All Her Little Secrets shines when Ellice Littlejohn wrests control of her increasingly dangerous circumstances and when racial issues...

“In exposing our nation’s troubled roots, the 1619 Project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the...

In We Are Not Like Them, Pride and Piazza dig into a friendship of opposites, conflicts around race, and a police shooting, creating a...

Penn's thoughtful memoir explores serious issues yet also made me laugh out loud. You Can't Be Serious is both thoughtful and playful,...

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a fictional account of an interracial music duo's rise to success (and their famous split) in which...

Bossy Short Story Love Some of my fellow readers have told me in the past that they don't gravitate toward short stories, whether because...

In Admissions, Kendra James explores race, friendship, ambition, and the absurdities and rhythm of daily life during her time at a New...

Caste is consistently powerful, profound, disturbing, and absolutely necessary nonfiction reading from the brilliant Isabel Wilkerson....

ICYMI: Wiley Cash's The Last Ballad explores race relations and the fight for dignity in a 1929 North Carolina mill camp community....

I loved Cash's Eastern North Carolina setting, the character of Sherriff Winston Barnes, and the pulsing racial, class-based, and family...

Marilynne Robinson offers another gentle yet affecting book in her Gilead series, this time about faith, grace, human connection, and a...

The Invention of Wings is historical fiction that tracks the characters of (the real-life) Sarah Grimke and her enslaved maid Handful...

The Books I'm Reading Now I'm reading Paper & Blood, Kevin Hearne's second and final book in his quirky Ink & Sigil fantasy duology; The...

The Books I'm Reading Now I'm reading Down Comes the Night, a young adult fantasy story featuring magical healing and warring kingdoms;...

Coates took his time building the story, and I felt as though he deliberately kept us in a plodding pace to emphasize the unwavering,...

The Books I'm Reading Now I'm listening to The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates's novel about slavery, with magical realism that offers a...

There is so much to unpack here; Evans's story themes are often haunting, always powerful, and wonderfully nuanced. She thought the...

01 Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton Eli Bell is a young man in a tough spot. His father's gone, his mother's in jail, and his best...

Evaristo offers a set of twelve interconnected stories about Black women in contemporary Britain and their friendships, loves, struggles,...

01 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo Evaristo won the Booker Prize in 2019 for this novel, which I'm listening to as an audiobook...