Category: Read This Book

Back in 2013, New Zealand author Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to ever win the Booker Prize with her novel The Luminaries. Now Catton is back with her second novel, Birnam Wood. Unlike the sprawling historical fiction novel that won her the Booker Prize, Birnam Wood is a shorter, more contemporary novel. 

The story centers around a New Zealand nonprofit called Birnam Wood. The organization focuses on ideas around mutual aid and ethical food production. To the head of the organization, Mira, this looks like growing crops on public land and sneaking on unwatched corners of wealthy land-owners, cultivating seedlings in her living room, and trying to sort out Birnam Wood’s funding.

When a landslide closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, the town of Thorndike was cut off, leaving a farm empty and unattended. Mira decides to head over and see if the farm would be a great potential space to grow some crops without the owners of the property noticing a bunch of twentysomethings starting a little garden on their land. But when she’s caught by an American billionaire, she makes a deal that seals the fate of everyone at Birnam Wood.

Heading into this novel, I had no idea what to expect. I remember listening to The Luminaries, marveling at Catton’s skill, but I also was very confused. Birnam Wood is much more straightforward, possessing twists and turns reminiscent of crime novels. Catton’s characters are complex. She has this way of conveying so much in a single conversation between two characters. So while I haven’t given you many details here, that’s for good reason — I don’t want to spoil it for you! But let’s just say I saw none of the plot twists coming. 

I’ll be talking about this book on the next episode of Book Riot’s Read or Dead podcast, so head over there if you want to hear more!

This is part of the absolutely lovely nonfiction comic Quick & Easy Guides collection. The author & illustrator, A. Andrews, is a disabled cartoonist. They make it very clear that they are neither a doctor nor a sex educator, but they have plenty of lived experience as a sexually active disabled person.

Disabled people are the largest minority group in the United States and make-up an estimated 20% of the population. That being said, many disabled folks are sexually active, and there aren’t nearly enough resources for disabled people on how to have sex that is pleasurable, comfortable, and safe. Not only are there not enough resources, there aren’t even enough conversations around sex and intimacy for disabled folks. This book hopes to open the door a bit wider, knowing that disabled folks remain less likely to receive adequate sex education and sexual healthcare at the same time as being more likely to experience trauma and stigma around sex. As mentioned in the title, this is a quick and easy guide. It does not get very deep and detailed, but it’s a wonderful starter for conversations and exploration. It’s written in a super casual, conversational tone that I really appreciate.

The author talks a bit about how they are defining disability and then some common myths about disabled bodies. I love that the author starts with communication as the main contributor to having sex that is enjoyable. This is true for all people, disabled or not, but for disabled folks interested in having sex, there may be more people to be talking to than just their partner or partners. Sometimes a conversation needs to be had with a personal care attendant, for instance, to arrange furniture or pillows before date night. Another example may be a conversation with your healthcare provider about contraception.

There’s practical information beyond communication in this comic as well about positions and toys and lube and more. The primary audience for this book is disabled people, but honestly, this is a fun, informative read for anyone. The artwork has a wide range of bodies and genders and skin tones and it’s wonderful.

Charity has been working at Camp Mirror Lake, which was the filming location of a cult classic slasher flick and is now a full contact horror simulation game, for two summers. She has the coveted role of final girl, and she loves her job—so she doesn’t mind that much that their owner can’t be bothered to show up half the time. But when one too many of her coworkers take off before the season is over, she calls her best friend and her girlfriend to help finish off the season. Only their final night takes a turn for the very real when it becomes obvious someone is hunting Charity and her friends, and she’ll have to uncover the camp’s secrets to figure out why.

If you enjoy movies like Scream or the Netflix adaptions of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, then you’re going to devour this one. It’s a relatively short read and it moves quickly, revealing Charity’s workplace confidence and love of the horror genre. The setting of a full contact horror simulation game is one of those amazing/terrible ideas that is either the last place you’d expect to find a killer on the loose, or the first, but Charity takes her job very seriously. And she’s no fool when it comes to creepy occurrences and weird things going bump in the night, and because she’s so savvy, it makes the moment when she realizes that she’s not playing a game anymore all the more satisfying. With really great characters and breakneck pacing, Bayron takes readers from one thrill to the next and the secrets behind Camp Mirror Lake are definitely intriguing. While I don’t think anyone should go into this book expecting the most mind blowing of twists and turns, if you enjoy solid horror and self-aware plots that explore popular horror tropes, this one is a winner. Bonus points for most of the characters being Black and for Charity being queer, which adds some much-needed diversity into a traditionally very white and straight genre. It’s a great read for spooky summer nights!

Chang-Eppig has created a fascinating historical fiction novel that grips you from the first few pages. The story begins when Shek Yeung finds herself in a tenuous position. Her husband has just been killed by the Portuguese. But he named his adopted son his heir and successor, not one of Shek Yeung’s two sons. To ensure her position as co-leader of the fleet, she marries the adopted son and promises to provide him with an heir.

Shek Yeung is one of the most notorious pirates in all of history. She led an alliance across the South China Seas. She was brutal and vengeful, a pirate queen in a time that saw Europeans starting to make contact with the East. Chang-Eppig’s novel showcases the rise of Shek Yeung from her humble beginnings. Her father’s fishing boat was attacked by pirates, who then sold her into prostitution. But when a powerful leader of a fleet of pirates takes a liking to her, she agrees to become his wife.

Rising to become co-leader of the fleet, she sets up new rules. The men are not to rape the women they capture, and she beheads the ones that do. She provides a safe haven for a girl she makes her personal assistant, a woman who keeps track of the fleet’s finances. But how does she justify herself when there are hundreds of other women that she has enslaved or killed?

I had heard of Shek Yeung, who has made a lot of “notable women throughout history” lists for her villainous career as one of the greatest pirates of all time. But I had never thought through her life and how she might have ended up turning to piracy. Chang-Eppig brings Shek Yeung to life in a way I’ve never read before, which makes for a fascinating read.

I want to put the content warnings up front: violence, sexual assault and battery, abuse, child abuse, more violence, murder, infant death, and most importantly, the premise of this is that there is a pandemic that kills a lot of people, if not most people. Some of it is a little too on-the-nose, which is extra fascinating because this was first published in 2014.

In the prologue, we have an instructor who goes by the title Mother Ina, and there are six teenage boys referred to as scribes. Each year, a group of scribes is chosen to copy The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, which is actually a cycle of 19 journals. The bulk of this book is told via these journal entries and prose. The writer (the unnamed midwife) is a Physician’s Assistant at the University of California at San Francisco in the labor and delivery department. There is a fever caused by some kind of virus that is taking people out, mostly cisgender women and children. Live births come to a stop, including many stillborns, and the people who were giving birth usually didn’t make it either. The hospitals are overrun and people are dying in hallways. Like I said, this book is so on the nose that I clenched my jaw the entire time I was reading it.

Our protagonist succumbs to a fever while she is at the hospital. She wakes up maybe days or even weeks later to find everyone around her dead. Grabbing what medical supplies she can, like antibiotics, some birth control, and syringes, she heads to her apartment and quickly learns that it is not only unsafe but especially unsafe for women. She ends up disguising herself as a man and realizes she needs to get out of the city. There are just bands of men roaming around, almost hunting. At one point, she meets up with a group that has women in collars and chains and not in the kinky consensual way. She bargains for some time alone with the women, as if she is just a guy going to have sex with them, and she then tells the women she is also a woman and she gives them some birth control. So then she goes about like some man-murdering birth control vigilante and it is amazing, taking the lives of some men who are hunting women to keep them as sex slaves.

When two young sisters disappear from a Kmart parking lot in an ordinary town in Pennsylvania, it causes a media frenzy. Without any leads, the family hires Alice Vega, a PI from California who has gained a bit of notoriety for being able to find missing people with unnerving accuracy. Alice is professional, distant, and dogged, but with the police unwilling to cooperate with her, she needs a way in. She finds it in Max Caplan, a local former cop turned PI whom Alice engages to help her on the case, which is just as well — because this is far from a straightforward missing kids case, and both Alice and Cap will need to have each other’s backs to come out unscathed.

I love Louisa Luna’s smart and incisive writing style, and I was instantly intrigued by the characters, who aren’t perfect or even always moral, but they are ethical and they are motivated by all the right reasons: to find the missing girls. Cap is an interesting guy. He quit the police force after taking the fall for a mistake that wasn’t his, and now he’s chasing “cheats and skips” to pay the bills. He has a teenage daughter he loves fiercely, and while he’s not a bad guy, he is reluctant to get involved at first. Alice is an enigma — young, possessing single-minded focus, brazen but not stupid, and not afraid to break (more than) a few rules. Alice intrigues Cap as much as the case does, and it’s to both of their surprise that they work together as well as they do. Come for the intriguing mystery, stay for the fascinating characters! I was genuinely impressed with all the twists this book took, but I was just as entranced by the electric relationship between Cap and Alice — it’s not just sexual attraction (although there is a tiny dash of that), but it’s that delicious tension of two very unlikely people realizing that they need each other…and maybe they could be friends.

I devoured this one on audio, narrated wonderfully by Tavia Gilbert, and I immediately had to download the next two books, The Janes and The Hideout. These books feel like an American version of Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk series, and I think fans of Tana French who might want to give an American series a try would like it too. (And if you like the TV show Broadchurch, I think you’d like this one as well!) It’s got literary writing, fascinating characters, and vibes for days. I highly recommend all three books!

When Cece is a little girl, she contracts meningitis, which causes her to lose most of her hearing. The doctor gives her a little box attached to headphones that hangs around her neck. This device helps her hear, especially at school. El Deafo follows Cece through the years as she makes friends, graduates to older grades, and receives various upgrades to her assistive technology.

Bell illustrates her younger self as a bunny, which adds such an adorable quality to her illustrations. This graphic novel is geared towards kids, centering on the anxieties and fear of growing up or standing out. Cece struggles with friendships because most of her friends have no idea how to be friends with a Deaf person. They either talk too slowly, assume she’s unintelligent, or feel overwhelmed with guilt that they aren’t Deaf themselves. Bell handles the ableism that kids can experience from other kids so well. Her characters are complex and messy, just like real kids!

The title, El Deafo, comes from what Cece calls her superhero alter ego, the one who always stands up for herself and speaks out in the face of ableism that she experiences. We see illustrations of Cece as El Deafo, the brave hero who shows up just when Cece needs her most.

I’m always looking for more books about disability for kids, and El Deafo is just the ticket. I love the illustrations and how they portray the complexities of growing up Deaf. Graphic novels are often easier for kids to get into, and by telling her story as a graphic novel, Bell has made her story even more attractive to young readers.

Recently, an audiobook edition of El Deafo was released, and the audiobook uses a cast of narrators to create an engaging audiobook that captures listeners’ attention from the first few minutes. The editing of the audio mimics Cece’s experience struggling to understand what people are saying around her. It makes for an excellent listen for both adults and the kids in their lives.

Shireen Malik has just broken up with her girlfriend, Chris, and she is not handling the breakup well. Shireen’s parents own a donut shop called You Drive Me Glazy across from Chris Huang’s parent’s donut and bubble tea shop. Both sets of parents have taken the rivalry to really petty levels and they have no idea that Shireen and Chris were dating, much less broke up. Shireen’s best friend Fatima is in Bangladesh visiting family for the summer so while she tries to video call as often as possible to offer support, it’s just not the same as if she were back home in Ireland with Shireen.

While Shireen is still rattled from the breakup, she learns that she has been accepted as a contestant on the first-ever Junior Irish Baking Show. You Drive Me Glazy has hit a rough patch financially (business is decidedly not booming) and Shireen hopes that going on the show will help get her parent’s donut shop back on its feet. Being on the show is also a step in Shireen’s plan to someday open her own bakery.

Shireen is an incredible baker and there’s a real possibility that she could win at this competition but of course, nothing is that easy. Her ex-girlfriend Chris has also been accepted as a contestant and is quite determined to win. In addition, there’s Niamh, a rather cute contestant on the show who not only has her eye set on winning the competition, but also it seems, she has her eye on winning Shireen’s heart.

This book is an absolute treat full of delicious puns and sticky situations. Each chapter’s title is delightful and the names that Shireen comes up with for the exciting donut flavors at her parents’ shop rival the punny names Bob Belcher gives his burgers of the day in the show Bob’s Burgers.

Content warning for racism, fatphobia, microaggressions, and outright aggressive Tweets.

When the witch puts Floralinda at the top of the forty-flight tower, it’s not personal. She’s just interested in testing out her towers and filling each floor with a prince-slaying horror. Floralinda is assured that if she just waits for a prince to rescue her, she won’t be there too long, and she’s even given a few magical food items to last the wait. After watching one too many princes perish on the bottom floor, delicate Floralinda becomes convinced she’s stuck there for life — however long that may be. But when an unexpected ally turns up, Floralinda discovers she just might have a chance at rescuing herself, one floor at a time.

This is a novella that I desperately wished was a novel, that’s how much I enjoyed it. And it was on the longer side for a novella, thank goodness. This contains a lot of humor, which I’ve come to expect of Muir, although it’s a slightly different flavor of humor than what you’ll find in her Locked Tomb trilogy. Floralinda goes through quite the satisfying character transformation in this book, from a helpless and guileless princess who conforms to all the stereotypes of a soft, delicate lady and is quite clueless about the severity of her situation, to a hapless victim, to a reluctant fighter, and finally, a determined woman who relishes taking on the monsters on each level. There’s a lot of great stuff here about agency and autonomy, and facing hard things even when the odds are stacked against you. I was also incredibly amused by Muir’s ability to come up with 40 very different and compelling challenges for each floor, and it was honestly so fun reading about how Floralinda approaches each one. I finished this novella and wanted to immediately start it again, which is about the highest compliment I can pay a book!

During the holiday season of 2003, a postcard arrives at the Berest home. Anne looks at the back of the card and sees the names of her great-grandparents and their two children, all of whom died during the Holocaust. But who sent the postcard? And why did they include the names of her lost family members?

After seeing the postcard, Anne’s mom takes her aside and tells her the story of their family history, beginning in Russia during the early 20th century. Theirs is a sprawling story, filled with family members who move to countries across Europe and as far away as the United States, always looking for a safe place to call home.

Over the course of the next 15 years, Anne searches for the author of the postcard, trying to find out more about her family members’ last days. She goes to private detectives, handwriting specialists, and government archives. But she struggles to find anything that will tell her more about her ancestors.

The Postcard is an expansive book that takes you around the world, connecting stories from characters across time. In many ways, Anne is disconnected from her Jewish heritage. Her family isn’t religious, and hasn’t been for a few generations, so Anne is unfamiliar with many Jewish holidays and customs. But she is from a line of Jewish women, and she shares that heritage with her daughter.

I love a family saga that spans the course of decades. There’s just something special about seeing characters grow and change over the course of time that keeps me entranced for hours. Anne’s family is complex, constantly moving and adapting to new cultures. But Anne is disconnected from that history, intentionally so, based on her grandmother’s insistence on not talking about her family’s past. I kept turning the pages, hanging on every word, and waiting to find out what would happen next.