Riot New Media

Joan works as the person who makes and keeps up with the swords for Shakespeare’s acting company. As a member of the Orisha, she’s been given the gift of controlling metal. Her family, all Orisha, are also tasked with keeping an eye on London’s Fae population; usually, there’s nothing to worry about, but there has been more and more Fae activity recently, including some attacks. So when Joan hurts a powerful member of the Fae, she finds herself in the middle of a battle between the human world and the world of the Fae.

This is the first in a duology, and the sequel, Saint-Seducing Gold, hits shelves on April 23, Billy Shakespeare’s birthday.

Stevie and Nora loved one another and had a plan to make their love something they didn’t need to hide. It involved moving away from their conservative hometown and out to California after high school.

Stevie, though, has a terrible fall that leaves her unable to remember much of her life. This includes the plan to leave down and worse, how much she and Nora are in love. Stevie cannot remember anything about the last two years, and her life has become messy, inconsistent, not what she would have wanted before the fall.

As for Nora, she’s unsure how to handle no longer being remembered nor what happens as a result of Stevie no longer wanting the future they had planned.

For readers who would like an adventure story for their picnic.

This book has everything: a historic setting, the Suffragist movement, a girl on an Antarctic exposition, and a survival story.

Clara Ketterling-Dunbar is part of The Resolute, a team of 28 crew members on an Antarctic exposition. It is November 1914, and the ship is stuck on ice 100 miles from the continent. How will the team survive? How will Clara figure out who she is amid a crew that is not necessarily happy there is a woman on board?

As a heads up: this book has sexual assault and harm to animals — the first is not unpunished, and the second is not out of gross cruelty but survival.

If you love survival, discussions of feminism and what it does or does not entail, and reading about the perceptions held by people around the globe about Americans in this era, don’t miss this one.

For readers seeking a swoony, frothy historical picnic companion.

If you want a delicious historical novel featuring an all-Black cast at the beginning of the 1900s in Chicago, do not look further. This book DELIVERS and then some.

Inspired by the very real Black entrepreneur CR Patterson, this book imagines what it would be like to be the daughters of a successful businessman at the time, and in addition to the two sisters’ voices, we get to know another daughter of wealth, as well as the assistant of the Davenport daughters. All of the girls have dreams and passions that fall outside of what is expected of them, and all four seem to be falling for people who are outside of their appropriate circles, too. So what happens when they seek to get what they want rather than what’s expected of them?

For readers who want to take an outdoorsy, (unfairly) cute contemporary romance picnicking.

Celine, the resident conspiracy theorist and local weird girl at her high school, and Bradley, the star football player who struggles with OCD, are ex-best friends. Actually, Bradley abandoned Celine because she didn’t fit in with his new, cool friends (tsks loudly). Now, they’re just academic rivals who engage in general pettiness and who have to work together in a survival course in the woods as part of a scholarship competition. To win, the outdoors isn’t the only messy thing they’ll have to wade through.