May Reads
1.The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Fictionalized story of a 15 year old 16th C Italian noblewoman forced to marry a duke who tries to get rid of her when she doesn’t bear him an heir. There’s some interesting stuff with art. (Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023)
2. The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer 🔥
Story of a titular Trini mother and her daughters with a Jamaican man that weaves in Afro-Caribbean and indigenous folktales to represent their lives and histories. Among the coolest Caribbean diaspora novels I’ve read and an absolute favorite this year. (Caribbean Girl Reading)
3. River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer 🔥
Formerly enslaved woman walks off Bajan plantation during Apprenticeship to find her children. Finding each takes her from Barbados to Trinidad to Guyana exploring in the process various ways of understanding freedom. Another cool Caribbean one that narrates things I haven’t seen before — like formerly enslaved women leaving plantations after Emancipation to find their children was totally a thing. Who knew?
4. Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes 🔥
Greek mythology updated with feminist wit and snark. Funny at times; ruthless at others; sometimes both at the same time. Made me wish I knew Greek mythology better.
(Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023)
5. Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks 🔥
Black British woman of Jamaican heritage tries to find home for herself in 1970s London, Bristol, and Jamaica, while forces of harm and evil lick at her feet, all set to a soul stirring down beat. Music takes on structuring and supernatural characteristics in this novel, and even where the story is weak, its downbeat sensibility buoys it.
(Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023)
6. Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
I kept thinking about Burns’ Milkman as I read this one. Set in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles” a young teacher gets close to the wrong family *and* has an affair with a married man. Danger ensures.
(Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023)
7. Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein 🔥
Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain like this Body is all over this one. In 1940s Trinidad nearing the end of the US occupation, the lives of a landowner and the people who work his land while living in squalor collide. This book is tragic and depressing AF but what it does with religion, class, family, and historical violence all against the wild pastoral landscape of Trinidad is stunning and important.
8. Boulder by Eva Balthazar 🔥🌈 (Pride Pick)
Solitary woman leaves the comforts of cooking for a merchant ship to live in Iceland with an all consuming lover. Captivating lover then decides she wants to have a baby and solitary woman grudgingly goes along with it. Things don’t go as expected (surprise!). Haven’t seen motherhood and breastfeeding eroticized in this way before and this little book is worth it for that alone.
(Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023)
9. The House of Eve by Sadeqa Johnson
Wherein a teenager becomes pregnant and then is sent away to one of those places run by nuns who sell the babies to wealthy infertile people. Plot twist: the wealthy infertile people in this one are DC elite Black folks.
10. Are We Home Yet by Katy Massey
This one makes too much of the fact that the focalizer’s mother once spent time as a successful sex worker. For me it was more about what it meant to be British and mixed race. And maybe the sex work is a big part of that but there’s also explorations of the psychology of disordered eating, migration from Canada, Jamaicans, Jehovah’s witnesses, and other things more interesting than the bits about the mother running a brothel.
11. Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby 🔥
This is Samantha Irby talking about being Samantha Irby in some of her funniest essays yet. My favorite is when she riffs on the changes she would make to the entire run of Sex and the City. It made me want to watch the show again. If you haven’t read her yet, start with Meaty and work you way through.
12. Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
I have trouble with the whole salvation/freedom via suffering business and so even as this one does interesting things in its multigenerational story about a family of Memphis women — from the 1940s to just after 9/11, violence and victimization as a vehicle for catharsis is not my favorite.
