Tuesday’s New Releases
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Meanwhile, here are my five favorite reads publishing TODAY, Tuesday, May 30, 2023.
Deep as the Ocean, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig
In her debut, Rita Chang-Eppig introduces to no less than a historical pirate queen, Shek Yeung, whose alias was “Madame Ching.” She was known across the seas as a fearless leader who forged alliances among pirates of many different nations (even while giving birth!), and although her real-life deeds were overshadowed by her powerful second husband Zhang Baosai (see “Captain of Destiny,” e.g.), here Chang-Eppig gives Shek Yeung her glorious due.
Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea
Go out and buy this book right now. I’m biased: Urrea is a dear friend and I read the novel before it was even in galleys, but it’s a World War II story you haven’t already heard and it’s about two women whose selves and bond are tested as they serve in the American Red Cross Clubmobile Corps on the Western Front. Based on Urrea’s mother Phyllis, Irene “brings the joy” to her soldiers – until certain horrors bring her to her knees. It’s a novel for everyone, a novel for now.
Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
Take a young married pregnant woman and maroon her in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a controlling father in law and a mysterious housekeeper and you’ll know just what the superbly talented suspense novelist Abbott can do with Gothic conventions. Jacy has come to “the U.P.” with her husband Jed expecting some quiet family time and instead finds herself a prisoner of past tragedy and patriarchal expectations. Read on a sunny day, Book Wags!
The Light at the End of the World by Siddhartha Deb
From Delhi in the near future back to the Himalayas in 1859 under British imperial attack, Deb constructs an intricate vision of an India whose historical present connects to a parallel scifi world, the kind of epic that calls to mind David Mitchell, Octavia Butler, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yet retains the author’s own particularly chilling kind of atmosphere. This is why we read fiction, to understand our world more deeply through imaginative juxtapositions.
Everybody Come Alive by Marcie Alvis Walker
If you haven’t visited the Instagram Black Coffee with White Friends, it’s time for you to meet Marcie Alvis Walker and learn what it means to look at diversity not just from an intersectional viewpoint – but an intentional one. Walker, who often writes from a Christian and Bible-based perspective, is anything but a proselytizer. Instead, in this new book of essays, she wants to show how a church-y upbringing shaped her and gave her strength in the face of family trauma.