by Ellen O'Clover
Ellen O'Clover (The Heartbreak Hotel) puts her own spirited spin on an enemies-to-lovers romance in If Not You. Five years ago, Mattie French and Campbell Porter were copywriting interns at one of Chicago's leading advertising agencies. But when Mattie watched her dream of receiving a return offer slip through her fingers right into Campbell's lap, their somewhat healthy competition became replaced with Mattie's utter disappointment and disdain for Campbell's ostentatious outfits, cocky smirks, and annoyingly
Read More »
by Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due's striking novel Mazywood blends historical Black Hollywood with a horror story involving family legacies and the power of a wish.
Readers meet Mazelle Washington as a little girl in 1926. The lonely youngest in a family of Black stage performers, Mazelle ventures into the woods, to the locally famous Wishing Pool, where she asks for a forever friend. She forgets to say she wants her friend to be human--but when a charming, scruffy white dog turns up, she loves him like no one else. With Scout
Read More »
by Deena Helm
This startlingly inventive novel following an American woman's first trip to the Middle East, Deena Helm's Our Cut of Salt is an unforgettable revenge drama with a supernatural twist. It is part of an emerging genre of fiction by writers reckoning with the history of their grandparents' lost Palestinian homelands by crafting intimate narratives of families and dreams ravaged by the mass displacement that occurred in 1948, now known as the Nakba (the Arabic word for catastrophe).
In the summer of 2002, Marina
Read More »
by Shaun Tan
Author/illustrator Shaun Tan's exquisite graphic novel/picture book hybrid, Hometown, features a girl whose interaction with an unexpected stranger causes her to question where she belongs.
"Here I am," the girl declares. "Gravity keeps me here. Or love, which is kind of the same thing." She lives with her parents and siblings and has "awesome friends" and "about three hundred of these things"--seemingly pets. Although "life is good," she still wonders "if there's more... than this." Then a "big hole [opens]
Read More »
by Elizabeth Acevedo
Elizabeth Acevedo, author of the National Book Award-winning The Poet X, writes a tremendously impactful story in her fourth YA novel, Anger Is Only a Shadow, about a teen with an arrest record.
Two months ago, 17-year-old "Indigenous Salvadoran and Afro Dominican" Lil noticed her 20-year-old brother, Aldwin, acting strangely: closing all the blinds, talking to himself, looking paranoid. She kept it a secret, not wanting to worry her already stressed and cash-strapped family. To release her scorching tension,
Read More »
by Steve Sheinkin, Maurice Ashley, illus. by Thien Pham
Newbery Honor winner and three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin (Impossible Escape) makes a strategic move to the chess world with the riveting graphic nonfiction Mind vs. Machine. Chess Grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley (Move by Move) joins Sheinkin and Eisner Award-winning illustrator Thien Pham (Family Style) to create a suspenseful page-turner about the 1997 match between world champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue.
The work opens in the late 1700s with a prologue
Read More »
