Over the last few months I’ve started posting my reading reflections and reviews on Instagram, or *bookstagram*, as the readerly community calls itself. Follow me there, at emzi.reads. While I’ll miss the longer form that wordpress offers, bookstagram has such an engaged community, one I enjoy participating in. I hope you’ll follow along!
The Song of Achilles–Madeline Miller
Told by Patroclus, who stumbles into Achilles’s life from a young age and becomes his dearest friend and partner, this story showcases just how powerful Achilles was, and how he was swept up in his destiny. As with Circe, the plot rushes forward, each stage feeling like home until the next one takes off. Miller really lets readers feel the humanity of the characters, the little details about their lives that they love or struggle against, and the ways that their humanity is tested by the currents of politics and, it seems, fate.
His Only Wife—Peace Adzo Medie
Afi is dutifully married off to a wealthy cousin because his family wants to reign him back in, to get him away from this awful woman he has been with for a while. They have a child together, but the family is convinced that she is wrong for him, and for them, so they marry him to Afi in absentia. She moves into an apartment near where he lives (with his girlfriend and child), and waits for him to become her husband.
Homie–Danez Smith
This collection is clever and playful, heartbreaking and raw, analytical and visceral. The core of it is about the loss, to suicide, of a lifelong friend, and it orbits out from there, considering other kinds of grief, Blackness, queerness, HIV, societal violence, and complicated joy.
Braiding Sweetgrass—Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together her scientific and ecological training with Indigenous wisdom and traditions. The result is a call to love for the astonishingly beautiful and wise earth. Kimmerer argues that, in the face of such vast ecological devastation and climate change, we need to listen to the wisdom of the plants, our first teachers, and embody the ethic of care and sharing, seeing the world as rich in gifts for the common good rather than as a resource to mine for profit.
Who’s Your Daddy–Arisa White
Who’s Your Daddy is a poetic memoir, a genre-blend that feels more intimate than a poem–without coyly obscuring the identity of the speaker. But it also holds the reader at the distance of poetry, framing the story with line breaks and metaphor without overt analysis. The tension between how much and how little is revealed draws the reader into the arc of White’s story.
Heavy—Kiese Laymon
It took me a while to be ready to read Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. It is as devastatingly powerful as everyone said, so complex, woven with the pain of Black suffering and the balm of Black love. And brutal honesty about the ways that white supremacy and patriarchy warp love, creating conditions in which it becomes toxic. The honesty here, and the truths that honesty tells, is utterly breathtaking.
So We Can Glow: Stories—Leesa Cross-Smith
Leesa Cross-Smith’s stories in So We Can Glow shimmer with personality, examining teenage-hood and coming of age, parenting, relationship regrets, and the ways we figure out who we are. So many of these stories feel like summer, young love, the deep sadness that still carries exuberance inside it, a sadness infused with the joy of living, pain and all.
The Broken Earth Trilogy—N. K. Jemisin
This series tells the story of the Stillness, a world that has intense geological activity like volcanoes, quakes, rifts. This turmoil (breaking the earth) causes seasons of ash and destruction and death. People stockpile resources their whole lives in anticipation of the next Season.
The Round House—Louise Erdrich
This story follows twelve-year-old Joe as he struggles to deal with his mother’s experience of assault and subsequent PTSD and his father’s attempts to hold the family together. Joe, with the earnestness and risk-taking perhaps only possible in a young teen, tries to figure out who harmed his mother, and why, with the help of his friends.
Allongé 