriller that fictionalizes, with creative license, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe’s story. When the book opens, Kit gets called to a meeting by the head of his department at Cambridge, and he assumes Cambridge is about to give him the boot for slacking off. But no, not exactly: the Queen’s spymaster is at this meeting to recruit Marlowe to spy on the papist Mary Stuart (aka Mary Queen of Scots) and prove she’s involved in a plot to commit treason. I say “recruited,” but it’s more like he’s voluntold, so off he goes, more than a little nervous but hoping to get it over with quickly. Spoiler alert: nah.

Kit is smart and resourceful, but also clearly out of his depth. He gets by mostly by the skin of his teeth because he’s a great liar, but you just know his luck is gonna run out sooner or later. He’s also clearly conflicted by the work he does the further he gets pulled into this web of espionage, especially when his involvement starts to have consequences in his personal life. In the middle of a string of treacherous missions and impossible decisions, we also watch his career as a playwright explode. In spite of the fact that you kinda know the ending here ain’t a happy one (if you know a bit about Kit Marlowe), you just keep hoping the author will write in a change of course. The final chapter (and off, the final pages!) just gutted me. Let’s just say hope is a helluva drug.

The performance of this book by James Meunier is just wonderful. He nails the snark and irreverence of Kit’s character so well that you’ll forget, for just a moment, that this isn’t an author telling you their own story, but a voice actor reading the role of a fictional character. He tells it all so naturally, conveying everything— annoyance, love, lust, desperation, betrayal, abject terror—like he was feeling every one of these emotions himself in real time. The parts where he gets low and tender (you’ll see what I mean) are so heartfelt that I had to pause what I was doing and remind myself again that James was not personally traumatized by the beheading of Mary Stuart, or heartbreak.

This book is perfect for fans of historical fiction who also enjoy a queer romance, a lot of snark, and all the tense, suspenseful parts of a classic spy novel. Oh, and make sure to listen to the author’s note for some important notes on artistic license. It’s all just catnip fo history nerds.

I will do a full review for this one probably next week, because I just finished it and loved it so much! This Elizabethan spy thriller is a fictional account of a story many believe to be true: playwright Christopher Marlowe was recruited as a spy by the Crown while working on his Master’s at Cambridge in the 1580s. The Queen’s spymaster shows up one day and is all, “Get in loser, we’re going to prove that papist Mary Stuart is plotting treason.” He sort of gets voluntold, so off he goes, and in that moment his life—and history—are forever changed. It’s got a queer romance and a lot of snark and plenty of spy novel aaah-is-he-going-to-pull-this-off-or-die suspense stuff. This one is great for history nerds; it sent me down a Google rabbit-hole for sure. (historical fiction)

Read by James Meunier (Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales by John Hornor Jacobs)

You know I love mythology, but I’m especially excited to read this one because it’s rooted in Norse mythology. Why, you ask? Because I went to a high school called Valhalla and our mascot was The Norsemen, and I’ve been way into Norse mythology ever since the first day of my freshman year when I completed Odin’s March up and across a rainbow bridge and touched Thor’s hammer at the end (it’s a big ol symbolic ceremony that students do again in reverse when they graduate to this day, at least in non-COVID times. I’m not kidding). And now that you know another nerdy fact about me, go get this audiobook! It’s narrated by one of my faves and is all about the banished witch Angrboda who falls in love with that trickster Loki and risks the wrath of the gods in so doing. (mythology, fiction)

Read by Jayne Entwistle (Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series, The Poison Thread by Laura Purcell)

I make a gleeful little noise every time I see a romance or cozy mystery with characters of color at the center, especially when they involve food! In this YA rom-com. Bao Nguyen and Linh Mai are two Vietnamese-American teens who each work at their parents’ neighboring pho restaurants. Bao is stable and reliable, Linh a creative, artsy firecracker. For years, the Nguyens and the Mais and their competing establishments have been at odds, so Bao and Linh have mostly avoided each other. But a chance encounter brings them together and pow! Sparks fly. Sound familiar?! Like maybe a tale that takes place in fair Verona? (YA romance)

Read by Ryan Do (The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl, Jeff Schwager), Vyvy Nguyen (Quiet As They Come by Angie Chau)

I knew I wanted to read this book before I knew wtf it was about; I saw a black cover with bright pink text and a contributor list that included R.O. Kwon, Garth. Greenwell, Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, and Carmen Maria Machado. Then I read it, and what a reward. This passage from the intro to the book really sums it up beautifully: “By taking kink seriously, these stories recognize how the questions raised in intimate, kinky encounters…can help us to interrogate and begin to re-script the larger cultural narratives that surround us.” This collection of stories spans the sexual spectrum and ranges from the relatively mild to the super explicit, examining desire, consent, safety, and power dynamics, and asking readers to think about the ways in which gender, politics, and cultural norms inform those power dynamics. I love the framing of kink as empowerment, and the challenge to examine any discomfort you feel in reading these stories. Be warned: it’s NSFW. Don’t come crying to me if you forget to connect your ear buds to your phone at the office. (short stories, erotica)

Read by an ensemble cast: Corey Brill (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu), Aden Hakimi (Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday), Lameece Issaq (They Never Learn by Layne Fargo), Kyler O’Neal (singer, writer, and actress), Joy Osmanski (This Time Will be Different by Misa Sugiura), Kaipo Schwab (Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse), Aven Shore (Notes on a Killing by Kevin Flynn, Rebecca Lavoie), and Ashton Grooms (actress you may know from Fox’s Star).

Sixteen-year-old Deka is a nervous wreck ahead of the blood ceremony that will determine if she will become a member of her village. She already stands out because of her powers of intuition, so she really, really needs her blood to run red. But on the day of the ceremony, her blood runs a brilliant gold. If like me, you’re thinking, “oooh pretty,” hold that thought. In Deka’s world, gold is the color of impurity, and Deka will thus face a consequence worse than death. There’s hope though—maybe. A mysterious woman approaches her with a proposition: she can stay in the village and submit to her fate, or she can join an army of girls like her and go fight for the emperor. Does she choose acceptance for an uncertain fate? And is anything—or anyone—what it seems? (fantasy)

Read by Shayna Small (The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson, Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson)

I finally see what all the fuss about this feminist historical f/f romance was about. When we first meet Lucy Muchelney, her lover of several years has ditched her to marry a man for “security.” But her spirits perk up when she receives a letter from Catherine St. Day, the recently widowed Countess of Moth, looking for someone to translate a groundbreaking French astronomy text. Hey! Lucy happens to be an astronomer. Heartbroken and with no other professional prospects, Lucy takes a gamble and shows up at the countess’ estate unannounced to be like, “Yo, so, hire me!” She doesn’t expect to be bowled over by the countess’ beauty, but she is.

The countess is also taken aback, and not just because she’s feeling some things that she’s never felt for a woman before when she lays eyes on this unexpected guest. She’d only reached out to Lucy in the first place hoping she might know of a person who could help because Lucy’s recently deceased father was a renowned and respected astronomer. Lucy explains that her father not only taught her everything he knew, but that Lucy herself did a lot of the work her father was commissioned for. The countess is all about women’s empowerment, but fears introducing Lucy to society and giving her this important project will piss off the the Very Serious male scientists in the field.

She’s right of course, and it’s only when those science dudes show their entire misogynist asses at a society meeting that the countess makes up her mind: she’ll withdraw the funding she’d committed to that group for the project and will instead allow Lucy to live in her home while she works on the translation by herself. And that’s how Lucy comes to spends her days interpreting the complicated French text at this lovely estate. At night, Catherine and Lucy explore each other’s celestial mechanics if you know what I’m sayin’. Life would be grand if things stayed this way, but old wounds and sabotage by some salty (and inferior) science bros threaten to undo all this happy.

This one is read by Morag Sims (A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian), whose delivery I found so delightful. The banter felt natural and matched the mood (tension! frustration! lust! science feelings!) of every conversation, and the steamy sexy times scenes were wonderfully executed (listen, not everyone can pull this off, but Miss Sims had me asking if it was hot in here). In light of my enthusiasm for this performance, I can’t tell you how excited I was to learn that Morag Sims will read the audiobook of Pride and Premeditation, our very own Tirzah Price’s debut Austen-inspired YA murder mystery novel out this spring!!!

But back to the book at hand: there are two more books in the Feminine Pursuits series if you like this one as much as I did: The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows is out now (just… don’t judge the cover) and The Hellion’s Waltz comes out in June.