The Tradition

I don’t read a lot of poetry. I never really have. And though I’ve picked up and loved a few collections over my years on this blog (notably: If They Come for Us and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings), I haven’t really been what I would consider “converted” to the art form. However, as is…

How We Get Free

This book was chosen by a friend as the first book of an Anti-Racist Book Club that she started. I know that the reactions to white people, white women, starting book clubs like this to address racism is very understandably skeptical as an empty gesture that will soon be moved on from… All I can…

The Girl with the Louding Voice

It’s really hard not to notice this novel, with a cover like that. Honestly. It’s bright and gorgeous and one of those covers that absolutely makes you want to judge the book inside and read it even if you really don’t even have an idea what it’s about. So that’s about where I was with…

Krik? Krak!

I’ve been meaning to read Danticat for years and @bookofcinz’s encouragement to just hurry up and do it for her #readcaribbean celebration this year was just the push I needed. I decided to go with this one because it’s the title I had heard of most frequently. Also, I have to be honest, I was…

Dominicana

I have wanted to read this for so long! There’re so many books I say that about, but this is one I knew right away I wanted to read. I think the only Dominican author I’ve read is Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies) and while I thought it was amazing, it was…

Your House Will Pay

This is another one of the “grab everything you’ve had your eye on and can find” library books that I managed to bring home before it closed due to coronavirus. In fact, this is the second time I had checked the particular one out from the library, but I just couldn’t get to it before…

Bright

I really don’t know where I first heard of this book, but somehow I knew, when I saw it on the used book shelf at my local indie bookstore, that it was the first novel by a Thai woman to appear internationally in English translation. These are the pluses and minuses of being on #bookstagram.…

The Nickel Boys

Knowing what this book was about, I was super nervous about reading it. I was afraid of the intensity of the content. But I still had it tentatively on my TBR, because I had read and really appreciated Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad when I read it a few years ago. (In fact, I event went…

My Plain Jane

I read the first of the novels by “The Lady Janies,” My Lady Jane, a few years ago on a snow day. It was a “retelling” of Lady Jane Grey, the queen for nine days of famous British historic lore, full of magic and shape-shifting and humor gave this tragic story a fun twist and…

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

I am not sure where I first heard about this memoir, but the title, and knowing that it was written by a queer woman, had me adding it to my TBR without knowing much more. Then I actually bought it for myself in my Holiday “gift to myself” book haul in January. As I was…