Mystery & Suspense | January 2, 2021

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

That’s my takeaway after reading this. That, and I’m glad I don’t know anyone like the characters in this spicy little thriller.

Sophie O’Neill and her husband and young son, originally from Chicago, are new to a small town in Texas. It was time for the family to get away from the hustle and bustle of suburbia. However, Sophie quickly finds herself bored. When she happens to come across the Facebook profile of socialite Margot Banks, she is preoccupied by the thought of befriending her.

This is a fast-paced tale that ramps up pretty quickly. I hope everyone else who reads this has a fun time trying to keep up with the shenanigans as they guess who could be a murderer, and why. This is the first book I’ve read by author May Cobb, but it surely won’t be my last.

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Booklist | January 1, 2021

Throughout the year, Booklist’s Adult Books reviewers have bestowed stars upon books across our wide reviewing spectrum and editors have selected titles for our subject-area and genre Top 10 lists. We now present the 2020 master list, the very best of the best, arranged in eight broad nonfiction categories and two encompassing fiction categories, one for general and historical fiction, the other for crime, fantasy, horror, romance, and science fiction. We are elated to be able to celebrate these exceptional books, given all the struggles of 2020.

Book of the Little Axe
Francis-Sharma’s original and intricate novel revolves around Rosa, who never fit in among the free Blacks in 1790s Trinidad and ends up living in the Crow Nation of Montana, married to a chief, until their son spurs her to journey back to her roots.

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Harper's Bazaar | December 29, 2020

2020 came and went fast, but fortunately, the publishing industry kept pace with the passage of time with a slew of the year’s most anticipated titles. Here, take a look back at the best new books that arrived this year—and add them to your 2021 reading list if you haven't dug into them yet.

My Mother's House
It’s a rare work of fiction that draws comparisons to Toni Morrison at the height of her power, so it’s all the more impressive that Francesca Momplaisir’s debut novel has netted such formidable praise. When Lucien immigrates to New York City with his family, he hopes for a fresh start and a way to provide other Haitian émigrés in the city with support and shelter. But it soon becomes clear that Lucien’s old traumas have followed him into his new life—and everyone around him will soon pay the price.

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Kirkus | December 18, 2020

Exhilarating—as well as hilarious, enraging, or both at once depending on the reader.

How women got mad, busy, and finally, reluctantly, accepted into NASA’s corps of astronauts.

Recast by the creators of Primates (2013) from NASA oral-history interviews with ex-astronaut Mary Cleave and other eyewitnesses, this likewise lightly fictionalized memoir takes its narrator from childhood interests in science and piloting aircraft to two space shuttle missions and then on to later educational and administrative roles. The core of the tale is a frank and funny account of how women shouldered their way into NASA’s masculine culture and as astronaut trainees broke it down by demonstrating that they too had both the competencies and the toughness that added up to the right stuff. Highlighted by a vivid series of scenes showing Cleave with a monkey on her chest, then a chimpanzee, an orangutan, a gorilla, and finally a larger gorilla to symbolize the G-forces of liftoff, Wicks offers cleanly drawn depictions of technical gear, actual training exercises, eye-rolling encounters with sexist reporters and clueless NASA engineers, iconic figures (such as a group portrait of the watershed astronaut class of 1978: “Twenty-six white guys and nine…well…people who were not. Pretty diverse for NASA”), and astronauts at work on the ground and in space. They capture both the heady thrill of space travel and the achievements of those who led the way there.

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Esquire | December 17, 2020

If this year in cookbooks could be summed up in one neat phrase, we'd have to say it was the year of origin stories. We interpret that broadly. The books we devoured in 2020 retread ancient history, revisited homegrown habits, and reexamined roots. These books gently reminded us that looking backwards isn't a foolish endeavor, especially when the rest of the world is stuck in this horrible present. Sometimes, a good memory is the best meal prep. That and a deep breath, especially when you're standing in the kitchen with a slew of ingredients in front of you and a hungry table awaiting your final dish.

Meals, Music, and Muses
Smalls began his adult life by tearing it up onstage as an opera singer (a baritone) and then pivoted to an illustrious career as a chef and restaurateur in New York. Quite the journey, no? His newest cookbook reflects it, leaning on stories and recipes from his early years in the South, as well as his musical heritage. Put more plainly, each chapter's recipes, from okra skewers to roast quail in bourbon cream sauce, is themed around a genre of music and the tales Smalls can tell about it—gospel for greens and serenades for dessert, for example.

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Booklist | December 15, 2020

This engrossing, engaging account bills itself as a history of hip-hop, but it’s so much more. Divided into four roughly even, chronological sections beginning in 1969 and spanning into 2020, the book reviews social and political history in light of the myriad individuals and influences that created this vibrant culture. East Coast, West Coast, Black lives, gang wars, civil unrest—all are framed within the context of how they influenced, and were influenced by, the evolving hip-hop scene. Companies blacklisted artists and cancelled contracts, album releases were delayed, and songs were censored, all in testimony to the growing power of this gloriously defiant art form that gave voice to marginalized populations. This young adult version is an update to the 2005 adult edition, and terms that are generally considered to be offensive have been removed. There are also exhortations for young people to work together for positive change, beginning with DJ Kool Herc’s introduction and carrying through to the final chapter, “Black Lives Matter.” There’s new material about the current generation of women rappers and their body-positivity messaging, the #MeToo movement, and the impact of COVID-19 on the hip-hop community. The book ends with age-appropriate discussion questions that will help young readers grasp the tremendous influence hip-hop has had on current society.

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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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