The Most-Read BIPOC Books This Week

This book has just been having a great year since its August 2023 release.

In it, it’s 1972 in Chicken Hill, a Black and Jewish working-class neighborhood in Pennsylvania, when a skeleton is found at the bottom of a well. This unearths a past that goes all the way back to 1925 when Moshe and Chona Ludlow owned the Heaven & Earth Grocery store that welcomed Jewish and Black people alike. When a Black employee of the store and friend to the Ludlows asks for help in keeping his disabled nephew from becoming a ward of the state, a community comes together to defend its most vulnerable from racist “Christians.”

Here’s another 2023 release that’s still going strong. And, it seems to have some basis in reality. It’s essentially about a white woman who, in a moment of blatant opportunism, steals her dying friend’s unfinished manuscript and passes it off as her own. Which is bad enough, but then ole girl decides to masquerade as a racially ambiguous/Asian-light person in order to better sell the book, which looks at the contributions of Chinese laborers to WWI Allied efforts. She even changes her name from June Hayward to Juniper Song. And this all works, for a time. But June knows what she did, and she’s scared someone else may, too.

If you’re wondering about the real-world implications I mentioned earlier, one of the latest Book World scandals involves an author who goes by Freydís Moon, and who is said to be a white person masquerading as Latine. There are a few articles and a damning Google Doc dedicated to exposing this person.

If there’s a Google Doc compiled by Book World dedicated to you, the best thing for you is to just pack it up. Change your name and move to another country. Just saying.

I’m going to pat myself on the back with this one. It’s one of the books I had on my list of spring’s buzziest BIPOC books.

Here’s what I had to say about it recently:

“I like a ‘busy’ novel, and The Ministry of Time, with its promises of time-traveling romance, slice-of-life comedy, and spy thriller, sounds plenty busy. A little ways into the future, a civil servant is offered beaucoup bucks, but the new project that comes with this increase in salary is a little…weird. It involves her working as a ‘bridge’ to a time ‘expat’ — someone from another time. Her expat is Commander Graham Gore, a man from 1847 who was supposed to have died during an Arctic expedition. As he lives with the civil servant turned bridge, and adjusts to things like washing machines, music apps, and women’s constantly exposed calves, he falls in love. A zany cast of secondary characters — which include everything from a 17th-century film (and Tinder) lover, to a former spy and a WWI captain — round out this everywhere kind of story.”

This is the fourth book in the Kings of Sin series, but it doesn’t seem like you need to have read the others to enjoy this one. In it, cool-headed publicist Sloane Kensington has to work with the charming — and low-key infuriating — billionaire heir Xavier Castillo. While Xavier loves getting a rise out of Sloane, he soon realizes that the one woman not throwing herself at him is the one he wants the most.

This is for the grumpy/sunshine, forced proximity girlies.

Here’s another book I discussed recently, since it just came out on April 9th.

Some interesting background info: Yulin Kuang wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation and directed the upcoming Beach Read adaptation. And here, she gets a little meta with the story of Helen Zhang, a bestselling author who’s earned the position of writer for an adaptation of a popular YA novel. Everything is going well until she finds out Grant is a screenwriter on the show as well. Now, the two will have to confront the horrible accident that connected them 13 years ago, even as they’re reminded of why they liked each other in the first place.

This is the perfect kind of cozy, lightly surreal book to read when it’s raining. In Tokyo, in a small back alley, there’s a café that has been brewing coffee for 100 years. It also offers its clientele something unique: they can travel back in time to change something, but they must make it back to the present before their coffee gets cold. Four of the café’s latest customers do things like confront people who left them behind, and see loved ones for the last time, including a daughter who they never got to know.