I'M TELLING THE TRUTH BUT I'M LYING is a collection of essays detailing author and poet Bassey Ikpi's experiences with bipolar II, ranging from her childhood in Nigeria to her young adulthood traveling with HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

To be fully honest, I was not at all familiar with Ikpi's spoken word work before reading this book, and still I found myself completely gripped by her story and her storytelling. Ikpi brings the tangle of emotions brought on by anxiety, depression, and mania to vivid life on the page. I don't think I've ever seen an author articulate that feeling of getting a diagnosis and experiencing total confusion because you thought that was just a weird personality quirk you had.

Ikpi's writing is intense and immediate. She doesn't shy away from showing the reader how much she struggled not only to understand and accept her diagnosis, but also how hard it was to adequately treat it - the essay that details the long trials of tweaking medications and dosages is one of the most harrowing things I've read lately.

Thanks to Ecco Books for the free copy of this book.

In 1991 Los Angeles, a black teenage girl was shot by a Korean shop owner who believed she was shoplifting. 30 years later, in 2019, the tensions that fueled the LA riots are rising again with the death of a black boy at the hands of the police. In the wake of this, the two families from the 1991 shooting are brought unexpectedly, violently, back together.

YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY is based on a real-life murder. Cha takes the basics of that story and weaves a complex, painful story of two families bound together through intergenerational violence.

While we do see the point of view of the families on both sides of the murder, it's not a "let's hear both sides" sort of story. It's all so much more complicated than that, and Cha very clearly lays out how people can be complicated and multifaceted and contradictory in their actions. The book also shows how systemic racism affects both the black and Korean communities, who has the luxury of staying removed from the story, and who pays the price. It's deeply layered while also being a completely gripping read.

Thanks to Celadon Books for the free advance copy of this book.

Mikel Jollett was born into Synanon, a drug rehab program turned cult. When he was five, his grandparents rescued him, along with his mother and older brother. HOLLYWOOD PARK is an account of Jollett's post-Synanon life, told from his perspective as a child growing up in a troubled, fractured family.

If you are drawn to memoirs like EDUCATED or THE GLASS CASTLE, get your hands on HOLLYWOOD PARK immediately. I could not put it down and tore through it in a weekend. You need not be familiar with Jollett or his current career as frontman of Airborne Toxic Event in order to appreciate his story.

This is a story of a life lived under siege, of a child looking for love and answers and finding no support. The early chapters, with Jollett writing in the voice of a small child, are particularly heartbreaking given that we can see how his relatives are failing him and how the few adults who see his cries for help are pushed away, though the boy does not understand why he feels lost. As Jollett grows up and begins to understand his own trauma, discover community in music, and begin to figure out how to break the cycle for the next generation, I was moved to tears.

Content warnings for drug and alcohol abuse, emotional and physical abuse, animal abuse, suicide, and probably other stuff, too.

Thanks to Viking Books for the free advance copy of this book.

Meredith Talusan was born a boy with albinism in the Philippines. After a childhood of being treated like a public spectacle, Talusan immigrated to the U.S. at fifteen and discovered that in America, she was perceived as white. Her memoir covers these years as well as her education at Harvard and beyond, where she struggled to fit in to white gay male culture, eventually coming to the conclusion that she did not want to fit in the box labeled "man" at all.

FAIREST is one of the knottiest, most intriguing memoirs I've ever read. It takes a close look at the malleability of race and gender and how Talusan slides between labels based on where she is and who she is talking to, whether she wants to bend the barriers or not. And her trans-ness isn't even always the center of the story. FAIREST also encompasses stories we're familiar with from other "types" of memoirs - child of immigrants, child star, queer coming of age, and more.

I was a bit leery of the blurb on the back of the galley describing Talusan as a boy who became a woman, but that turned out to be accurate, and one of the best things about this memoir. Rather than your now-standard-if-outdated story of "a woman trapped in a man's body," Talusan doesn't generally struggle with physical dysphoria and does not tell a tale of knowing she was trans from a young age. Instead, as an adult, she simply comes to find that she cannot express her full self when performing masculinity. It's a broadening of the trans canon that I think is greatly needed.

Thanks to Harper Perennial for the free copy of this book.

Red and Blue are time-traveling agents from warring timelines, moving between ages and universes to alter worlds in attempts to sabotage the other side. They become aware of each other's presence and begin leaving coded messages to each other, slowly falling in love throughout the millennia.

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR is one of the most finely crafted, romantic, and engrossing books I've ever read - no small feat for a book that's barely 200 pages. At first I had a little trouble differentiating Red's pages from Blue's, but once I got a handle on that, I was hooked.

This book is filled with gorgeous, fantastical details. It's a love letter stuffed with other love letters, to books, to nature, to historical figures, to futures yet unknown. I've never read anything like this perfect little diamond of a book, and I hope you'll give it a try, too.