Reel is a love letter to Black creatives overlooked by fame and history. In Reel, we are navigating the modern-day love story of performer Neevah Saint and her director Canon Holt, and our story-within-a-story biopic on the fictional performer Dessi Blue. Through these nested narratives, we see how Black artists across generations have been constrained by racism in its many forms: socioeconomic oppression, legal persecution, day-to-day violence and disproportionately poor health outcomes. While our biopic star Dessi is launching a career in the early years of the Civil Rights movement, our modern-day protagonist, Neevah, is launching a career as she battles lupus, a disease that disproportionately impacts women and, specifically, women of color. We learn through Neevah that more than 90% of people living with lupus are women, and that it is 2-3x more prevalent among women of color. 

And this is where it is both brilliant and stressful (particularly for those who’ve experienced medical trauma, as a patient or as a caregiver - Neevah and Canon’s experiences give us perspective on both). Neevah’s experience of chronic illness shows us the highs and lows - the days she feels well and capable and strong, and the days her immune system escalates attacks on her organs, threatening her ability to work and forcing her to reevaluate her priorities in all spheres of her life. Canon cycles through fear and anger, denial and hyperfixation, rest and action, balancing his love for Neevah with his fear for her health. Readers can rest easy that this is a low-conflict love story, in that the real conflict is the battle both protagonists must wage to keep Neevah well and define their love for each other. 

I listened to this on audio, and the dual narration includes musical numbers and dialogue from Dessi Blue - I HIGHLY recommend audio if you can get it! 

 

While I think this book can be enjoyed in any format, I felt my best personal reading experience was via audio. I can’t think of a better companion for long morning trail walks with my dog than this essay collection.

An enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer blends her worlds of Indigenous history and teaching with science (botany) to create a fluid dialogue between the reader and the land. Through her own reflections on her research and life in academia, raising her two daughters, tending her homestead and her relationships with Indigenous elders, craftspeople and more, Kimmerer shows us the many ways in which western culture and language limit our understanding of the natural world. This is a collection of essays that can each stand alone, but together build a sweeping narrative through loose thematic groupings within the life cycle of sweetgrass: planting, tending, picking, braiding and burning. As sweetgrass teaches us, all life cycles require give-and-take, and it’s the balance between the two that brings us into greater harmony with ourselves and the land and enables sustainable communities and habitats. 

At the heart of this collection is a reflection on what it means to be Indigenous to a land, and how the first people can teach those of us who are not Indigenous to this land how to be in better relationship to it. To this end, Kimmerer breaks down Indigenous traditions of reciprocity, helps us to understand a natural language of animacy and intimacy, teaches us the principles of the honorable harvest and cautions us against the devastating hunger of our modern-day Wendigo, a capitalist beast threatening the longevity of our most critically-needed gifts of soil, air and water. 

I highly recommend this collection to any reader - it is both timeless and incredibly timely as we rally ourselves to speak out against the inherent violence of settler colonialism globally and work to protect the land and its native peoples.

I loved this sequel and the transition to multiple POVs! I enjoyed One Dark Window, but the deeper world-building, evolved magic system, and the shift to Elm and Ione as our primary romance made this follow-up a stand-out for me. I particularly enjoy when an author can pull off a tight story arc in a duology, and this nailed it - the ending felt appropriately hard-won and resisted easy heroics. I adore the Nightmare, and the complexity in his characterization, and I appreciated the sharp humor he brings to character interactions. This is a dark and atmospheric story with two affirming and compelling romance arcs, and I highly recommend to fantasy romance lovers!

I loved this! At just under 200 pages, it's a longer novella, which enables the time jump from the prologue and our second-chance-meets-sex-lessons-meets-Christmas set-up. The character arcs felt authentic within this timeframe, and the dark edge of longing counterbalanced the levity of the 12 days of Christmas, making this a perfect holiday read for my fellow Meredith-Duran-loving masochists. This is a debut, and I cannot wait to read more by Colleen Kelly.

Also, for my fellow histrom readers, my favorite microtrope moments: he bathes her (the caretaking!), explicit declaration of fidelity, and use of a nickname (Lyddie! My heart.). 

This was a fun, fast-paced read with fantastic bi representation. Both main characters are bi, and there is really authentic on-page dialogue between Mason and Xeni as he shares the biphobia he’s experienced - both generally from family and from intimate partners he had trusted - and it tackles head-on some of the more frustrating misconceptions about bi folks (the biphobic idea that we can’t be monogamous rearing its ugly head in Mason’s prior relationships). You would think a modern-day, marriage-of-convenience story would feel like a stretch, and while, sure, it does, it also brings incredible levity to a story that still handles tough topics like grief, emotional abuse and abandonment, and more. 

This is also an incredibly sex-positive story, where our main characters speak openly and honestly about what they like and dislike, about their sexual histories and health and about how they plan to enjoy their (supposedly limited) time together. I loved glimpses of Xeni’s friend group and Mason’s family and am absolutely going back to read Rafe very soon. 

And, critically important: I loved this small-town rep. Cranky county clerk who really blows the wedding vibes? Check. Found family among the handful of people of color in an otherwise extremely white town? Check. Everybody in everybody’s business? Check. And my absolute favorite part: big-city girl falls in love with cute boy-in-henley working at the cozy small-town cafe and PLOT TWIST. 

Anyways, I won't spoil anything, but if you're looking for a sweet, hot bi4bi read, this is it.

White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color, by Ruby Hamad is a book to read right now if you, like me, put it off for far too long. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Mozhan Marnò, and highly recommend it if you enjoy nonfiction on audio. Hamad deftly examines the racist and colonialist narratives used to define Black and brown women as *not women* at worst and *less than white women* at best. She explores the intersections of gender and race that have subjugated non-white women to the lowest realm of inclusion and agency, and she explicitly outlines how white women have made this possible at every juncture. 

There were so many moments in this that felt clarifying and relevant to us today. As I’ve struggled to identify *why* some of the rhetoric tossed around the internetright now  is so frustrating and exhausting, Hamad gives us the words and context to better understand why and how these bad-faith arguments are used. In a moment that feels particularly timely for us now, she discusses the 2016 backlash against US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib when she spoke out about Hillary Clinton’s condemnation of Palestinians. Hamad pushes us to ask ourselves why we expect Black and brown women to be “team players” when the team explicitly works against them, and emphasizes that there is no sisterhood with white women when white feminism continues to prioritize proximity to white men over the liberation of all people. She shows us how the common arguments we see today (ie “why aren’t you denouncing terrorism” as a counter to advocacy for Palestinian freedom), misdirect and invalidate the oppression of Black and brown people by pivoting to argue that they are their own oppressors. This is not new, but it is pervasive, and Hamad challenges us to recognize these devices and how they’re weaponized to silence people of color. 

Ultimately, this was a fast-paced read with a well-constructed thesis that is very relevant to our work and advocacy today. 

Notes: this is largely cisnormative, and does not explicitly explore the additional intersections of marginalization experienced by trans, nonbinary and gender non-conforming people of color. 

Salt Houses, by Hala Alyan, traces four generations of Palestinians through exile - from Palestine to Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Paris and Boston. Where multi-generational sagas always feel epic, this story is also painfully intimate. It’s a story filled with ghosts - of Palestine, of family members murdered or imprisoned or lost to time and distance and bitterness, of all the things we are too scared to say out loud to the people we love. The lives and love of Alia and Atef anchor the story, and we see their childhoods and young love, their deep trauma during the Six-Day War and subsequent flight to Kuwait, their early marriage with young children, the ceaseless displacement, the restless moves from country to country as they try to build lives free of war and occupation. Spinning out from them, we see their children and grandchildren with inherited trauma and grief fighting for reclamation and joy. This is a diaspora story where “houses as old as the earth itself” are replaced by “structures made of salt.”

And woven throughout each generation are moments of raw tenderness that boldly refute the dehumanization and violent caricaturization of Arab men we’ve witnessed through the last several decades. Instead: Mustafa, cradling a baby bird for his sister. Mustafa, practicing a speech for hours to get it just right. Mustafa, released from prison, kneeling to kiss his mother’s feet as he whispers never again. Atef making wishes to the moon with Riham. Atef drinking tea in the garden every afternoon with his daughter. Karam calming his mother’s fears and his sister’s anger. Zain reeling in Linah’s wild temper and restlessness. Alyan whispering to us: see this, and this, and this. Every life, an entire universe. 

I love Felicity's ability to write richly developed female main characters, and Caro does not disappoint! I did struggle, though, with the male main character, Phin, and his presentation on page. Most challenging for me was his tendency to sexualize her lisp, which felt like a distraction from his true intent in these moments (encouraging her to speak) and risked fetishization of her speech at times (this was my personal discomfort, and may not be felt by other readers). He also speaks in third person through a large portion of the intimate scenes, and this is a tough one for me, because people speaking about themselves in third person so often feel painfully narcissistic. Unfortunately, it pushed me out of the story each time. Ultimately, I struggled to root for these characters, because, for these reasons and a third-act moment, I didn't come around on Phin by the end. While this didn't work as well for me as I had hoped, I did appreciate the on-page declaration of fidelity (a FAVORITE micro-moment of mine in reformed rake stories!) and the confidence Caro discovers in herself. Felicity writes page turners (there isn't one of hers I've managed to set down for long - these are all-nighters). I love her writing style and will be anxious to read more of the Bed Me series! Thank you to the author for a complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review.