The Best New Book Releases Out April 30, 2024

Garrett’s Hollywood Homicide was a hoot and a holler for me, and Missing White Woman sounds like it will be similarly engaging, if not as funny. Here, what starts off as a romantic getaway with her boyfriend, Ty, turns into a nightmare for Breanna. When she comes down the stairs of the luxury Jersey City rowhouse they rented on the last day of their vacation, Bree finds a woman dead in the foyer and Ty missing. To make things worse, the dead person is Janelle Beckett, a missing woman the internet has designated as its latest obsession. With the heat of the police and social media closing in on her, Bree will have to figure out what happened to Janelle herself if she’s to know peace again.

Following Disability Visibility, leading disability advocate Alice Wong has edited another anthology that gives a voice to the disabled experience. The writers here explore what intimacy means. They place value on sex, yes (and how sexual liberation and disability justice relate, for instance), as well as community, friendships, and caregiving.

This starts off how a few tales of dysfunctional families reunited start off: with a parent passing away, and the siblings coming back together at last. Except, when these three estranged siblings — Beth, Nicole, and Michael — reunite, they discover something they never could have predicted. One of the VHS tapes they bust out and watch to relive the good times shows their father covered in blood with a dead body, and their mother vowing with him to get rid of it. Now, they’ll have to determine if they want this secret to be buried with their mother, or if they want to fully unearth it.

With Bite by Bite, the author of World of Wonders is gifting us a collection of essays about how food is inherently tied to our memories and emotions. From shaved ice to rambutan to lumpia, what we eat and drink can summon feelings of joy, grief, and nostalgia, just as it carves out ethnic boundaries. Nezhukumatathil also looks at what it means for the environment for us to consume food, and the ethics involved with gathering it.

We love a subverted genre over here, and A Magical Girl Retires looks at the magical girl genre through a decidedly depressed millennial lens. That is to say that the magical girl in Seolyeon’s tale starts off up to her eyeballs in debt after having lost her job during the pandemic. When she attempts suicide, she’s interrupted by Ah Roa, a girl in all white who is looking for the greatest magical girl of all time, and Seolyeon’s protagonist just might be her. Now that she has some hope for the future as a magical girl, the young woman charges forward but is met with the unpleasant surprises that come with magical girlhood. Turns out it’s a lot of work. Magical girls go to job fairs, need unions, and have to learn stuff in classes. On top of all that, your girl still has low self-esteem. And, in true millennial fashion, her magic wand is a credit card, and her big bad monster enemy is climate change.

I’m going to leave y’all with a direct line from the blurb for this one because it tickled my nostalgia: “A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls — that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone’s game.”

Very Sailor Moon-coded.