Each year, the National Book Foundation nominates 25 books for the National Book Award. A celebration of the best in American literature, the nominations span fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literature in translation, and young adult books. And every year since 2014, we at vox read them all to help our readers figure out which ones they’d like to see. here are our thoughts on the 2021 nominees and winners.
fiction
cloud cuckoo land by anthony doerr
cuckoo land in the clouds is so cleverly designed that reading it is a bit like opening a clock to admire the mechanism. It’s not always clear what you’re looking at, but it’s undeniably impressive that someone was able to put all those gears together.
You are reading: Award winning books 2021
There are five main characters in this book, and they exist in four different timelines. We start on a spaceship in the 22nd century. Turn the page and you’re in the Midwest in 2019. Turn the page again and you’re in 15th century Istanbul. turn the page again and you’ll be in korea during the war.
doerr’s clever plot finally brings these characters and timelines together. but even before the satisfying conclusion, they are united by a single theme. each of our protagonists lives in what they understand to be the end of the world. each one seeks refuge in the same book: a lost comedy from ancient Greece that continues to emerge in history through luck and chance.
doerr built an elegant structure. it’s also too long: in the time it takes for the five plots to cohere, a great deal of urgency has been drained from the book, leaving the long half of the book feeling tortuous, incoherent, and badly in need of a point. the author, moreover, seems palpably uncomfortable when it comes to writing women, even when it comes to supporting characters. Still, Doerr’s tribute to the perseverance of life and books in the face of the apocalypse is heartwarming, and whatever happens, it’s quite a sight to open the covers of Cloud Cuckoo Land and watch the clock tick. —constance grady, book critic
matrix by lauren groff
Lauren Groff’s Matrix, about a group of nuns building a utopian community in 12th-century England, is the most purely sensual book I’ve read all year. each line is rich in physical detail, precise and exquisite: apricot flesh with “a bit of elasticity like a girl’s firm thigh”; the voices of the nuns as they read aloud “blending so beautifully that the print is not a tapestry of individual threads but a solid sheet like crushed gold.”
matrix, which takes its title from the latin word for mother, is based on the real life of french poet marie de france. Marie de Groff is a painfully awkward 17-year-old when she begins the novel, ugly and rude but possessing great strength and great ambition. she is sent to an impoverished abbey in the middle of nowhere in england on the grounds that she is too ugly to marry but decent to manage an estate. Through sheer force of will, she transforms the abbey from a slum into a kind of Eden: a safe haven for women, replete with art and sheltered from violence, yet always worried both by the demands of the male invaders and by the relentless plans from marie for more. more, more.
Marie’s fierce and boundless ambition is the driving force behind the matrix and keeps you turning the pages. But it’s her insistence on experiencing life through her body that really makes this novel special: the way Marie revels in her physical strength, in good food, in sex, in love. cool water after a hot flash. She is an unforgettable character, and Groff evokes her point of view so strongly that she takes over her entire body. you don’t read this novel as much as you immerse yourself in it, as if you were being baptized. —constance grady, book critic
slut by laird hunt
can you capture a whole life in a slim little book? Hunt tried, and succeeded beautifully, in Zorrie, a deceptively simple book about the curious forces that shape life. The title character, Zorrie Underwood, lives most of her life in a farming community in Indiana, first as an orphan raised by an uncaring aunt, then as a drifter during the depression, a wife, and finally a young widow who lives next door to her neighbor Noah. , who harbors a tragedy in his heart. hard work is all she’s ever known, but it’s far from the sum of what she is. ella zorrie enjoys the house she builds in indiana: “the land she had grown from, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”
a brief and key moment in the life of zorrie (the one who returns to bless and torment her) is the two months she spends in illinois as a young woman, working for the radio sphere company painting clocks that glow in the light. – dark numbers. She and the other young women there, especially her friends Jane and Marie, often lick their brushes, coated in a substance not yet known to be a potent carcinogen. The glow of that dust follows Zorrie throughout her life, marking her hopes, her fears, and ultimately her sense of meaning. hunt’s novel reads like poetry, evokes writers like paul harding and marilynne robinson, and radiates the warmth of a beating heart. —alissa wilkinson, film critic
the prophets of robert jones jr.
Robert Jones Jr.’s first novel, The Prophets, is a powerful story of forbidden love between Isaiah and Samuel, two enslaved men in the antebellum South. “the two” can exist in the world they create for themselves in the barn on the edge of the plantation until they are finally betrayed. the work of jones jr. has garnered considerable praise for revealing what queer love may have been like for enslaved people.
but it is the gravitational pull of his prose – lyrical, startlingly clear, with the ability to evoke intimate moments or grand scale – that sets his work apart. it’s evident in the way jones jr. describes isaías and samuel when they are alone: ”each separate movement builds on the other to form something that seems to sway to its own music, from side to side, like the sea.”
Nearly every review of the Prophets mentions the late James Baldwin, and for good reason. Baldwin’s dying wish was that someone might find something in the “remains” he left behind, in other words, that other authors might find inspiration in his work. in the thanks to the prophets, jones jr. thanks baldwin and writes: “we did that”. Baldwin was nominated four times for a National Book Award, but never won. It would be inspiring to see Robert Jones Jr., who stands squarely on Baldwin’s shoulders, take home the award. —jariel arvin, former foreign member of vox
jason mott big book — winner
an infernal book is a journey from hell, dark and full of restlessness. half of the book is a stream-of-consciousness narrative by an anonymous bestselling author who tells the reader that he has been haunted by hallucinations since childhood. the other half tells the story of a dark-skinned boy (who may or may not be dead) referred to only by the name the bullies give him: soot.
The anonymous author’s tenuous grasp of reality gives the book a dreamlike quality: it’s unclear whether what you’re reading is actually happening, an ambiguity heightened by the fact that many of the author’s encounters seem too fantastical to read. be real Chief among these are his regular visits from Sooty, who becomes the author’s connection to the horrors of police brutality, something he would rather ignore.
Police brutality becomes a recurring theme in the book, as do other elements of the African-American experience. Among other things, Jason Mott touches on loss, memory, race, colorism, family, love, and the United States. by taking on such a broad lens, he’s not really able to explore any of these topics in depth. the ideas are confused with each other, the way in which the real and the unreal merge for the narrating author. the result is a strange and sad story, elegant and meandering. —Sean Collins, News Editor
non-fiction
a little devil in america: notes in praise of hanif abdurraqib’s black performance
hanif abdurraqib’s prose is always impressive, but a little devil in america: notes in praise of black acting shine in particular. Divided not into sections or chapters but into “movements,” each part of this collection explores the joy and pain of black people while weaving together his own personal memories and reflections of his life and the lives of other black people that intertwine through American culture.
in a section on jazz star josephine baker, abdurraqib writes: “there are streets named after black people located in every city in the united states. most of the time, blacks are dead. sometimes the street named after the dead black person doesn’t have many living black people.” Abdurraqib thrives when he combines simple facts with meaning, and throughout this book he paints larger-than-life pictures of memory and history.
black performance is presented in many ways, not only through music, dance or life, but also in the attempts white people make to emulate it. a section looking at the story of william henry lane, a troubadour charles dickens wrote about, soon gives way to a parallel: how black people are imitated on the internet and how this social creepiness has become normal because, well, it has been standardized since the beginning of time.
the collection talks about the way blackness is interpreted, born, killed, distorted, hated and loved, with beauty and consideration. “Anyone who speaks a language within a language can see when that dialect presents someone with a challenge… or when it comes from someone who saw a movie with a black person in it once and never saw a black person again, he writes. “it would be funny or fascinating if it weren’t so stifling. i’d laugh if i wasn’t suffocated by the violence of imagination.” —melinda fakuade, associate editor, culture and reporting
running low: in search of water in the altiplano by lucas bessire
the depletion of the ogallala aquifer, a vast expanse of groundwater that lies beneath the plains states, is the subject of depletion by lucas bessire; in search of water in the highlands. but it’s also the device for bessire’s reconnection with her family roots in western kansas and her definition of “exhaustion” in all its forms. bessire is an anthropologist and filmmaker, which is evident in his approach to fieldwork and his scenic depiction of the plain.
the ogallala aquifer was once an ancient sea, buried millions of years ago by the formation of rocky mountains. Today, it supports a sixth of the world’s grain production, but perhaps not for long: In just 80 years, farmers have been drying up the aquifer. bessire takes us on an investigation into the short-sighted water management policies that govern agriculture on an industrial scale. This search is aided by his formerly estranged father who serves as his local “fixer,” taking him to water board meetings and introducing him to local stakeholders.
bessire also takes into account her family’s role in depleting the aquifer: her great-grandfather “rw” was one of the first farmers to exploit the ogallala aquifer. what struck me was the way bessire connects ogallala with other forms of natural resource depletion: a childhood memory of finding a buffalo bone on her family’s property presents a devastating historical account of how herds of buffalo once roamed the region, before early settlers from the plains hunted them to the point of annihilation. This book left me heartbroken to learn more ways that human nature, politics, or profit motives have caused a failure in our stewardship of the earth’s irreplaceable resources. —Laura Bult, Video Producer
tastes like war: memoirs of grace m. cho
Food and memory are inextricably linked in the harrowing memoir of Grace Cho Tastes Like War, which explores how different dishes and items embody history and trauma.
Named after a comment her mother made earlier about powdered milk, a food she avoided and despised because it reminded her of what American soldiers distributed to Koreans during their military occupation, the book examines the pain and struggle what food can bring.
“I can’t stand the taste of it,” [Cho’s mother] said of powdered milk. she “tastes of war”.
Throughout the book, food, including kimchi, apple pie, and cheeseburgers, are markers of cho’s personal memories and symbols of everything from the tragedies people suffered during the war of Korea to the drive for assimilation that many immigrants find in the United States. . A fixation on apple pie, for example, is representative of how fiercely Cho’s mother tries to blend into her father’s extremely homogeneous hometown.
“Baking, for my mother, was a way of becoming American,” cho writes. “Baking was a way of forgetting.”
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Driven by crisp, unflinching prose, Cho’s book is as much about his personal history as it is about the history of American hegemony in Asia, and the many scars it has left on the millions of people who have experienced it. Recounting her own relationship with her mother, who had schizophrenia, and many of the meals they shared, Cho offers an incisive portrait of how unsettling these conflicts remain. —li zhou, political reporter
Night Covers: A History of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace
In 1722, in the woods of Pennsylvania, a Native American man named Sawantaeney is murdered by two English fur traders. It’s a business gone wrong. Covered in Night tells the story of the failed negotiation that follows: the colonial government offers capital punishment as justice but ignores native pleas for restoration, communion, and reparation. the settlers just don’t understand that their neighbors don’t like the idea of an eye for an eye. what more, they wonder, could these people want?
A gripping narrative takes us through the tension between punitive Proto-American concepts of law and order and the community-centric beliefs of the Haudenosaunee, through indigenous attempts to see their traditions and ethics respected. While the English of the day did not deign to write, or even apparently understand the existence of native philosophies of justice, Nyu Professor Nicole Eustace peruses the original documents and finds their inclusion accidental. this book is a feat of collecting primary sources and close reading.
While we haven’t exactly learned the right lessons in the intervening 300 years, the covered night explains a lot of horrible things about our past and offers a kind of glimpse into a brighter future. —meredith haggerty, senior editor, culture
all it took: ashley sack ride, tiya miles black family memento — winner
At a time when conservative lawmakers want teachers to reduce their instruction on slavery and its lasting impact, Harvard author and historian Tiya Miles gives readers plenty of reasons to keep discovering and sharing the truth. About the cruel institution that shaped America. In Everything She Led: The Journey of the Sack of Ashley, a black family memento, Miles tells the story of survival in the face of unspeakable hardship.
Rose, a black woman enslaved on the South Carolina coast in the early 1850s, learns that she or her daughter Ashley will be sold at auction. Rose’s lineage, which survived through her only daughter, was in jeopardy, and the love she and her daughter shared would be damaged forever. However, with what little she had in the way of possessions, Rose mustered the will to be creative, thoughtful, and resourceful. she gave her daughter, just 9 years old, a sack of things: a tattered dress, three handfuls of walnuts, and a braid of her own hair. she told her daughter, “may she always be filled with my love”, and she never saw her again. The act of filling a sack with meager possessions may seem inconsequential, but it speaks to the love, resilience, and hope Black women mustered to survive through generations. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter found out about her great-grandmother’s act and embroidered the story on the sack, further preserving the story for her offspring.
What makes this historical account so impressive is how thousands extend the story beyond this one family to show how it stands in the greatest historical record of the efforts African-American families made to preserve themselves and their memories. through crafts and fabric work. Miles draws on his own family history to talk about the importance of textiles like quilts. Miles goes to great lengths to extract stories the archives didn’t care to preserve, a valiant effort that continues the same practice Rose began nearly two centuries ago. —fabiola cineas, race and politics reporter
poetry
what a noise against the stick by wishe c. outer wall
the poetry of what the noise against the cane intertwines black and political resistance, Afro-Caribbean customs, liberation, the body and nature, meaning and freedom, to name a few, throughout the black diaspora and black america. the book begins with his long poem, “song for the waters and the dirt and the blade”. Bailey traces the spiritual turmoil and complex hesitation of an enslaved woman’s journey through the transatlantic slave trade to the brink of the Haitian revolution: a turmoil beyond wounds, beyond reconfiguration, and beyond creation. of places.
As I navigated through this poem, I found myself pausing; digesting each stanza. Aside from Bailey’s pun and diction, the sheer magnitude of lines like “home tune: a ruthless drift / a song that doesn’t return” and “praise our mothers’ fading homes / that we can only see in dreams” He made me sit down for a moment. the spirit of the book spoke directly to me, through its female-led perspective, perhaps, but certainly through the character’s negotiations with memory. “words that I cannot pronounce because I do not want / my flesh to remember but the stench / accumulates there mapping / a route to my head / I want my memory to fail I want / to expel it with the smell of pessil.” she prompted me to ask myself: what are the ways our bodies remember? how were the bodies of our ancestors tied to nature? How do our bodies store trauma across generations?
here I found explorations of contemporary black america and the diaspora, identity negotiations, and themes of home, nature and body, femininity, and self-recognition and lineage. i encourage readers to remember haiti as the first black republic and to think about the titles of books and poems, the relationship of the body to nature (which can sometimes seem quite the opposite), and what freedom looks and feels like in search of liberation. . —Sierra Enea, Video Clearance Producer
sword king floats — winner
Martin Espada invites the reader to understand the lives of different Latinx people using personal memories, lyrical fiction, and historical and current events. the title “flotadores” presents the story of a salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in an attempt to cross the rio grande in search of a better life. From the unity of Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria to being called “Jose” in a New York taxi, Martin Espada covers an unjust and intolerant America that persists today.
Espada recalls his time working in Brooklyn as a tenant attorney, only to be seen as a thief because he is Puerto Rican. He accurately describes the ridiculous insults, physical and mental abuse towards Latinos, which have been reignited and become even more visible than before during the Trump era. in opposition to hate, he brings poems that bring a universal truth to all Latinos, to have pride in their identity, resilience in their work, and tireless care for their community.
This diverse collection of poems uses Spanish words to create a personal and emotional bond with characters (some fictional, some not). some words just don’t have a great English translation, and the author accepts it. one learns and identifies with the stanzas of what he was and still is being Latino, migrant or Puerto Rican in the United States.
the last poem, dedicated to his deceased father, brings back childhood memories and thoughts of seeing parents as gods, only to discover that they are mortals who have made incredible sacrifices, such as leaving a paradise home, to have a better life. chance of life for the next generation. A Latinx person reading this will feel like this book has come home to them, and those who are not Latinx are invited to learn and understand. —natalie ruiz-perez, video clearance producer
sho by douglas kearney
Kearney’s poetry sings and crackles, loud and clear: no small feat for poetry that begs to be seen on a page. Kearney, who described his visual experimentation of earlier works of poetry as “performative typography,” sticks primarily to more traditional text and line structures in sho. the cuts, the indents and the blank spaces breathe and ebb and flow, giving the feeling that life beats around her poems.
That’s necessary for these poems, which are often translated into the vernacular and thus seem like voices jumping off the page. the “fire” marries the body and the music that burns in the soul of a religious service (“that god — / good spirit flow pierced run sway bow / what we owed to the body / I see / we sing / a sweet body of / the sweet body— we give”).
“blacks are a fat suit, hollywood, usa. I got them. I fill the frame with his stuff: too much.”) “close” is dedicated to the kearney family (“our black asses / have barricaded themselves in / this house, this now / ‘transitional’ neighborhood, / we steal where / some call ‘white cliffs’—/fool!”) sho reads like a testimony, a chorus of voices telling a story of black communities, a nation, and a very singular poet at the center of it all. —alissa wilkinson, film critic
a thousand times you lose your treasure for hoa nguyen
Some mothers choose to let go of their past lives. they keep their personal histories separate, intact, and indistinguishable from the knowledge of their adult children. not the mother of the poet hoa nguyen, linda diệp anh nguyễn, who is the centrifugal force of her fifth collection of poems.
nguyen is a mystical myth writer, and the book is a tender attempt to guide readers through the non-chronological corridors of her mother’s life, first as a flying biker in an all-female circus troupe and then as an old woman. nostalgic figure. Speckled throughout the collection are also his observant and insular intimacies of the Vietnamese diaspora: “who wants to hear / about his Asian experience in North America anyway”, “look ma / no accent”, “people will ask about the girls at the bar / and saigon tea will ask about my language / with me being a bastard.”
nguyen’s references to the vietnam war are akin to surreal word paintings. She describes the absurd and senseless violence wrought by the United States in minimally abstract, almost clinical language in “Napalm Notes” and “Operation Hades Notes.” However, the book does not stop at war-torn Vietnam. It is one of many narrative backdrops to the poems, alongside the “washed stars of Washington DC,” a oxbow lake, and a fruit stand called Mexico in Vinh Long province.
nguyen’s work spans time, continent, trauma, and language, but the book’s opening and closing images are of hoa’s mother, frozen in her youth. they are an ode to diệp’s adrenaline-fueled memories and her past life, one full of secrets, tangled love affairs, and rousing adventures that the writer describes in “words [that] hang on sinews and care”. —terry nguyen, reporter, the products
the sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void by jackie wang
Other people’s dreams are boring. They are a conversation killer. the only person they appeal to is the person who has dreams, who finds them naturally interesting, even though they know that if someone else were broadcasting these same dreams, their eyes would mist up.
the jackie wang collection, the sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void, transmits dream after dream, proving that poetry is perhaps the only adequate medium to tell dreams. wang elegantly weaves in and out of the realistic and the fantastical, often delving into longing and loneliness. as in dreams, there is an undercurrent of anguish and confusion, although the tenor never turns into a nightmare.
Wang’s work shines brightest when his dreams lead to the casually sharp depth we all believe our own dreams achieve, as in “Panic at the Disco”: “I’m not” with “everyone around me.” but where am I / maybe I’m trying to find you, then forget you, jumping into the pool. / Yes, we are living three times: party, catastrophe and limerence.”
dreams sound better when translated into verse. —julia rubin, editorial director, reports and culture
translated literature
winter in sokcho by elisa shua dusapin; translated from french by aneesa abbas higgins — winner
the threat of terrible ebbs and flows in winter in sokcho. It is set in a sleepy seaside town near the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea. So when a more or less clueless Frenchman asks a bored hotel clerk to take him there, he might hear narrative alarm bells ringing in his head.
but this is not that kind of book. the awkwardness has more to do with the cultural exchange and power dynamic between the employee (the delightfully apathetic protagonist) and the Frenchman (an older comic book artist looking for a muse). the shop assistant doesn’t know as much as she thinks; the Frenchman is not as naive as he seems. still, they awkwardly navigate something less than romance and more than a distraction from her existential doubts.
In the middle are spare details that bring the city to life: the woman waiting behind bandages to reveal her freshly refreshed face, a car ride through ocean waves that bite into the rain “like the spines of a sea urchin”. always, the cold, a reason not to go out and dream of lives redrawn on the other side of a paper wall.
The ending may be a bit of an anticlimax, but that’s the way the novel is. just enjoy your stay in sokcho while it lasts. —tim williams, deputy style and standards editor
ge fei peach blossom paradise; translated from chinese by canaan morse
In Peach Blossom Paradise, Ge Fei focuses much of the book on its main character, Xiumi, and the constellation of people that make up her life. Xiumi comes of age at a transformative time in Chinese history, as the 20th century is just beginning in the last years of the Qing dynasty. But in Fei’s narrative, the revolutionaries are not heroes, but deluded: deluded that they can change the world, deluded about the harm they can cause, and even deluded about their own motives.
“You talk and talk about revolution and unification, your concern for the world and the heat of your ambition, but all you really want is a piece of ass,” Xiumi says at one point, pointing to one of the bigger. themes in fei’s book: the subjugation of women.
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Throughout the book, women are forced to acknowledge their lack of autonomy. footbinding, rape, and murder are companions of women in fei writing. The book begins with Xiumi, not realizing what a period is, discovering that she is bleeding. Terrified, she believes that she is dying and seeks to hide the evidence. Throughout the book, she will fight for control of her body and lose.
Near the end of the book, fei gives her main character a moment of clarity: as character after character tries to understand and remake the world, xiumi finds a moment of peace in her memories: “these past events, which xiumi he had not consciously produced, or even thought he had experienced, now fell one after another into his mind he saw how poignant and incontrovertible even the most mundane details could be components of his memory each summoned the other in an endless and unpredictable sequence .and what is more, he could never tell which particle of memory would sting the soft places of his heart, make his cheeks scald and his eyes well with tears, just as the gray embers of the winter hearth do not announce which of them can yet. .burn fingers.—jerusalem demsas, policy writer
the unknown dimension of nona fernández; translated from spanish by natasha wimmer
the twilight zone offers its readers a kind of twisted familiarity, revealing a destiny that probably reads as too possible or too familiar depending on where or when in the world you live. As you read Nona Fernandez’s story of 1980s Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, which she deftly juxtaposes with the near-mundanity of life lived between, around, and on top of the horrors of secret torture and suddenly revealed betrayals, the What resonates deeply is how tragically and incomprehensibly different life can be under an authoritarian regime, even between the same houses on the same block.
The book is a quick, intelligent and powerful read. You could absolutely read this book simply for the clever storytelling, for the story of a modern documentary filmmaker obsessed with a member of the Chilean secret service, or even for a quick political and cultural history lesson, but what you will inevitably take away is a reminder that what you see in front of you is rarely the whole story of a person, time, or place. the twilight zone is inevitably a reminder to search for the seams that separate the reality we are comfortable with from the surreal nightmare of authoritarianism whose victims deserve to be remembered. —ashley sather, production manager, vox video
when we stop understanding the worldworld of benjamín labatut; translated from spanish by adrian nathan west
When we stop understanding the world it is extraordinary. he took over my mind when I read it. For days, I couldn’t think of anything else.
benjamín labatut, a rotterdam-born chilean author, has described his book as “a work of fiction based on real events”, tantalizingly adding that “the amount of fiction grows throughout the book”. his theme is scientific discovery, which he presents in five meditative essay chapters as a kind of pure philosophical ecstasy. and that ecstasy can shudder over the edge into existential horror in a whisper, a blink. the more we discover about the inner workings of the universe, teme labatut, the more we can see how little it corresponds to the reality in which we live our little human lives.
take, suggest labatut, karl schwarzschild. He was a German philosopher and astronomer who fought during World War I, and the first to solve the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. schwarzschild found hidden in the center of those equations something abominable to imagine: a point in space where “the equations of general relativity went haywire: time froze, space coiled up on itself like a snake.” the point is the center of a star that has gone nova, where the mass collapses in on itself into “a single point of infinite density”. It came to be called the Schwarzschild Singularity, and in Benjamin’s narrative, the mere contemplation of the sheer monstrosity of the Singularity idea breaks Schwarzschild’s mind and body. by the time einstein receives a letter from schwarzschild solving the equations of general relativity, schwarzschild himself is already dead in a military hospital.
This book is disturbing, uncompromising, full of phrases of clear and limpid beauty. read it and feel his mind expand as he tries to take in all that labatut has to offer. —constance grady, book critic
clay planet by samar yazbek; translated from Arabic by leri price
Planet of Clay documents the Syrian war from the perspective of a girl caught up in its devastation. rima, the narrator, is mute and, although it is never fully explained why, she is constantly forced to walk. “My head is my feet,” she writes. for this reason, her mother and her brother keep her tied closely to them and tie her wrist with a rope so that she can move around a room, but she can never leave it alone. this makes rima a witness, but also leaves her without control of her own destiny, not unlike civilians caught in the middle of the conflict.
The narrative of the book reflects the trajectory of the conflict. early in the book, rhyme’s mother is killed at a checkpoint and rhyme herself is shot and injured. from there, the horrors only increase. rima is taken by her brother to a hideout that is finally bombed. she suffers a chemical attack and sees women and children, as she calls it, “disappear”.
rhyme’s story is deeply personal, but also refracted: he doesn’t fully understand the politics of the conflict or why it happens, but he feels and experiences the tragedy. writing also acquires this quality. it is poetic and sober, but sometimes lacks specific details to support the narrative. but that’s also what gives the book so much of its power. when politics collapses, you feel more acutely the cruelty and almost sick routine of war: the humiliations, the death, the torture, and the planes dropping bombs night after night after night. —jen kirby, foreign writer
juvenile literature
the legend of aunt po by shing yin khor
“every night my father and i feed a hundred lumberjacks,” writes shing yin khor at the beginning of his endearing and vibrant graphic novel the legend of aunt po. “We also feed forty Chinese workers who do not receive a pension.” With this, she introduces us to the bustling life of a Sierra Nevada logging camp in 1885, seen through the eyes of Mei, a teenager who lives and works in the camp with her father. Around the campfire, Mei tells stories, transforming Paul Bunyan into a super-strong Chinese aunt, Po Pan Yin.
Although the logging camp is a loving place, the shadow of Sinophobia cast by the recently passed Chinese exclusion law falls on me and its future. As he struggles with the prospect of living a life on the fringes of society despite all his intellect and talent, hate crimes and racism remain a looming background threat. As tensions escalate, Mei begins using Auntie Po and her Big Blue Ox Pei Pei as protective totems for herself and her community: a giant strong woman to deal with the oversized dangers of her world. /p>
the legend of aunt po remains deeply hopeful, despite grappling with complex issues: everything from mei’s disconnection from her own culture (“i’m mad i have to make my own gods,” she muses at one point ), their alien identity and religious faith, to the disenfranchisement of workers and the way the lens of privilege can unsettle even the most intimate families. yin khor has a gift for capturing all these tensions through vivid images rather than words. the body language and silences of her characters often speak for them. an entire commentary on labor rights, the environment, and capitalism is condensed into an image of a two-handed logging saw aptly named “the whip of misery.” Everything is rendered in vivid, warm colors along with the postcard-ready mountain scenery: A heartwarming story, choosing optimism over fatalism, much like the fables Mei creates around Auntie Po. —aja romano, web culture reporter
last night at malinda’s telegraph club lo — winner
malinda lo’s last night at the telegraph club is a story of sapphic self-discovery. Over the course of a year in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s, 17-year-old Lily Hu becomes herself. Saying no to friends he’d only said yes to, nurturing his interest in rockets and space, venturing to the titular telegraph club to see “male impersonator” Tommy Andrews, and along the way he notices yes, he loves other women, and one in particular: his new white friend kath.
In brief chapters interspersed throughout the novel that contribute little to the narrative but significantly to the construction of the world, Lo delves into the points of view of other characters, overlaying the experiences of the mother, aunt, and father. father in his exploration of this place and time. In the midst of it all, Lily must navigate thorny adult issues: duty to family, racism fueled by Red Scare, homophobia. it’s a beautifully done intersectional story, but the novel is still at its best in the little moments of discovery that embody any love, but particularly a queer first.
the moment when lily notices a group of young women walking through the park sharing “surprisingly cheeky” flirtatious smiles, wondering if there is “something significant” in kath’s silence as she too watches. there is another moment when lily recognizes kath in the crowded telegraph club just by the movement of her body. and the moment he discovers something he never knew, never imagined, “how a first kiss can turn so quickly into a second, and a third, and then a continual opening, pressing, and touching, the tip of his tongue against hers.” kath, the warmth of her mouth.” —Caroline Houck, Senior Associate Editor, Policy and Politics
too bright to see by kyle lukoff
The worst part of growing up is being 11 years old. it’s that awful moment when you realize you’ll never instantly become the person you dreamed of being, and how what you feel rarely matches what you feel. you see in the mirror. they all tell you what to be, but there is no guide on how to get there. Kyle Lukoff highlights this haunting moment in Too Brilliant To Watch, a gentle and affectionate coming-of-age novel.
It’s the summer before high school and Bug, an 11-year-old girl living with her mom in Vermont, is going through that horrible time when nothing fits. she is also dealing with the loss of her uncle roderick de ella, who was an effervescent presence in her family’s life. his death and absence haunt her family’s home.
pain and new beginning coincide with bug’s journey of self-discovery; how he wants to look, what he fantasizes about the person he wants to be and the realization of his own gender identity. the book never strays into saccharine or swerves into mindless cruelty. the bug story, as uncertain as it may be, is honest and clear. Too Bright to See is a ride that’s both kind and brave, and in Lukoff’s loving hands it’s a spirited hit. —alexander abad-santos, senior correspondent
revolution in our time: the promise of the black panther party to the people by kekla magoon
“the panthers waged a revolution in their time, just as we fought one in ours,” writes kekla magoon in her refreshingly hard-hitting new history of the black panthers. Tackling the panthers’ notoriety head-on, he outlines their goals, controversies, and continued relevance.
revolution frames the panther movement and the unprecedented repression effort against it within the continuing consequences of slavery, jim crow’s disenfranchisement, the long history of police brutality and racist violence, and the turbulent civil rights struggle from which the Panthers arose. magoon traces the panthers’ path to prominence along with dozens of individual accounts of black civilians whose lives intersected with the fight for civil rights.
magoon is especially outspoken about the connection between state-sanctioned violence against Black communities and the Panthers’ decision to be armed in public, a decision that exacerbated chaos and fear, fueled by both racism and the irresponsible media, which seemed to greet every move of the panthers. “In a vacuum, it’s easy to default to violence as never the answer,” Magoon writes. “But when it comes to black history, we must not forget that violence is also the issue.”
magoon highlights the many men and women who have died fighting for civil rights at the hands of police brutality, hate crimes, and other efforts of repression. she connects the socialist practices of the panthers with the broader struggles of the poor and working class.
and vividly describes the incremental struggles for equality, won and lost, that Black Panthers participated in, from voting rights to education to holding police accountable for brutality and many more ripples in a sea of changes. And though Magoon covers decades, even centuries, of history, he does so with a candor and detail that make this book a useful resource for readers of all ages. —aja romano, web culture reporter
me (moth) by amber mcbride
how you feel about me (moth), a debut novel written in verse, will largely depend on how you feel about its ending, which takes a huge twist. For me, author Amber McBride nailed it for the most part, but the ending is still the kind of thing that tends to crowd out the rest of the book in her memory.
however, relegating the rest of the novel to an afterthought would be a shame. mcbride has a clear voice and a lyrical notion of how to tell a story through several poems. the plot is simple: a girl named moth has lost her family in a car accident and now lives with her aunt in suburban virginia, where she is one of the few black students. one day a new boy walks into her classroom and they form an instant connection. His name is Sani, and he is of Navajo descent. After a series of events that leave Moth feeling more abandoned than ever, she and Sani embark on a trip west to visit Sani’s dad in New Mexico.
mcbride structures most of the book as a long conversation between moth and sani. They tell each other stories, joke around, and work together on a song about their road trip. (Sani is an aspiring musician; Moth gave up a promising dance career after the accident.) There are several chapters where McBride captures the way text communication can feel a bit like poetry.
but then again, that ending: it’s good, but it leaves you wondering what part of the book was intended as a setup for an unexpected twist. Less than you’d expect, but more than you think, I suppose, and a part of me wishes McBride hadn’t felt the need to reveal something important. there is more than enough history in the unlikely connection between moth and sani. —emily vanderwerff, general critic
See Also: Arnaldur Indriðason – Book Series In Order