Category: Promo

Love Marriage was a Phenomenal Book Club choice in 2022 and I’m trying to read through this awesomely curated list. I’m always interested in gaining insight into the experiences of first-generation immigrants and their struggles to reconcile their heritage with their new surroundings. I’m so curious about how authors deal with the challenges faced by people living in between two cultures. It’s a book about the complexities of love and relationships. It’s darkly humorous in a way that dares you to keep a straight face in the midst of the heroine’s misjudgments.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana is an amazing collection of interconnected short stories that explore the lives of residents in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. This brilliant collection is stunning on audio (seriously, so good) and it explores the impact of displacement, economic inequality, and the erasure of community history. It’s also a deeply working class book situated in an urban environment, as opposed to the blue collar suburbs we read so often about. Though it interrogates pretty deep issues, it still manages to be an incredibly hopeful book exploring the delicate interdependency between folks from diverse backgrounds, revealing the ways in which people can come together and find common ground despite their differences.

I recently finished But I Live, a co-creation from three graphic novelists and four Holocaust survivors that came out last year. The book consists of three illustrated stories. Each story vividly and thoughtfully tells the experiences of these survivors as children during the Holocaust. Extremely moving and intimate, it’s one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. 

In these stories, the reader sees the Holocaust through the eyes of children. That’s one reason the book is so powerful. The kids can’t comprehend what is going on around them. I remember learning about the Holocaust in school as a kid, and struggling to get my mind around that level of hatred and evil. It’s still hard as an adult to sit with these stories, to let them in completely. But we must. We can’t give into censorship and denial. We can’t turn away and avoid the horrors of the past. We have to hold these stories up, embrace and share them so they are not forgotten. This is more important now than ever before. 

Earlier this year, I finished a hilarious suburban horror novel called, aptly, Suburban Hell. It’s about a group of four moms who accidentally conjure a demon from the space where one of them was planning to build a She Shed. It explored friendship, was a thoughtful critique of suburbia, and gave space for moms–too often seen as a one-dimensional thing–to be dynamic, fully formed people. 

You know when it feels like a book was just written for you? Yeah. That was this book for me. I used to be 2 weeks behind on edits, now I get them done in 2 days!