Wild Swans

I was recommended this book by a coworker many years ago and a combination of events this year, including AAPI Heritage Month, a book choice recommendation for a book club topically related to Mother’s Day, and prompt #15 for The Reading Women Challenge 2020 (a biography) finally had me picking this one up. Wild Swans…

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…

Gideon the Ninth

Well, I think we could all agree that I knew I’d be reading this one. Tagged as lesbian necromancers in space, there was really no more I needed to know. And all the awards it’s been nominated for since then really only reinforced what I already knew. In fact, this was in the stack of…

Beloved

I am 31 years old, an avid reader, was the nerdy kid in English class who always actually read the books assigned, and yet…this is the first of Toni Morrison’s works that I’ve ever read. I’m disappointed in both myself and all the school systems I went through. But it’s never too late to correct…

The Lost Queen

I have always, always, always been obsessed with the legend of King Arthur. I have read so many retellings of the story. (Mostly fictional – I love it, but I’m not a scholar. Haha.) But seriously, I read T.H. White’s The Once and Future King so many times growing up that the spine broke and…

Where the Crawdads Sing

Well, I finally did it. I read this book. I have been so hesitant because the hype for this one is legitimately beyond real and I just figured there’s no way it stands up. Plus, I can’t lie, without the hype, it’s not one that I would for sure pick up just after reading the…

Sulwe

I don’t think I have read a picture book since I was actually the age for reading picture books. But one of the prompts (#4) for The Reading Women Challenge 2020 is to read a Picture Book by a BIPOC Author, so here was my chance to try something “new.” I had legitimately no idea…

The Confessions of Frannie Langton

As I was looking for a book that would fit The Reading Women Challenge 2020 prompt #1, an author from Caribbean or India, I remembered this novel that a few of the Caribbean-based bookstagrammers I follow (particularly Cindy at @bookofcinz) had talked about last year when it came out. It sounded pretty interesting and really…

Celestial Bodies

In my goal of working to read more diversely, I’m attempting to also diversify my diversity… That sounds confusing, but basically, I’m just trying to cast my reading net ever wider. So when I heard about this 2019 winner of the International Man Booker, the first novel translated from Arabic to win this prize, in…

The Deep

Just about two years ago I read Solomon’s debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and was so impressed with the world-building, the diversity of the characters, the writing…it was a fantastic debut. And it was before I really had any idea about Afrofuturism as a genre, so it felt truly groundbreaking to me. I am…