New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

All the Greek retelling girlies, gather ’round. Here’s another great entry to the female-figure-from-antiquity-reimagined trend. Clytemnestra is a Spartan princess who is forced to marry the tyrant Agamemnon. After he ends up sacrificing their daughter to the gods, our girl Clytemnestra plots her revenge, and readers are treated to a nuanced examination of motherhood, survival, and loss.

With the deft skill of a poet, Dungy writes a memoir centered around her seven-year journey of trying to fight against the homogeny imposed on her lawn by the mostly white Colorado community she lives in. Dungy connects the need for diversity in agriculture to the need people have in social structures, while decrying the consequences of its absence. This offers a different perspective from the usual narrative that sees writers becoming more in touch with the natural world.

In this second chance romance, Jana is set to attend a destination wedding in Tanzania, and ready for the reset it’s sure to provide. But then she funds out her ex, and child’s father, Anil will also be there, and suddenly her plans are ruined. Even though he’s a good father, she can’t forgive him for what he did years ago. To distract herself, and show that she’s not sweating him, she comes up with list to get her juices flowing. She’ll perform karaoke, do dance routines for strangers, and generally let her guard down. But that makes her more susceptible to her still-lingering attraction to Anil.

Mickey Hayward, a young Black writer, leaves a messy life in Maryland to work in New York as a media writer. As a Black woman in media, she isn’t exactly treated well, but she at least has a caring and supportive girlfriend at home. But then she gets fired, and she thinks the manifesto she writes as a result will expose the racism and sexism inherent to the industry and change it for the better. Except it doesn’t. It goes by barely noticed. It takes her moving back to Maryland in a fit of self doubt and a media scandal to give her the spotlight she wants. Question is if it’s really want she wants, after all.

After the banger that was Burn Down, Rise Up, Tirado is back with another haunting YA novel that centers a community affected by injustice. Bronwyn is stuck in the rural town of Hillwoods while her father gets her dying grandmother’s affairs in order. Despite having a cousin in the town who’s the same age, Bronwyn starts feeling increasingly isolated. She’d turn to swimming — a sport she hopes to compete in at an Olympic level one day — but everyone in town keeps warning her against it. Her cousin Anais tries to protect Bronwyn and herself from the darkness of Hillwoods, but both girls soon find out that the town’s lore is reality and is even connected to their family.