Category: Read This Book

A few years ago, Rum burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, A Woman Is No Man, which was selected as the first-ever Jenna’s Book Club pick. Now, Rum is back with her sophomore novel, Evil Eye, which features Yara, a thirtysomething Arab woman living in North Carolina. Yara has it all: a wonderful husband, two daughters, and a job. At least, that’s what she tells herself. But then, why does she feel so purposeless?

Born in Brooklyn to Palestinian refugees, Yara spent her childhood restricted to her parents’ community. Her father was often violent, and Yara was relieved to accept the marriage he arranged for her. But after she moved to North Carolina, she realized that she was still expected to do all of the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. But her husband, Fadi, didn’t hit her. He let her get an education and have a job. Wasn’t that enough?

Now, Yara is in her early 30s. She wants to move up in her career, but she feels overwhelmed. After she yells at a co-worker who said something racist to her, Yara’s boss all but requires her to see the university’s counselor. Yara begins therapy and quickly realizes that her struggle to regulate her emotions may stem from a much bigger issue.

Evil Eye is a coming-of-age story of a Palestinian American woman learning to put herself and her own healing first. There’s such a strength to this book. For the first time in her life, Yara is disentangling the multigenerational trauma she’s experienced but has never fully confronted. Yara’s story isn’t full of dramatic moments or plot twists. It’s a quiet, character-driven story full of depth and emotion. It’s the quiet dissolution of everything Yara thought her life to be. But her life could be different—maybe even better—if only she had the courage to make some big changes.

We begin on Ben Rosencrantz’s 30th birthday. Ben was an English professor in the Pacific Northwest, and he recently divorced his husband and moved back to the Salt Lake City area. He now helps run his father’s board game shop as well as takes care of his father, who is having some health issues. Ben’s heart is really tender from having to leave a teaching job he loved, from the divorce, from his father’s deteriorating health, and also not expecting to be moving back in with his father at age 30.

The board game shop is named Of Dice and Decks, and it’s in a small, tight-knit community of shops in the Sugar House neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood where everyone knows each other and some of the elders have been around since Ben was a kid. Ben doesn’t mind this, and while it’s not ideal, he still loves the community he grew up in, and there is a certain amount of comfort he gets from being around people he has known his whole life. Of Dice and Decks is not doing well financially. Ben’s father added a bit of a coffee shop element to it, and folks do come in for their caffeine, and that may be the main thing keeping the shop afloat.

Ben is at Of Dice and Decks when an incredibly shady guy named Clive comes in. Ben doesn’t know him personally, but he does know that Clive is always trying to sell some kind of knockoff or something to his father (who turns him away every time). As you can imagine, Clive gives off really bad vibes. He goes into the shop, telling Ben that he has something to offer him that Ben is not going to want to turn down. He finally verbally wears Ben down, and Ben takes him to the office to hear what Clive has to say before throwing him out. Clive claims to have an original copy of The Landlord’s Game, which is a game that actually existed, and that Monopoly basically stole its idea from. Copies of The Landlord’s Game go for a lot of money, and Clive is trying to offload this game fast. Ben turns him away, and late that night, Ezra, the florist from next door (and possible love interest?), and Ben are alone in the game shop when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Clive, with a knife stuck in his chest.

This quozy mystery was a ton of fun, and I’m excited for the series to continue.

Evie Sage has just had another very disheartening day at her village job fair, where she’s been unable to secure a job. Ever since her last position ended rather badly, she’s been desperate for work to help her support her sick father and young sister. When she wanders into the forest in a state of despondency, she’s not thinking about the Villain—but that’s exactly who she runs into. The Villain is feared throughout the kingdom for his dastardly deeds and is wanted by the king. Evie knows she should be afraid, but she’s weirdly…not. And it doesn’t hurt that the Villain is hot, either. Fascinated by Evie and her lack of fear, the Villain offers her a job as his assistant, and Evie readily agrees, even if people finding out means she’ll be ostracized. Sure, the job isn’t always easy or pleasant (lots of heads on spikes), but it turns out Evie’s good at it…but when it becomes clear that someone from within the Villain’s manor is out to get him, she becomes determined to root out the mole.

I picked this book up and read just a page before I knew that I definitely needed to continue. I loved the charming and hilarious voice, and while I know the over-the-top plot scenarios and character depictions might not work for everyone, I was really into this one as a fun fantasy escape. A lot of your favorite classic fantasy tropes can be found here, hilariously inverted and retooled to make for a hilarious “will they or won’t they?” romantic fantasy that kept me turning the pages. Despite the absurdities of the plot points, the author does a good job grounding the story in Evie’s desire to belong and to take care of those she loves, all while dealing with a messy past. The author also plays around with the idea of what makes someone “evil” or villainous, and surprise! There’s some nuance there! I enjoyed the hilarious romantic banter, the sexual tension, and the slow reveal of Evie and the Villain’s secrets. My only complaint? The cliffhanger ending that has me impatiently waiting for the next book!

Important note—this is an adult fantasy novel! While it’s not too gory, and there’s no on-the-page sex that might put off a younger audience, I wanted to make that distinction because I know some people have been confused.

TL;DR? Pick this up if you want a funny fantasy escape in the vein of India Holton.

If you spend any amount of time on BookTube, you’ll find Jen Campbell, an author and book reviewer who creates weekly videos talking about what she’s reading. I discovered her channel back in 2016 and have loved watching her content ever since. Through her videos, I discovered her books, which range from children’s picture books to short stories to nonfiction books about bookshops. But my favorite of her books are her poetry collections.

In her most recent collection, Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit, Campbell examines a childhood growing up as a disabled girl who spent much of her time in and out of hospitals. Campbell was born with a rare condition called ectrodactyly-ectodermal dysplasia-clefting syndrome (EEC), which impacts everything from her tear ducts to her kidneys. Campbell was born with disfigured hands, and her doctors spent several operations reconstructing her individual fingers.

In “Alopecia,” Campbell describes her alopecia as small animals falling from her scalp. “The Five Stages of IVF” follows her long journey with IVF, its ups and downs, the disappointments and lingering hope. “Anatomy of the Sea” examines how the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl may have caused her genetic condition. And in the titular poem, “Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit,” Campbell captures her feeling as a child who was treated as a “curious specimen” rather than as a human.

Reading this poetry collection is like a walk into Campbell’s past of hospital operations, rejoining her in the present filled with fertility clinic waiting rooms and years spent shielding herself during the ongoing COVID pandemic. As a disabled person, I feel a kinship with Campbell’s poems. There’s something fundamental about her poetry—the hospital stays, the terrible doctors, the ever-changing disabled body—that connects with my own life. But, like all great poetry, Campbell’s collection contains universal themes about what it means to exist in the one body we are each given, of what it means to be human.

Our heroine is a Black rapper who goes by the moniker Duchess. The nods to reality in this book are heavy-handed, and it’s absurd in the most delightful way. Duchess (her real name is Dani) is always on the move working, whether it’s as a performer or with her own skincare line, Mela-skin. In fact, there are some major corporations interested in partnering with her line.

Of course, there are people getting in Duchess’s way. One of them is Samantha Banks, a pop star who keeps riding on Duchess’s coattails and creating beef where there is none. Duchess has tried to ignore her but the bad press is getting in the way of her success with Mela-skin. Another person who is getting in her way is her manager, who keeps trying to play up Duchess’s sexuality as if she is a one-dimensional character, and he’s keeping her from expanding and from accepting some amazing opportunities.

Our hero is Prince Jameson, grandson of the Queen of England. Prince Jameson has been able to mostly stay out of the spotlight and do what he wants, shrugging royal duties to instead be a philosophy professor at a university. Unexpectedly, the Queen volun-tells Jameson that he will be the forward-facing royal for a benefit concert in honor of his deceased grandfather. Jameson is at a pub when the royal project manager asks him to name some musical acts that should be in the concert. He only listens to long-dead composers so he pulls aside a lad at the pub and asks his opinion and the lad names Duchess. Jameson submits her name, sight unseen.

He eventually looks up her music videos and he is simultaneously incredibly turned on and also thinking he may have made a mistake in including her in the benefit concert for his deceased grandfather. Still, he will be an absolute gentleman and do his best to give her a lot of space because he could very easily fall into debauchery. His plan would have worked, too, if she didn’t show up early and he had to host her at his estate for the couple weeks before the concert.

This book is incredibly steamy and has explicit, open-door sex scenes. Content warnings for racism and discussion of the death of a parent.

When a moment of everyday harassment causes Annabelle Agnelli to snap, she starts running. She runs and runs and decides that she’ll run all the way from Seattle to Washington, D.C. Her mom thinks the idea is insane and wants to stop her, but Annabelle is determined. And when her Grandpa Ed shows up in his RV, she realizes: She’s really doing this. But running thousands of miles one day at a time means Annabelle has a lot of time on her feet to think about what she’s running from, and what she’s running toward. And maybe, somewhere between Seattle and D.C., she can start to heal from the traumatic event that sent her running in the first place.

This is a tremendous book that knocked me over. Caletti starts the moment that Annabelle starts running and sticks with her every step of the way as she processes her flight response and decides to keep going. At first, as a reader, I was left wondering how on earth Caletti could sustain an entire book about Annabelle’s inner monologue while running 10-15 miles a day across the country, but very quickly I found I was in expert hands. Caletti doesn’t shy away from the intensity of Annabelle’s emotions, and even though the reader doesn’t know at the beginning why she’s running, it’s clear that Annabelle has been hurt. The deeper you get into the story, the more you learn about her past 18 months and how she found herself here. I had a few guesses about what happened in Annabelle’s backstory, and I was surprised — it’s not quite what I expected, but at the same time, I defy any young woman living in our society today who isn’t familiar with someone who has experienced a variation of what Annabelle has. I may not have been an Annabelle, but I know women who have been in her running shoes. And that makes her journey and her story so important.

I loved spending so much time with Annabelle, but I also loved her support team: her worried mother, her supportive brother, her sidekick Grandpa Ed, and all of the people she unexpectedly meets on the road who see her, empathize with her, and share their stories. By the end of the book you are rooting for Annabelle not just to reach her destination, but to find the strength you know she has to face the past and step confidently into the future.

As a British novelist, you could say Dickens has haunted Zadie Smith throughout her career. She swore she’d never write a historical novel, but here she is with The Fraud, a historical novel set in mid-19th century London.

Mrs. Touchet is a Scottish housekeeper for Ainsworth, her cousin by marriage. Throughout his decades-long career, Ainsworth has remained a middling novelist, especially in comparison with some of his famous friends, like the ever-charming Charles Dickens. Now it’s the 1870s, and Mrs. Touchet is watching part of the trial of a man claiming to be the inheritor of an estate. But this man is a working-class Australian man—what a laughable idea that he could ever belong to the upper crust.

Much of this book is a romp, a hilarious take on the wealthy white men who dominated the literary scene that gave us the Victorian novel. She flavors her prose with the literary style of the era. There are so many tongue-in-cheek asides and such witty banter, all with Smith’s stellar ear for dialogue.

But The Fraud refuses to let its readers stay comfortable in the cozy world of literary salons. There’s this plot thread that follows characters enslaved on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. We follow their experiences and see the bigger picture of how rich white men have profited from their enslavement, which gave these men the ability to create these novels. But these men never want to confront how their privilege made their art possible. Instead, they would rather see themselves as artistic geniuses.

Smith performs the audiobook, bringing to life the many different kinds of people — and their accents — that we come across in her novel. Her cheeky prose and sharp wit make the audiobook an incredible listen. In moments of her narration, Smith even sings.

Luna O’Shea just got fired from her job as the incredibly proficient executive assistant of a practically useless CEO. She did not see this coming, and the HR person’s “reasons” had the pungent odor of anti-trans microaggressions. She desperately needs someone to talk to, and since her roommate Simone isn’t home, Luna decides to go to where she was working so they can talk in person.

Simone is a chef and is working on the set of an upcoming reality cooking show. While Luna is at the place where they will be filming, a moody trans man with a vape and a French accent goes storming through asking every woman around if they’d pretend to be his girlfriend for 15 minutes. He offers to pay any takers one thousand dollars and he seems desperate. Luna ends up being the one to do it and so she hops on a video call with this guy’s grandfather, who just happens to be a wildly famous French chef. The grandfather is suspicious why his grandson and Luna’s fake boyfriend, Jean-Pierre Dominique Gabriel Aubert-Treffle, is in New York. Jean-Pierre decides a fake girlfriend is the best excuse and so Luna gets looped into the chaos.

Apparently, Jean-Pierre’s entire inheritance depends on a test, which is a passable recreation of his grandfather’s famous French cuisine menu. Upon learning that Jean-Pierre has a girlfriend, the grandfather says that she should also have to take part in this cooking test. Once they hang up the phone, Jean-Pierre asks Luna to continue this farce through the cooking test and in turn, he will pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The biggest catch? Jean-Pierre is absolutely terrible at cooking and Luna is pretty bad at it as well. Luna, however, is an optimist and not about to turn down such a large amount of money. They quickly discover that while they’re both transgender, how they view the world and their places in it are wildly different and it leads to a number of arguments. That makes the fact that they fall for each other surprising to even them.

While this book is related to Chef’s Kiss by the same author, it totally works as a standalone. It is hilarious and sexy and wonderfully queer.

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In the 1920s, the Osage people were the wealthiest people per capita in the United States. This was due to the oil that was discovered on the reservation that the government had forced them on decades earlier, and to some smart thinking on the tribe’s part that ensured they owned the mineral rights beneath the allotments they were given. But in 1921, investigators found the body of a woman named Anna Brown, who had been murdered. Her death brought awareness to a string of murders that continued for the next few years, terrorizing the Osage Nation and putting everyone on edge. Fearful of a scandal, J. Edgar Hoover sent an agent of the Bureau of Investigation to try and solve the case. What he uncovered instead was a vast conspiracy to rob the Osage of their wealth and destroy their community.

This is not an easy book to read, but the amount of research and detail that Grann has put in is really extensive, and you’ll come away with not only a better understanding of the injustices that the Osage faced but also the oil mania in the U.S. in the early 20th century and how so many people suffered as a result. The tragedy of the Reign of Terror, as it is known among the Osage, is the story of America — how white supremacy wasn’t satisfied with robbing the Osage of their land, their way of life, and their dignity, but that too many white people would stoop so low as to trick, trap, and murder the Osage for their money. At times, reading this account feels almost too much — surely the conspiracy wasn’t that far-reaching, wasn’t that nefarious? But through careful reporting and an attentive eye to the historical record, Grann proves that it was that bad, and probably worse than the historical record can ever tell us. The majority of the book reads like an engaging history, and Grann skillfully juggles many different people, timelines, and narrative threads to build out a full account. In the final section of the book, he allows himself into the story, and shows how in the course of researching this book, he discovered that the crimes and conspiracies went much farther than the FBI records show, and how through talking with descendants of the victims and combing archives, he was even able to find answers to a few lingering mysteries. No one was safe in Osage County in the 1920s, not even the very few white people who attempted to expose the murderers.

This is an absorbing and sobering story, but one of those necessary histories that must be told. Definitely pick it up before the movie is released in October!

As a teenager, Leland was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that is causing him to go blind. Now he’s a middle-aged man stuck between being sighted and being blind. It’s from this in-between space that he writes this memoir.

With each new chapter, Leland combines personal narrative with his examination of a different facet of being blind. He goes to a conference for the blind where he feels the intense disorientation of going from being the only blind person in the room to being one of hundreds. Leland interviews the team of blind people behind one of the most successful audio-description services in Hollywood. And in another chapter, he spends two weeks at the most rigorous school for the blind in the United States.

In the more memoir-like portion of the books, we listen as Leland describes what it’s like to slowly lose his vision, knowing that he’s going blind but with little idea of when, exactly, he’s going to be completely blind. We follow him as he interacts with other blind people who view him and his limited vision as not yet part of the blind community. But in another instance, Leland and his white cane mark him as not quite sighted either.

Leland’s memoir refutes the assumption of sighted people that being blind is an all-or-nothing situation. As we follow Leland’s story, he pushes for his readers to sit with him in the uncomfortable in-between, a space far too often overlooked by sighted people. Leland performs the audiobook edition of his memoir, adding a layer of emotional depth to his already rich narrative. There’s a unique magic that happens when an author reads their own work, and The Country of the Blind is no exception.