Sponsored by Harper Perennial, publisher of The Fiancée by Kate White
The New York Times bestselling author Kate White returns with an unsettling but riveting psychological thriller about a captivating woman who joins a family and threatens to upend their picture-perfect lives.
They had everything they needed for a perfect family vacation: close-knit relatives, a bucolic setting . . . and a murderer in their midst?
Sponsored by Open Book
Book Riot is teaming up with Open Book to giveaway a summer reading prize pack which includes $100 giftcard to Bookshop.org Here’s a little more about the Open Book newsletter: We created Open Book to amplify BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other traditionally underrepresented voices in the publishing world. We ask writers to be open books about their lives, work, process, inspiration, and interests to help readers get to know new voices with a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and ideas that shape our society.
Welcome to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met, well-read, and well-fed. Two more newsletters to go together, people of the club! Today I’m going to hit you with some of my favorite book club picks of the year so far. The truth is I could have added another 10 titles from the list of books I have read this year, and another 10 from my TBR. But I’m not trying to go out with a 4,000 word newsletter, you know?
To the club!!
I came back to Portland just in time to miss the epic heatwave that smashed temperature records in the Pacific Northwest three days in a row. Bruuuuuh 116 degrees? No quiero! I’ve experienced that ish before and have absolutely no desire to do so again. Climate change!!!!
Because super hot temps are popping up all over the place, I thought today I’d share this thread all of helpful tips for staying cool when you don’t have AC. I used to do A LOT of these when I lived in inland San Diego and my brother unknowingly bought a house with no AC. I hope these will come in handy in helping you beat the heat!
I love this book so much (I know, I know: Vanessa likes a book about mythology. Shocking!). This cultural analysis dedicates one chapter to each of 11 mythological female monsters to illustrate how women have been labeled as monstrous throughout history. She examines the lore surrounding creatures like Scylla, Medusa, and the Sphinx to show how women’s anger, sexuality, and even ugliness have been used to turn us into villains. You’ll find yourself looking at these “monsters” in whole new light.
What do the words “magical steampunk Egypt,” matcha, floral cocktails, and cheese have in common? Putting any one of those on a string is easy bait to lure me. In alternative Cairo in 1912, djinn and humans exist alongside one another. Special Investigator Fatma el Sha-arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities and she’s just been tasked with investigating the killing of a brotherhood dedicated to a famed Sudanese mystic. That man, known as al-Jahiz, is said to have torn a hole in the veil between the magical and mundane worlds decades ago before disappearing, and the man claiming responsibility for the killings claims to be al-Jahiz returned. Together with her new partner and her mysterious lover, Fatma sets out to solve the case and uncover the truth about this self-professed prophet.
The collection of nine stories explores “the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good.” It does it so perfectly, painfully, and poignantly, the kind of read you need to stop and savor. My favorite stories include one about two 40-year-old lifelong friends whose relationship turned sexual years ago; when the narrator drops suggest to her friend that they could be more than occasional lovers, the friend stills dream of life as a “good Christian woman” and recoils in horrified disgust. Another favorite is one about two women who fled their hometown in the South to live freely and safely as a same-sex couple. But one of the women grapples with the concept of home, of belonging, of community, of longing for people and places that made you but may no longer serve you (this passage KILLED ME). The collection is a slim one but packs such a punch. The stories are so vulnerable and revelatory. It almost feels like an invasion of privacy to witness this beautiful if sometimes heart-breaking intimacy, these slices of life that often go unseen.
Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine is a biracial, unenrolled tribal member with dreams of studying medicine. She defers enrollment to stay local and care for her mother and grandmother, then witnesses the murder of her best friend. When the killing is followed by a strings of other suspicious deaths, the murders appear to be linked to a new lethal cocktail of meth wreaking havoc on the res. Daunis gets pulled into an undercover investigation into the source of the meth, one that brings her into close contact with a new boy in town who might be hiding something about himself. She also pursues her own secret investigation, using her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to uncover buried secrets in her community.
All of the books in the Perveen Mistry series are fun, smart historical mysteries with a feminist message, but this one also has something to say about colonial rule. In 1920s Bombay, Perveen Mistry is India’s first female lawyer. The Bombay Prince opens in November 1921 as the Prince of Wales is getting ready to come to India on a four month tour. There’s major unrest in India and a lot of tension surrounding the visit; people are getting tired of British rule and they’re pushing back against it. When a young Parsi student falls from a second story window just as the Prince Edward’s grand procession is passing by her college, the death rattles Perveen. That very young woman had come to her for a legal consultation just days before her death, asked about the legality of skipping classes on the day Edward would be visiting Bombay. Plagued with guilt and a sneaking suspicion that this death wasn’t accidental, Perveen promises to get justice for the woman. Can Perveen help a suffering family when her own is in danger, and in the middle of so much turmoil?
Good Morning America announces its July Book Club
This Bushwick-based book club writes original songs for every book they read. This is amazing, and also feels like a challenge…. *begins scheming in Spanish*
Thanks for hanging with me today! Shoot me an email at vanessa@riotnewmedia.com with your burning book club questions or find me on Twitter and the gram @buenosdiazsd. Sign up for the Audiobooks newsletter and catch me once a month on the All the Books podcast.
Stay bad & bookish, my friends.
Vanessa
Sponsored by Harper Perennial, publisher of The Fiancée by Kate White.
The New York Times bestselling author Kate White returns with an unsettling but riveting psychological thriller about a captivating woman who joins a family and threatens to upend their picture-perfect lives. They had everything they needed for a perfect family vacation: close-knit relatives, a bucolic setting . . . and a murderer in their midst?
Hello mystery fans! Another month is in the books and it’s time to roundup mysteries, thrillers, and crime books that have just released and are thus ready for you to go forth and read them. (TWs are in review links)
Here’s a great series for detective fans, which just released the sixth installment and follows a team of investigators in Detroit. You get not just one PI but a whole team! If you want to start at the beginning check out Bury Me When I’m Dead (Review).
If you’re a fan of dark academia, private school settings, secret societies, social thrillers, and twisty reads this is a great pickup. Bonus: the audiobook narrators, Jeanette Illidge and Tapiwa Mugweni, are excellent.
If you’re looking to start a new historical mystery series, like fictional serial killers, noir-ish, and want a Harlem Renaissance setting here’s your next read. (Review)
This is a rare case where this is the fourth book in a series but it is a standalone because the first three were written as a contained trilogy. The Box In The Woods is perfect for fans of the mystery genre and horror tropes as you race to try and solve the mystery! This book is the experience I’m always looking for when reading mysteries. (Review) If you want to read the trilogy start with Truly Devious.
For fans of Ruth Galloway’s series there’s a new release! The series follows a forensic archaeologist who lives near Norfolk in a salt marsh. If you want to start at the beginning pick up The Crossing Places, where Ruth helps with a missing child case and finds herself and her remote life put in grave danger. Griffiths is also the author of The Stranger Diaries (Review) and The Postscript Murders (Review) so there is plenty of great mysteries to read in her catalog.
If you like historical mysteries, this is a series you should absolutely be reading. Set in the early 1900s, it follows Perveen Mistry, India’s only female lawyer. If you want to start at the beginning, mostly for full character backstory, pick up The Widows of Malabar Hill. (Review)
For domestic thriller fans, here’s a page-turner that follows Oliver and Nathan and a night gone terribly wrong for Oliver at a bathhouse, and the need to keep Nathan from finding out, which only creates more problems and tension… The book has alternating narrations between Oliver and Nathan, and the audiobook selected two narrators, Michael Crouch and Daniel Henning, to portray them so if you audio pick up that format.
If you’re looking for a thriller and aren’t afraid to fly here’s a twisty one about a flight attendant on an inaugural groundbreaking flight who ends up having to choose between saving her daughter or everyone on the plane when she finds a threatening note…
Here’s the sequel to East of Hounslow (Review), which picks up after the cliffhanger ending and follows Jay Qasim, the most reluctant spy–because MI5 forced him into helping. If you want a character to root for and love, grab this series–it reminds me a lot in tone to a show I really enjoy, Man Like Mobeen.
Lippman has an extensive catalog to dive into–including a PI series and recent standalone releases Lady in the Lake (Review) and Sunburn (Review)–and has a new psychological suspense starring a novelist, which has some Misery vibes…
If you’re a fan of PI mysteries, this is the fourth in a Chicago set series you should absolutely be reading. If you want to start at the beginning, pick up Broken Places (Review), and if you want to jump into the series with Runner here’s my review.
Here’s a fascinating read about the language of cults and how it’s used to not only get and keep power for cult purposes, but also how the language is used throughout our society, including in marketing. (Review)
Browse all the books recommended in Unusual Suspects previous newsletters on this shelf. See upcoming 2021 releases. Check out this Unusual Suspects Pinterest board and get Tailored Book Recommendations!
Until next time, keep investigating! In the meantime, come talk books with me on Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Litsy–you can find me under Jamie Canavés.
If a mystery fan forwarded this newsletter to you and you’d like your very own, you can sign up here.
The Charles Dickens Museum in London has opened a new exhibit that encourages visitors to follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens and visit the sites that inspired his classic novel Oliver Twist. The exhibit will, according to curator Louisa Price, show how the beloved novel “was shaped by Dickens’s life and his world and the streets around him.” The accompanying walking tour will take visitors to famous places from the novel, including Saffron Hill, which was the home of Fagin’s den of thieves, and Clerkenwell Green, where Oliver is pursued by a mob. Also on the tour is the office of the notorious Mr. Laing, the man who inspired the horrible magistrate in Oliver Twist who presides over Oliver’s pick-pocketing trial. The exhibition and self-guided walking tour (with accompanying audio) opens this Wednesday, June 30th.
Amazon’s six-part fantasy epic series Good Omens, based on the 1990 novel written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, has been renewed for a second season. Michael Sheen and David Tennant will be reprising their roles as angel Aziraphale and demon Crawley. Author Neil Gaiman is also returning to executive produce showrun alongside executive producer Douglas Mackinnon, who will also direct. Since the first season of the show covered a lot of the material in the novel, season 2 will explore storylines that go beyond the source material. John Finnemore and Neil Gaiman will be writing that new material for the show. Gaiman said, “There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favorite Angel and Demon. Here are the answers you’ve been hoping for.”
The Navajo students at Tse’Bii’Nidzisgai Elementary School and Monument Valley High School have written a book filled with oral histories and drawings that capture what life is like in Monument Valley. For the book, entitled Hózhó, A Walk in Beauty, the students in Monument Valley interviewed their grandparents and other relatives about what life used to be like on the Navajo Nation. All proceeds from the book will go towards scholarships for students looking to attend college or other alternate forms of higher education.
We’ve got your roundup of books you’ve never heard of (ones you won’t want to miss). Get ready to add them all to your summer 2021 TBR.
Sponsored by Blue by Kai Kupferschmidt.
Join science journalist Kai Kupeferschmidt on his quest into the science and nature of his favorite color: blue. This globe-trotting adventure searches for blue in the natural world in order to understand the world’s obsession with this rare and captivating color. Few living things are truly blue; virtually all blue creatures, including the morpho butterfly and the blue jay, achieve their hue through tricks of light. Follow Kai’s journey to find Earth’s rarest color, from a biotech laboratory in Japan and a volcanic lake in Oregon to Brandenburg, Germany—home of the last surviving blue-feathered Spix’s macaws.
Not to echo the crowd or anything, but whew, already the end of June, huh? The beginning of this year sounds approximately the same as 37 CE, past-wise, and let’s be fair, considering how many people were supposed to hang tight in their homes, a lot has happened.
Nonfiction continues on though! I was recently talking to someone about how much I love nonfiction, and just — what a great and vast genre. All-encompassing in its embrace! Unless you are made-up. And even then, sometimes that’s okay. We’ve got some new nonfiction releases for your perusal:
Feel like you got a late start? Maybe comparing yourself to your peers and feeling weird about it? Shafrir “was an intern at twenty-nine and met her husband on Tinder in her late thirties,” then had a baby at forty-one. She didn’t feel truly successful until age forty. If you need even more evidence that there isn’t an exact timeline for anyone (no one! do what you want when you want!), check out her memoir.
BY GRABTHAR’S HAMMER, I love Galaxy Quest. I remember watching that movie as an early teen, seeing the girl faint in the audience when Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen kissed, and being like “…she gets it.” This behind-the-scenes look goes from the origins to the shoot to its release and legacy, also getting into the starships, aliens, technology (THE CHOMPERS, why are they there), and features interviews with the cast. Man. What a great movie. “Let’s get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!”
Calvin University historian Du Mez looks at the last 75 years of white evangelicalism and how evangelicals “have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.” Their heroes are manly men (and Reagan) and “chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.” As someone who was steeped in non-denominational-but-definitely-evangelical-leaning Christianity as a teen in the early 2000s, this is the book from this week that I’m most excited about.
As a toddler, Ly Tran’s family emigrated from Vietnam to Queens. As she grows up in her new country, she faces the dilemma of pressure to conform to its culture, while also living at home with her parents and their Buddhist faith. We look at a lot of memoirs in this newsletter, and this is ideal if you like a coming-of-age story along with (probably unsurprisingly) a story of family. This was in Vogue‘s Best Books to Read 2021.
For more nonfiction new releases, check out the For Real podcast which I co-host with the excellent Kim here at Book Riot. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.
Sponsored by AfterShock Comics.
It’s the most dangerous heist ever attempted. Four desperate criminals are going all in on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to steal millions in art and turn their miserable lives around. The catch? They have to pull it off under the nose of a one thousand-ton Kaiju. And a giant monster might just be the least of their problems.
Welcome to Read This Book, the newsletter where I recommend one book for your TBR that I think you’re going to love! Genre fiction is my wheelhouse, and about 90% of my personal TBR, so if you’re looking for recommendations in horror, fantasy, or romance, I’ve got you covered!
This week’s recommendation is one of my favorite YA Fantasy novels of recent years. Not only is it based on one of my most beloved films of all times, it’s also a gorgeous, magical (and musical) novel, perfect for those who love their fantasy novels with a dark twist.
In a long list of fae-based YA fantasy novels (and it really is a long list, and getting longer, and I am not complaining), Wintersong is uniquely beautiful. The first magical duology that is unapologetically and lovingly inspired by Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Wintersong is both historical and fantastical, split between 18th century Bavaria and the magical Underground of the Goblin King and his court. Liesl grew up on tales of the Goblin King and his strange, alluring kingdom. But her connection to him does not end with fairy stories. When Liesl was small they were playmates. Then she grew up, and came to think of him as only her imaginary friend, someone she had dreamed up to escape her everyday life as it grew increasingly difficult. Until the day he stole her sister.
Abduction is a common trope in tales of the fae. You see it in old stories like Tam Lin, and in new ones like Labyrinth. And, as in Labyrinth, the abduction of Liesl’s sister in Wintersong serves as a means of drawing the heroine of the story into the realm of the fae, in this case the Underground, in search of what was lost. It’s a journey that never goes smoothly for the quester, but Liesl’s trip into the Underground is more than usually fraught with danger. The deeper she goes the more she realizes how tangled up her entire family is with the magic of the Underground, because it’s family that really drives Jae-Jones’ novel. Yes the Goblin King is a fascinating character, but it is Liesl and her siblings, and her love for her siblings, that form the heart of Wintersong. Everything that she does, even the bargain that she strikes with the Goblin King and its inevitable end, is for her siblings.
If you’re looking for a new fantasy series to sink your teeth into, one with gorgeous world building, a dark and compelling romance, and a deeply emotional, family-driven plot, you want Wintersong.
Happy Reading!
Jessica
Sponsored by Tor Books
When the Sparrow Falls illuminates authoritarianism, complicity, and identity in the digital age, in a page-turning, darkly-funny, frightening and touching story that recalls Philip K. Dick, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut in equal measure.
Sponsored by AfterShock Comics
Years ago, it was Winston’s job to investigate such things. Now his ex-partner needs help solving the brutal murder of the world’s largest Colossal. Because he knows the secret. He knows about the magical curse that gives Winston the ability to survive a world where everything is bigger, stronger, and angrier than he is. But how long can Win’s impossible luck last, and will this new case finally be the death of him?
We’re giving away an iPad Mini to one lucky reader! Click here, or on the image below to enter. All you need to do is sign up for our Daily Deals email and get the day’s best book sales right in your inbox.
Sponsored by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Leslie Knope is running for class president! She campaigns all around Pawnee Elementary with her friends, Ann and Ben. In order to win over voters, though, Leslie starts to make some big promises . . . ones she’s not sure she can keep. Will Leslie be able to keep her word and become the best president Pawnee Elementary has ever seen? Filled with colorful, detailed illustrations and brimming with Easter eggs and nods to iconic moments from the show, this hilarious reimagining features a pint-sized cast. The story will introduce Parks and Recreation to a whole new generation and will teach them the importance of staying true to yourself. And waffles. Parks and Recreation © Universal Television LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey readers! I’m back with another week of new children’s books!
In this fun picture book from YouTubers Ava and Alexis, identical twins realize their differences in taste don’t have to drive them apart. As they prepare for a big fashion show, Ava and Alexis first think they have to agree on every little thing only to run into trouble when they realize one of them may like things fancy and glamorous while the other is more into cool vintage finds.
Picture book bios are coming together so fast these days! This one takes on public figurehead Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose long medical career (researching diseases like HIV and most recently, COVID-19) has led to the rise in his public profile. This one goes back in time to Dr. Fauci’s upbringing in Brooklyn, where his inquisitive nature led him to settle on the medical field as a career choice.
Though Geraldine loves her lunch box (affectionately named Bianding) and the surprise Taiwanese lunches her grandma packs, her classmates don’t love them so much. When Geraldine is teased about her food, she throws out Biandang and immediately regrets it and must decide how to stand up for herself.
In this fun and surprising graphic novel, Vega’s sent to a wilderness camp to make new friends. But alongside the other campers, Vega realizes this camp is far from ordinary, and they work together to figure out what’s really going on.
In this middle grade novel, Millie jumps from homeschool to an arts academy where she bonds with some of her classmates over their shared love of a Japanese pop group called Generation Love. The girls come together and decide to perform in a school show together, but complications at home and at school threaten to tear them apart.
Until next week!
Chelsea
