New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

Tyriek White debuts with a novel that’ll have you thinking of Jesmyn Ward. Over 30 years, White’s East New York family serves their community with a gift that allows them to connect the living and the dead. When Key, Colly’s doula mother, dies unexpectedly, it leaves his grandmother Audrey in a precarious situation. Just as she might lose her public housing as a result, Colly leaves college and starts to come into the ability that is his inheritance. Once he begrudgingly returns to his community, he’ll start to serve as his mother and mother’s mother did before him, tending to spiritual concerns as well as the more tangible, like the neglected housing units of the Brooklyn neighborhood.

In the late ’90s, right before the UK hands over Hong Kong to China, biracial 25-year-old Lily is shaken loose from her routine with an inheritance letter from a stranger. The stranger claims to have a connection to her mother Sook-Yin Chen, who was sent from Kowloon to London in 1966 in exile. Though she went with a specific goal, Sook-Yin soon learned that she had to adapt to her new environment in ways that people back home would disapprove of. Chapters alternate as Lily finds out more about her mother, and the “accident” that took her life.

U.S. history as a field has traditionally treated Indigenous people as a side note. Here, Blackhawk rewrites them into the country’s story, showing how they influenced major historical events at every turn. Five centuries of history leading up to the start of the U.S. as we know it today are examined, showing, among other things, how Native nations influenced European colonizers’ actions, just as colonizers influence theirs.

If you loved Queenie, add this to your pile of hot mess heroine novels. Elsie is 28 and tired. Though she would love to melt into a life filled with hookups with her co-worker Bea and a viable career as a poet, the reality of her dysfunctional family and soul-crushing job at a bar are too loud. When she’s evicted and goes to Juliet, a childhood friend, for help, she finally feels at ease for a time. In between nighttime balcony smoking sessions and Drag Race viewings, Elsie realizes that she may already have everything she needs.

Joan is 16, Black, and living in London in 1605. She’s also the only other person living apart from her godfather who is blessed by Ogun, the iron Orisha. It’s with this gift that Joan is able to work as a craftswoman for William Shakespeare’s acting company, even though she could hang as a witch for it. When the Fae start acting out in the mortal realm, she saves the son of a lord and is brought into the political world of both Fae and mortal. When her godfather is arrested, it’s up to her to get the raggedy faeries together.