YA fantasy. Towards the “high fantasy” end of the genre. Set in Orisha, a nation based loosely on Nigeria. It is a kingdom in which magic had suddenly ceased to work and all adults who had been able to use it were killed by the king’s soldiers about a decade before the start of the …
Theory. Thinks about research from an Indigenous, and specifically Maori, perspective. A classic. I first read the book about 15 years ago and wrote an extensive review at that time. I re-read it now for work purposes, and I’ll keep this brief. The work is divided into two broad parts, one providing an overview of …
Literary fiction. Short stories. I don’t generally orient my reading via prizes, but the fact that this collection won the latest Giller Prize is probably why it was prominent enough in my awareness that, after my partner borrowed it from a colleague, I spontaneously picked it up and read it as well. Stories of everyday …
Science fantasy. In a post-apocalyptic Sudan, a child of a rape that happened as part of war-slash-genocide develops powerful magic as she grows up, and seeks to confront both the threat to her and the threat to her people. I’ve read a bunch of books by Okorafor – her Binti series and her Akata series …
YA fantasy. This author’s take on the secret British magic school and the ‘chosen one.’ Was pretty skeptical before I picked it up, but it drew me in fairly quickly. It manages a good balance of taking things seriously and poking a little bit of fun at, ahem, a certain similar series. The book enters …
Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to politics. He has published a bunch of scholarly work along these lines too, but this …
History. A reexamination of the Black civil rights movement in the US. The conventional narrative frames it as a struggle that took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and that involved pushing the US nation and state to more completely live up to the supposed high principles of its founding by admitting Black people …
Contemporary fiction. A young widow in the city of Suryam in India witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in a park, and ends up drawn into a relationship with the woman and her husband. I picked up the book because of the unconventional relationship at its core, but it also has some things to …
Middle-grade fantasy. Book three of the Nevermoor series. Features Morrigan Crow, a serious and sensible girl growing up in an absurd and fantastical realm, along with lots of strange creatures and magic and terrible villains and hijinks. As I’ve observed before, it is enough like that famous series by She Who Must Not Be Named …
YA contemporary. Queer Black girl in a mostly white, mostly well-off town in the midwestern US doesn’t get the big scholarship she’ll need to attend the university program of her dreams, so she decides to go after an alternative source of scholarship dollars by entering the superintense prom king/queen competition for which her school is …