Popsugar | December 11, 2020

After devouring Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel, You Should Have Known and binging the smash success that is HBO's The Undoing, readers — myself included! — are eagerly searching FOR where to get their next thriller and suspense fix. Whether you're craving more psychological thrillers centered around complex marriages and intricate female friendships or novels balancing an unsolvable crime case and passionate love affairs, we've got you covered! Ahead, take a look at our best recommendations for thrillers like You Should Have Known. From forthcoming novels to newer releases, we guarantee these will hold you over until Nicole Kidman's next spine-chilling project, Nine Perfect Strangers (also a novel by Liane Moriarty), hits Hulu.

For the Best:
After a night of too much drinking and unconscious behavior, Jules Worthington-Smith's wallet is found at a crime scene, casting her as the prime suspect of a murder case. A well-polished and established woman in the community, Jules believes she is innocent and begins her own investigation. This whirlwind embarkment in Vanessa Lillie's For the Best won't only test the limits of the media and justice, but will force her to evaluate demons she's suppressed all her life.

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BookBub | December 10, 2020

From swoon-worthy romances like One Last Stop and Act Your Age, Eve Brown to fantastic fantasies like Hall of Smoke and The Gilded Ones, 2021 is packed with exciting releases. Here are some of the most anticipated books of 2021.

The Hunting Wives:
For Sophie O’Neill, moving with her family from Chicago to small-town Texas leaves something to be desired when it comes to excitement. That all changes when she’s introduced to the Hunting Wives, a club of women known for their partying and love of target practice. And when a teenage girl turns up dead, Sophie suddenly finds herself involved in something much more sinister. You’ll want to carve out plenty of time for yourself before picking up May Cobb’s latest novel — this thriller is impossible to put down.

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Vulture | December 9, 2020

This was a tough year for publishers and authors: Independent bookstores closed their doors, publishing dates were delayed, and authors scrambled apologetically to promote books they’d worked on for years, which now threatened to vanish from public view without leaving a ripple. None of it is fair. I wonder if we’ll look back on 2020 as the year of Lost Great Books; perhaps there will be a future curriculum organized around this principle. I hope so. Here are ten that ought to be on it.

5. My Mother’s House, by Francesca Momplaisir
A torrential, Faulkneresque tale of evil and love among multiple generations of Haitian immigrants living in New York. The most hard-core novel of the year.

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Mystery & Suspense | November 25, 2020

In Daniel Pyne’s Water Memory, we meet Aubrey Sentro, a black-ops specialist suffering from serial concussion syndrome. She has been experiencing frequent memory loss while on the job, and is forced to take a desperately needed vacation. However, while on the high seas everything comes to a standstill when pirates highjack the cargo ship. What the pirates don’t consider during the takeover is Sentro.

While excelling in the black-ops world, Sentro ends up lacking in the family world. While on this ill-fated cruise, battling memory loss, and the will to return to her children, Sentro utilizes every tactic she’s learned to get back to her family, and save the ship.

This is a must-read for any thriller fan looking for a different angle into the black-ops world. Water Memory has all the action of a thriller, but with an extra layer of personal struggle.

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Book Riot | November 23, 2020

Hip hop is one of the most dominant and influential cultures in America, giving new voice to the younger generation. It defines a generation’s worldview. Exploring hip hop’s beginnings up to the present day, Jeff Chang and Dave “Davey D” Cook provide a provocative look into the new world that the hip hop generation has created.

Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip hop’s forebears, founders, mavericks, and present day icons, this book chronicles the epic events, ideas and the music that marked the hip hop generation’s rise.

I read this one in adult form and am SO excited to see this adapted for young readers!

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PopSugar | November 6, 2020

Now that 2020 is almost in our collective rearview mirror, it's time to look ahead to a brand-new year full of books that we're all going to be obsessed with in 2021. Despite how unsettled 2020 was, it served up plenty of unforgettable reads, from the stunning and timely The Vanishing Half to the warm and witty Beach Read. But 2021 is here to tell 2020 to hold its bookmark, because this coming year is absolutely stacked with highly anticipated novels from the likes of Taylor Jenkins Reid, Kristin Hannah, Talia Hibbert, Stephen King, and Casey McQuiston. And it's not just the big-name authors who are preparing to wow readers; there are already a number of 2021 debuts generating major buzz, too.

#34: The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

Sophie O'Neill's quiet, rural life is completely upended in May Cobb's sharply observed thriller The Hunting Wives. After moving with her family from Chicago to Texas, Sophie becomes friends with a glamorous woman whose alluring hunting club may be responsible for the death of a teen girl.

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Forbes | November 2, 2020

Following the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, in 2013, Patrisse Cullors was motivated to take action. She, alongside Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, created #BlackLivesMatter to expose ongoing anti-Black racism. “I hope it gets bigger than we can ever imagine,” she thought at the time.

It has. Black Lives Matter has evolved into a movement, one that’s still growing. In May and June, the hashtag was tweeted an average of 3.7 million times a day. On May 28, #BlackLivesMatter was used on Twitter nearly 8.8 million times—the most times it had been tweeted in a single day since the Pew Research Center started tracking it in 2013. 

“The virality is happening through millions of regular normal people who use the hashtag because they see the necessity to call out racism, to call out white supremacy, to call out anti-Black racism,” says Cullors. “I wasn’t a celebrity, we weren’t really known outside of our own cities and states seven years ago. That is the power of grassroots organizing—to be able to get folks to recognize how important it is to see themselves in each other.”

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Booklist | November 1, 2020

It opens with the mellifluous Dion Graham and ends with an always-appreciated who-read-whom at recording’s end. In between, the horror is unrelenting, yet the three narrators persist with tenacious dignity and grace. Graham enthralls as the titular “my mother’s house”—Kay Manman Mwen in Kreyòl—the Queens, New York home of Lucien and Marie-Ange, a once “compassionate and savvy young couple,” who initially provided a haven for fellow Haitian immigrants. Their needs, his help, feeds Lucien’s power as he transforms La Kay into a house of hidden torture chambers. The house, calling itself La Kay, appoints itself witness and judge, plotting vengeance when it can bear Lucien’s depravity no more. The provocative casting of a female narrator—the impressive Karen Chilton—for Lucien’s sections becomes a rebellious, reclamatory act of giving voice to the countless women manipulated, hunted, tormented, and enslaved in the too-many decades Lucien has thrived. Janina Edwards achingly haunts as Sol, the sole prisoner allowed narrative agency, whose survival—and that of her basement-born son—is anything but guaranteed. Debut novelist Momplaisir’s already unnerving nightmare on-the-page morphs into aural terror, most definitely not for the casual listener. Content warnings, yes: a chilling lesson in inhumanity—private and public both.

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AP News | October 31, 2020

Black Lives Matter has been a lot of things in its brief, fiery life.

It has been a slogan, a rallying point. A movement that led protests coast to coast, calling for America to get serious about preventing Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement. A heaven-sent resource for people like Helen Jones, desperate for justice after her son died in a Los Angeles County jail.

“Black Lives Matter saved us, because we had nobody,” said Jones.

Now, BLM’s influence faces a test, as voters in Tuesday’s election consider candidates who endorsed or denounced the BLM movement amid a national reckoning on race.

“We’re a very young organization with a whole lot of visibility in a really short amount of time,” Patrisse Cullors, one of three BLM co-founders, told The Associated Press. It would be “false,” she said, “for anyone to put it on us solely around what happens in this election cycle.”

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Variety | October 27, 2020

“#MeToo. #TimesUp. Now #NotDone?

A new documentary from first-time director Sara Wolitzky, titled “Not Done: Women Remaking America,” looks back on the last few years of advancements in the women’s movement. Premiering on Oct. 27 on PBS, just days ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the project feels both perfectly timed and also like it may just be the start of another wave of the movement.

‘We’re living through another of these major chapters of feminist organizing and people being back in the streets and huge shifts in public consciousness,’ Wolitzky tells Variety. ‘It felt like a good moment, but in some ways we can only scratch the surface. There’s always a lot more, both in terms of what happens next but also even in terms of looking more closely at the stuff that’s just happened. There are definitely pieces [within “Not Done”] that we could have done a whole film on.’

‘Not Done’ is the first film release from Verizon’s Future Fund, a multi-million dollar company commitment to supporting new and emerging female talent in entertainment and tech. It explores the outcry of feminism over the last four years, from the 2016 election through the women’s marches that in many places turns into marches for equality and inclusion among multiple disenfranchised and underrepresented groups, to Alyssa Milano making Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement go viral, the importance of Black Lives Matter being started by mothers and the start of Time’s Up. It features original interviews with everyone from African American Policy Forum co-founder and author Kimberlé Crenshaw, Black Lives Matter co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, producers including Shonda Rhimes and Joey Soloway, activist and journalist Gloria Steinem and Time’s Up co-founder and CEO Tina Tchen.”

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School Library Journal | October 26, 2020

The 2020 SLJ Summit finished with a personal and thought-provoking conversation between Black Lives Matter (BLM) cofounder Patrisse Cullors and Tennessee school librarian Erika Long. The two discussed Cullors’ reason for writing her memoir, the impact of a lifetime of racism, how young people are pushing the country to be better, and the role of educators now and going forward. It starts with "courageous conversations."

Cullors’s 2016 memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, was recently adapted for middle grade and YA readers. The SLJ review called the title “an essential purchase for all high school libraries. Students will learn about BLM's beginnings and empathize with the pilgrimage of one individual discovering her true self.”

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ComicBook.com | October 26, 2020

Faith Erin Hicks is no stranger to middle grade graphic novels, and her next work, Ride On, leans into that with a passion. The new graphic novel from First Second Books, which ComicBook.com is exclusively announcing here, is loosely based on Hicks' experience riding horses in her younger years. But Ride On, written and drawn by Hicks, is not just about horses; it's also about loving something so much and then loving something else.

"Ride On is about young riders and horses and also Star Trek. So, I was a horse crazy girl in my younger years. I loved horses. I rode constantly. I would go and hang out at the barn with other young women who rode, and one boy, there was one boy who rode at the stables that I rode at when I was a young teen," Hicks says of the new graphic novel. "And Ride On, it's not a memoir. There is nothing in this book that is completely true to events that happened to me, but I would consider it emotionally true. So, it is based on, a little bit based on my experiences being this young, horse crazy girl, and also based on my experience of having this one thing in my life that I loved."

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Publishers Weekly | October 23, 2020

Meals, Music, and Muses by Alexander Smalls was named as one of the best lifestyle books of 2020 by Publishers Weekly!

“This eclectic cookbook provides classic Southern recipes with extra flair thanks to Smalls’s affinity for music. An internationally recognized opera singer, he elevates the work by naming each chapter after a type of music and diving into the details of his South Carolina childhood and how it influenced his cooking style.”

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Good Morning America | October 20, 2021

“Author Sili Recio discusses her Dominican upbringing and how it inspired her new children’s book If Dominican Were a Color.”

Follow the link above to watch the full interview on Good Morning America!

Interview Magazine | October 19, 2020

“In 2013, shortly after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, Patrisse Cullors left a comment on her friend Alicia Garza’s Facebook page: ‘declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. i am done. i am so done. trayvon, you are loved infinitely #blacklivesmatter.’ Soon after, Cullors, along with Garza and Opal Tometi, co-founded Black Lives Matter, a network that put a name to all the organizing and advocacy she had done throughout her life. After George Floyd’s murder last May, Black Lives Matter grew from a national organization into a global rallying cry. The hashtag Cullors created seven years ago can now be found painted in the windows of local businesses, on NBA basketball courts, and on a street leading directly to the White House. As Black Lives Matter has evolved into the central nervous system in the fight against police brutality and racial injustice, Cullors has become one of the most visible and respected activists of her generation, equally effective when speaking at protests in her hometown of Los Angeles as she is on Good Morning America. Cullors is one of the leaders in the campaign to defund police departments, and, in the run-up to this year’s presidential election, a fierce advocate for voting rights. Here, she offers us an important lesson in resistance: rest.”

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She Reads | October 19, 2020

“This year was such a great year for thrillers, it’s hard to think next year can top it. Thankfully, suspense, thrillers, page-turners, and whodunits await us in the year to come. Here we rounded up some of the most anticipated thrillers of 2021.”

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb was included in this fabulous round-up! Follow the link above to read more.

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Providence Journal | October 15, 2020

“Journalistic power couple Jack Logan and Taylor Parks make a triumphant return to the page in L.C. Shaw’s riveting and relentless ‘The Silent Conspiracy’ (Harper, 324 pages, $16.95), and they’ve really got their work cut out for them this time.

Indeed, after tackling a potential brainwashing conspiracy in ‘The Network,’ they’re facing a rash of murder-suicides that seemed to suggest someone is turning ordinary people into homicidal maniacs. Before you can say ‘Stephen King,’ Jack and Taylor have come to realize that this latest conspiracy bears a direct connection to a major case involving a nefarious insurance company that Taylor, an attorney, is bringing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

‘The Silent Conspiracy’ is just credible enough to be dizzying in its message and prescience. It’s a truly scary tale, the implications of which are even more dire because it’s grounded in reality.”

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Kirkus | October 15, 2020

“With the release of When They Call You a Terrorist (Young Adult Edition): A Story of Black Lives Matter and the Power To Change the World by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, adapted by Benee Knauer (Wednesday Books, Sept. 29), teens can get to know one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, someone who is among the most influential figures shaping public discourse today. This edition of Khan-Cullors’ adult memoir packs the same emotional punch and is enhanced with questions at the end of each chapter that serve as a scaffold and inspiration for further discussion and action, making it ideal for classroom use. An intimate, self-reflective account of childhood, family, and community, the book will resonate with many while providing critical context and understanding for others. Khan-Cullors spoke to me from Los Angeles; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.”

Follow the link above to read the full interview.

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