The Trope is Afoot
Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.
Tropes Abound In These Mysteries!
Tropes are very common in genre books as they offer readers the “you know exactly what you are getting” feeling, in the best possible way. If you’re in the mood to solve a mystery, knowing that the killer must be one of a handful of characters, for example, you can reach for a closed-circle mystery. If you care more about the criminals’ motivations over their identity being investigated, pick up a whydunnit instead of a whodunnit.
The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge 2025
As we continue the 2025 Read Harder Challenge, I like to feature other reading challenges happening across the internet. I know many of you have multiple reading goals and challenges this year, with Read Harder being just one of them. One I learned about recently is The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge 2025. This is the sixth year of the challenge, which invites readers to finish at least 24 books by Black women and Black nonbinary folks by the end of the year, choosing from 40 different prompts.
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The Funniest Picture Books I Read in 2024
I read over 350 picture books last year—a spectacular collection of informative, surprising, silly, moving, heartbreaking, profound, fun, and challenging works. I love a picture book that makes me cry or teaches me something new about the world, but what I love the most is a picture book that makes me laugh. I’m talking full-on, tears-streaming-down-my-face, my-dog-is-giving-me-a-funny-look, alone-in-my-house-and-struggling-to-breathe-a-little laughing. These books did not make me smile. They did not make me chuckle. I belly-laughed my way through these books. Laughter is medicine we all need right now. I hope you find some here.
6 Queer YA Rom-Coms for Your Spring Bookshelf
What’s lighter than a comedic love story? Romantic comedies (aka rom-coms) offer the perfect literary complement to the spring months. Not only that, but young adult rom-coms shed some of the weight that even adult rom-coms can carry. This is not to say that YA rom-coms lack substance—far from it. Instead, it’s that the tone of YA rom-coms tends to be just a little lighter than their adult counterparts.
A Bookish Guide to Beyoncé’s ★ Cowboy ★ Carter
This was originally published in our Deep Dive newsletter (which we now call The Headline), but since Beyoncé’s historic Grammy win—she was the first Black woman to win Best Country Album and the first Black woman to win Album of the Year in a while—I thought I’d bring it back.
Golden Girls Goods for Readers
Decades later there is still so little media that centers women of a certain age and portrays them in the fullness of their human experience the way The Golden Girls did, a show that feels so ahead of its time for daring to let these women be not just mothers, grandmothers, and widows, but women with vibrant social and sex lives doing life on their terms. I hope that when I, too, am of a golden age, I have friends with whom I can sit around eating cheesecake till the wee hours of the morning talking about love, life, loss, sexy times, workplace drama, and everything in between.
Read This Queer Chinese Folktale Retelling
The pacing in Legend of the White Snake slowly unfurls a carefully built relationship with a central evident flaw—Zhen is lying about his identity to protect himself and his adopted sister. They both can shift into snakes so their power is a clear target for the prince’s hunt. On top of that, they both must consider their positions as common servants even as Xian treats them like friends. Under these difficult layers of dangerous class and species differences, Lee manages to build a wholly believable love story between Zhen and Xian.
