4/5 stars The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich (2021) "Louise Erdrich has made a career writing about the contemporary world in light of the history of indigenous people, how the past continues to impact the present." I've only read one of Erdrich's novels before, and it was ages ago - high school, I think! But my best friend is methodically going through all of them right now, and it made me want to have Erdrich's voice in my ear for a while. The novel starts in 2009-ish in Minne

2/5 stars A Guardian & a Thief, by Megha Majumdar (2025) Bleak. If you like a book where everything goes wrong (to the point where you're like, all of this happened to one family in one week??) and everyone ends up miserable, I guess this one's for you. I'm not someone who needs a happy ending for every story, but some modicum of hope, at least, is what gets the reader through the worst sorts of depravity, poverty, and desperation. A likable character or two also helps. I rea

4/5 stars Chain-Gang All Stars , by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (2023) Trigger Warnings: Graphic violence, Imprisonment and enslavement,...

4/5 stars Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) , by Jesse Sutanto (2025) Another cozy murder mystery with your favorite old...

4/5 stars Black Star , by Kwame Alexander (2024) TW: Racism, KKK activity, reference to a lynching This is a sequel to The Door of No...

5/5 stars Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls , by Kai Cheng Thom (2023) "from the depths of my rage and...

1/5 stars What the River Knows , by Isabel Ibañez (2023) TW: Normalized alcoholism I feel like I can't really top the GoodReads review I...

3/5 stars Witch of Wild Things , by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland (2023) A fun little book of magical realism. Sage Flores has a special gift...

4/5 stars The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay (2019) It IS a delight, this book! Ross Gay's essays remind us to look around each day and...

4/5 stars Even Though I Knew the End, by C.L. Polk (2022) At barely over 100 pages, this was a quick read, but Polk manages to create an...

5/5 The Door of No Return, by Kwame Alexander (2022) TW: Violence, descriptions of the slave trade, mention of rape “Black history began...

4/5 stars Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Sutanto (2023) “People always say that your wedding day is the happiest...

3/5 stars We Are Not Like Them, by Christine Pride & Jo Piazza (2021) Christine Pride, a Black editor, and Jo Piazza, a white author,...

3/5 stars When We Were Sisters, by Fatimah Asghar (2022) Asghar is a poet, and this book reflects that, as it is written in short bursts...

4/5 stars Night Wherever We Go, by Tracey Rose Peyton (2023) (I'm running way behind on posts, so you may get three notifications in...

2/5 stars The Sun Is Also a Star, by Nicola Yoon First off, here is a video about how the book beautiful cover art was created: Book...

3/5 stars Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty (2022) TW: Drug & alcohol abuse These 12 interconnected stories follow a modern-day Native family living on the Penobscot Indian Nation Reservation in Maine. A young man named David is the main protagonist, and we see him at different times in his life, from 12 years old into his 20's. He lives on the rez with his mother, her alcoholic medicine-man boyfriend, and, occasionally, his older sister. Everyone smokes a lot of cigar

5/5 stars Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," by Zora Neale Hurston (2018) Barracoon tells the story of Olualo Kossula, also...

2/5 stars Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020) TW: Allusions to sexual assault, incest, suicide, cannibalism, murder...

2/5 stars How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (2022) I saw this compared favorably to Emily St. John's Station Eleven, which...