Riot Roundup: The Best Books We Read April-June 2024

In the 1950s, young wife and mother Pilar has just moved to the border town of La Cienega, Texas when she’s cursed by an old woman claiming that Pilar stole her husband. Decades later in 1994, 14-year-old Lulu is begrudgingly preparing for the quinceañera she doesn’t want when her beloved grandmother dies. Pilar is the glamorous stranger who crashes the funeral and soon forms an unlikely kinship with Lulu, a bond that will force Pilar to confront her painful past and Lulu to embrace the uncertainty of her future. This is a love letter to Tejano culture that takes readers from dusty rodeos to family gatherings to a Selena concert, and asks readers to consider why we label women as wicked.

I’d also like to very emphatically cosign Magical/Realism and thank the universe for all this fantastic Latine lit!

I was excited to read this because Kaveh Akbar is just as brilliant a poet as he is a novelist. Martyr! is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Cyrus Shams, his friend Zee, Cyrus’ parents, and his uncle each get their own distinct point-of-view chapters and feel so real. Cyrus also provides excerpts of his own work in progress, The Book of Martyrs. The idea of a meaningful death is deeply personal to Cyrus, an Iranian American writer whose mom’s plane was shot down by the US government. Martyr! directly challenges popular literary opinions, such as the idea that dream sequences don’t belong in literary fiction or that performance art is uniquely “pretentious.” I already can’t wait to reread this book and notice the character, plot, and structure details I missed.

—Grace Lapointe

Ruby Young and Cordelia Graves are the definition of unconventional roommates; Ruby is alive and Cordelia is dead. Cordelia was never one to share her space and Ruby…managed to kill all of Cordelia’s plants. But when Cordelia finds the dead body of her neighbor outside of the building, Cordelia feels she needs to find justice for the man and needs Ruby to help her out.

Ruby is just trying to get her life together, like finding a job and building a new life in Boston. Can these two seemingly unlikely partners get to the bottom of their neighbor’s murder? I loved watching Cordelia and Ruby figure out how to work together as well as figuring out how the spirit world works for Cordelia. It’s definitely not a cozy mystery but like Olivia Blacke’s other books, it’s very funny and poignant. I am so excited for folks to read this book and cannot wait for more books in the series.

—Elisa Shoenberger

As a big fan of Susan Barker’s last novel, The Incarnations, I had been eagerly awaiting her next book, and I was VERY excited when Old Soul was announced. I literally squealed out loud when I got it a couple weeks ago, because it’s my most anticipated book of 2025. And now that I have read it, I am mad! Mad that I’ve already read it and mad that I can’t read it again for the first time, because it’s my new obsession. It’s delicious, disturbing WTF-ery. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, because this really is a singular reading experience you need to have for yourself. So I’ll just tell you that 1) it’s incendiary literary horror, 2) it starts when two strangers discover their lives have both been affected by the death of a loved one who was involved with the same mysterious woman, and 3) OMG IT’S SO GOOD I CAN’T EVEN HANDLE IT. This is my idea of a perfect novel, one that is so compelling and criminally well-written that you can’t put it down, and also weird and fucked up in a way that feels like it’s ruining your life, but in the best way. I can’t stop thinking about it, especially the ending. I think I’ll go read it again right now.

—Liberty Hardy

This is a middle grade graphic novel about three Taiwanese kiddos who end up living undocumented in America without their mother and father. They have to adapt not only to a new country and culture but also to living under the radar. While there are some stressful moments, these are balanced by funny observations about their new lives and everyday kindness from the people around them. While this shows some of the stress on the kids, it’s a light treatment of it. The youngest Feng Li gains some insight into her classmate’s perspective as an Asian-American who still has to endure teasing while Feng Li’s older siblings go through their own growing pains with teen friends and responsibilities. Looking forward to more from Betty Tang!

—Summer Loomis

I was in a reading slump when I opened up the egalley for Nick Cutter’s forthcoming horror, but I was also optimistic: I’d loved his 2014 novel The Troop, and this latest promised the same levels of gory body horror, plus a focus on one of my greatest fears: wasps. (“Why did it have to be wasps???” was the thought that ran through my head, in the voice of Indiana Jones, of course.) In this fast-paced read that takes place over the course of one day, Margaret receives a text from her best friend, who’s been missing for over a month. As she follows the series of clues left on her phone, a terrible secret is slowly revealed, changing everything she thought she knew about their friendship.

—Steph Auteri

I know, I’m way behind the times on this one. I loved Miller’s Circe but had been saving Song of Achilles for years because, like any good book nerd, I had decided I wanted to read the Iliad first. This year, inspired by Miller’s excellent writing on her experience with Long Covid, I committed to finally do just that. And gosh, everything you all said about it is true. This queer, gorgeous, well-researched retelling of the story of Patroclus and Achilles is emotional and perfectly done. It was impossible to put down. It was at once huge and astoundingly narrowed, the story of two men in love, in the midst of one of the greatest epics of all time.

—Leah Rachel von Essen

Hamilton’s sapphic space romance debut reveals what happens when following your dreams with your chosen family means confronting the disturbing realities of deep space. Cleo and her friends are queer twentysomething PhDs at the height of their respective fields finally pursuing their scheme to uncover what happened to the hundreds of people who disappeared 20 years ago at the Providence spaceship’s launch. But, when they sneak onboard, the dark matter engine starts on its own. Now they are stuck in space with an AI holographic replica of the ship’s old captain, Billie, who can’t remember what happened to her or her crew. If any of them want to survive the flight as things on board become progressively stranger, they will have to uncover what really happened all those years ago. Plus, Cleo has to try not to fall in love with the adorable hologram while they are at it.

—R. Nassor

For even more of our favorite recent reads, here’s our January-March 2024 Riot Roundup. Don’t forget to check out our roundup of the best comics and graphic novels we read this quarter, too!