JAMES by Percival Everett

If you read one book this year, make it this one. There are 258 reasons it won the Pulitzer Prize, and all of them significant. It should be mandatory reading in every middle school/high school in this country. But I’m sure the book banners will have something to say about this fictional account of a slave in the pre-Civil War South. James is the retelling of Jim’s story in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In James, Jim is an intelligent, self-taught reader and writer but reverts to “slave speak” when around white people. He learns he’s to be sold and runs away to devise a plan to buy his wife and child back so they can travel north to freedom. Huck Finn, a runaway as well, finds him and the two set out on an adventure to make the money needed and encounter one catastrophe after another. Everett shows us the realities of slavery and racial identity while depicting white supremacy in all its ugly and evil forms.

Favorite line(s): It pained me to think that without a white person with me, (Huck), without a white-looking face, I could not travel safely through the light of the world, but was relegated to the dense woods. Without someone white to claim me as property, there was no justification for my presence, perhaps for my existence.

FAMESICK by Lena Dunham (audio)

I missed a freeway exit listening to Dunham describe a heart-wrenching encounter with her co-producer, Jenni Konner. For six seasons of Girls, they were on again, off again best friends, exchanging hundreds of texts a day, vacationing together, buying each other presents. Dealing with chronic illness, drug addiction, and the difficulties of managing both while writing, directing, and acting serves as the catalyst for much of Dunham’s journey through her twenties and thirties. There were few in her life at the time who supported her through her debilitating endometriosis, OCD, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Most, including Konner, couldn’t abide Dunham’s health and addiction issues as they cost much in their working relationship and their friendship. Dunham ultimately finds healthier days, years, and fulfilling relationships—but what a cost to have to do all of it in the spotlight.  

HOW TO READ A BOOK by Monica Wood

Harriet, a retired English teacher, leads a book club in a women’s prison. Violet, one of the prisoners in for a fatal drunk-driving accident, is released and runs into the husband of the woman Violet killed. Frank, the husband, is the handyman for a local bookstore where Harriet is looking for the prison club’s next read. The confluence of their chance meetup is the launch of a novel about found family and forgiveness, and how books can lead to our understanding of one another in ways both profound and complicated. 

Favorite line(s): Outside, crocuses glinted in the dark, another spring in the making. How had all this time, decades and decades of it, piled up with so little resistance? How had Sophie, that clinging, headstrong child, become a woman leaving? The fox reappeared, a quick-moving smudge in the moonlight. As it vanished anew, Harriet felt a vast and mystifying gratitude. She and the women had passed the winter reading books they hadn’t cracked since age fifteen, books with recollected plots, books with well-trod furrows of discussion, books understood best in retrospect. She was glad to have honored their request to revisit the past, for the future—theirs; hers—felt shadowy, and immense, and beyond discussion.

EVERYONE’S LYING TO YOU by Jo Piazza

Lizzie was ghosted by her best friend fifteen years ago. Rebecca is now a tradwife influencer with over 11 million followers. Rebecca reconnects with Lizzie at the MomBomb conference in order to write a profile for her magazine when Rebecca’s husband is murdered and Rebecca goes missing. Lizzie gets caught up in the whodunnit and learns about Rebecca’s real life behind the staged photos while in real life she is trying to distance herself from the life she’s created and sold. Turns out tradwives, who profess to quit the corporate world for motherhood and a submissive relationship to marriage, are really corporate honchos building empires out of the idea of traditional motherhood nostalgia.

Favorite line(s): “The so-called tradwives, the most controversial of the influencers. The worst thing to happen on the Internet since planking. I don’t really give a damn if someone wants to play dress-up and service their husband. I do care when they start spouting off about how this choice is a new offshoot of feminism. They cook and they clean and they talk about how a woman’s place is in the home and how she must submit to her husband. They homeschool their kids. They claim that women who work in the corporate world have been sold a lie, that it’s toxic for women to focus on anything but motherhood.”

BLACK SUMMERS edited by Desiree Cooper

These thirty-three essays, poems, and comics about growing up in and growing in resilience with the city of Detroit will hook you from the beginning. Cooper sets the tone for the anthology in the Foreword, noting that Sarah Elizabeth Ray, also known as Lizz Haskell, was kicked off the Boblo Boat in 1945 for being “colored.” She filed a complaint that reached the United States Supreme Court, where it ruled in Elizabeth’s favor, setting the stage for Brown v. Board of Education. Detroit’s struggles are its people’s struggles, and they have persevered through the century.

This is but one example in the anthology of the legacy of summer memories spent on porches, in backyards, fishing along the riverfront, basketball courts, riding the city streets with the windows down and Motown blasting from radios, splashing around in the Swimmobile, picnics on Belle Isle, family reunions, the Detroit Jazz Festival, and the Afro Nation music fest.

Simple and carefree summers sit alongside some of the city’s grittier experiences. The 1967 riot, the closing of Belle Isle, protests, racism, and white flight. All written with verve and heart, these essays leave indelible marks, both joyful and somber, on those experiencing Detroit when the days went on until 9 p.m., and the city never slept.  

Favorite line(s): We got reverent. Daddy would turn the radio off (since reception sucked). Not a peep from us kids the entire short drive under the cool comfort of Humanity Making A Way Where There Hadn’t Been A Way Before. The tunnel dipped down, leveled out, then sloped upward the final seconds of the ride, cars in front of us, cars behind us. Chattering on the ascent, we rolled down windows as the wagon rejoined the surface world. After exiting the tunnel, powerful sunlight heralded scents of water, loam, grass, and swirls of air that didn’t taste like somebody made it. We would catch that waft of barbecue smoke which, as all civilized folk know, is one step away from the heavenly breath of God. Daddy didn’t care for noise, but he didn’t mind us cheering every time we emerged from this magical portal into the island’s new world. Sometimes he’d turn the radio back on. Most times he wouldn’t.  (From The Daddy, The Isle, and The Tunnel Drive by Zig Zag Claybourne)

YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke      (audio)

Natalie is a tradwife influencer with millions of followers when, one day, she wakes up on her farm in 1855, not understanding what is happening. How will she exist without modern conveniences and get by in the harsh realities of this new world? Called a satire on social media and the femininity of the right-wing conservative frenzy, Yesteryear is sinister in its commodification of motherhood and the inauthenticity of pretending to do it all without showing the behind-the-scenes lives of these women.

THIS SUMMER WILL BE DIFFERENT by Carley Fortune

Lucy arrives early on Prince Edward Island for a weekend with her best friend when she hooks up with an oyster shucker who works at the local restaurant. Turns out the shucker is her best friend’s brother, Felix. And Bridget has one rule: do not fall in love with my brother. Of course, chemistry gets in the way. And secrets, betrayals, and the complexities of family and friendship. Setting is its own character, and PEI doesn’t disappoint.

Favorite line(s): Friends. Sure. He says it so softly that I strain to hear it. For the rest of the drive, I keep my eyes shut, examining those two syllables and what they mean. We had been inching closer to something that felt like friendship before I messed up. I don’t know if it’s the scent of the ocean, or if my body knows the twists of the road, or if Summer Wind is imprinted on me at a cellular level, but I can feel when we’re almost there. I open my eyes when the truck slows. I don’t want to miss my first glimpse. The cedar shingles, the yellow door, the red dirt road snaking through the grass, the Gulf of St. Lawrence glittering behind it.