Juneteenth Books and the Best BIPOC Books Out Today

One of Our Kind is Yoon’s (Everything, Everything, Sun Is Also a Star) first adult novel, and it is bringing some heat. In it, Jasmyn and King Williams are a Black couple who move to Liberty, California, a town they believe to be a Black utopia. It certainly seems nice — at first — and though King fits right in immediately, Jasmyn doesn’t. Where she was hoping for like-minded people interested in social justice and activism, she instead found a community of people obsessed with getting spa treatments at the bougie wellness center at the top of the hill. What’s more, she finds out a secret that reveals this perfect place is anything but.

After last year’s The Deep Sky, Kitasei is serving up what sounds like more glorious sci-fi, this time featuring ” a thrilling anti-colonial space heist to save an alien civilization.” After 10 years of being the best art thief in the galaxy — who returned stolen artifacts to their rightful civilizations — Maya Hoshimoto has been forced into hiding. Now, she’s just a student of anthropology who dreads the future. Then, an old friend pops up with the job of a lifetime — if she can find a powerful item, an alien species could be saved from extinction. Thing is, no one alive has ever seen it, and others are after it, too. To get it, she’ll go from strange worlds to ancient ruins and realize that saving one species could spell ruin for all of humanity.

Here’s our other wrestling-centric book, this time featuring Luchadores — or masked Mexican wrestlers, for the unfamiliar. We meet Ernesto Vega in Mexico City in the 1960s when he’s still working on a construction site but is soon discovered by a luche libre trainer. Ernesto is transformed into the rockstar Luchadore El Rey Coyote and becomes known all across Mexico. Decades pass, and in L.A., his son Freddy is fighting to keep his gym open, while his grandson, Julian, is fighting to live authentically as a gay man. As Ernesto’s life fades away in hospice care, everyone from his descendants to his wife’s ghost and manifestations of the past visits him.

The Milanis are a family of Iranian American multimillionaires with a reality show coming out that they realize will air all their dirty laundry — and everyone, from the four larger-than-life daughters to their Persian cat Pari, has something to hide.

With the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop having just passed last year, legendary drummer of The Roots, Questlove, looks at history-making songs within the genre, gracefully picking them apart and showing what they meant to music and Black American history alike.

Here’s another history of Juneteenth, this time geared towards the youngins. In it, we learn about the history of Juneteenth through the perspective of Emancipation Park, a park in Houston, Texas that was dedicated to the ending of slavery in the U.S.