Debut. NY magazine’s Vulture writes in 18 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer, “this phenomenal debut explores what happens when we make any number of decisions by rote and fail to see or question the bigger picture.” Adds BuzzFeed in “30 Summer Books To Get Excited About, “Ma’s language does so much in this book, and its precision, its purposeful specificity, implicates an entire generation.”
Debut. Entertainment Weekly, 7 inclusive novels that will make you think, “follows the lives of four friends as they drift apart and come back together, navigating adulthood as black men living with traumatic legacies who have been offered very different fortunes as they come of age. Holmes’ searing study in masculinity is offset by irresistible heart and biting humor. ”
Philadelphia Inquirer, Summer books, “A tale set in Ghana, where a girl is given up by her family, endures a very hard life, and, once set free, must find a way to heal and live forward.” McFadden is the author of 8 books, her previous, The Book Of Harlan, won the 2017 American Book Award, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction) and was named a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016.
Praise Song for Butterflies is also mentioned in the new issue of Vanity Fair, which debuts a real books section, replacing the old Hot Type column, with its dizzying run-on list of titles. The welcome change is no surprise. The magazine’s new editor, Radhika Jones, was formerly at the NYT Book Review. Featured in the new issue’s book section is a profile of the owners of the “Trailblazing Black-Owned Bookstore,” D.C.’s Mahogany. Their favorite upcoming title is McFadden’s.
The Air You Breathe, Frances de Pontes Peebles, (PRH/Riverhead); DRC Edelweiss and NetGalley
Philadelphia Inquirer, Summer books, — “The long friendship between Dores and Graça is forged through music. Based partly on the life of Carmen Miranda, this novel takes us from 1920 Brazilian sugar plantations to the urban samba scene of the 1930s.” Previous title, The Seamstress.
Asghar, Fatimah, If They Come for Us, (PRH/Random House/One World, August). Pbk. Original; DRC, Edelweiss and NetGalley
The Philadelphia Inquirer notes, “Asghar, co-creator of the web/HBO series Brown Girls, writes through the eyes of a Pakistani woman who comes to America and discovers a very strange country indeed.”
Reminder: Nominations are due for the June LibraryReads list in just a couple of days, by midnight, April 20th.
The just-released May LibraryReads list is remarkably homogenous. All the authors are white women, most of them have already published several books, and the majority of the titles are in the rapidly growing, some would say over-published, category of psychological suspense.
While readers advisors can happily read and recommend any of the titles, as Becky Spratford has often noted in her blog RA for All, they won’t expand readers’ horizons. She pointedly asks, “Why aren’t we all going out of way to look for titles that don’t get recognition?”
To help you do that, we’ve added “Debut” and “Diversity” columns to our spreadsheet of the nearly 200 titles mentioned during last week’s GalleyChat, GalleyChat Titles, April.
Below are are excerpts from the tweets about the June titles by non-white and LGBT authors. If you haven’t read them already, you probably won’t have time to do so before the deadline, but this may serve to remind you of titles beyond the familiar. As Becky says, “If every single one of [you] laid off of voting for the more mainstream titles and instead voted for a more diverse title, many of those mainstream titles would still get in, but maybe a few more marginalized voices would too.”
Native American
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse, S&S/Saga Press, June 26, 2018, DRC available
DEBUT
GalleyChatter: “Really fun, unique urban fantasy/postapoc blend with Indigenous characters & mythology!” —– ” a post-apocalyptic urban fantasy with a Navajo cast of characters.”
Author background:
“Rebecca Roanhorse is an Ohkay Owingeh/Black writer of Indigenous futurisms. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pug. Her debut novel Trail of Lightning(Book One of the Sixth World series) is available summer 2018 from Saga Press, and her children’s book Race to the Sunis coming in 2019 from Rick Riordan Presents. Her short story ‘Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience‘ is on the 2017 Nebula Recommended Reading List.
There There: A novel, Tommy Orange, PRH/Knopf, June 5, 2018, DRC available
DEBUT
GalleyChatter: “a story of urban indigenous peoples. Got a big push at #pla2018” — Following up on that, PRH Library tweeted that it is a department favorite.
The New Yorker recently published a story that comes from the book, and an interview, in which the author explaind that he wrote There, There because, “I knew I wanted to write a multigenerational, multivoiced novel about Native people living in Oakland. My wanting to write it largely had to do with there not already being a novel about Native people who live in cities, and very few novels set in Oakland. Native people suffer from poor representation as it is, but having little representation in literature, as well as no (literary) version of our (urban Native) experience, was what made me want to write into that space, that void, and try to honor and express fully all that it entails to be Native and be from Oakland.”
Vietnamese-American/Autism
The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang, PRH/Berkley pbk original, June 5, 2018, DRC not listed
DEBUT Bustle headlines a story about the book, “The Kiss Quotient Is A Refreshing Own Voices Romance With A Heroine On The Autism Spectrum”
From the publisher:
“Key Selling Points
DEBUT AUTHOR who was discovered during Pitch Wars, an online contest with wide social media reach, where published authors match up with a mentee and work on pitch to catch an agent or editor’s eye; Helen was mentored by Brighton Walsh, a contemporary romance author published by Berkley and St. Martin’s Press
THE HEROINE HAS ASPERGER’S, as does the author, who is willing to discuss her personal experience
MULTICULTURAL CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE: hero is half Vietnamese and the author, who is also part Vietnamese, seamlessly introduces cultural elements
AN OWN VOICES NOVEL: romance readers are clamoring for better representation in romances and this book speaks to the #OwnVoices social media movement”
LGBT
History of Violence: A Novel, Édouard Louis, Translated by Lorin Stein, Macmillan/FSG, June 19, 2018, DRC available
Gallleychatter: “…by the author of End of Eddy. Has a unique voice.”
From the publisher: “On Christmas Eve 2012, in Paris, the novelist Édouard Louis was raped and almost murdered by a man he had just met. This act of violence left Louis shattered; its aftermath made him a stranger to himself and sent him back to the village, the family, and the past he had sworn to leave behind.”
When Katie Met Cassidy, Camille Perri, PRH/Putnam, June 19, 2018, DRC available by request
Galleychatters were enthusiasitc about the author’s
debut, The Assistants.
Former librarian and library page Perri speaks to librarians at a PRH Open Book session (be sure
to check out her demo of the “Page Freeze” beginning at time stamp 3:24)
Confessions of the Fox: A Novel, Jordy Rosenberg, PRH/ One World, June 26, 2018, DRC available
DEBUT
Author background:
“Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer and scholar. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and queer/trans theory. He has received fellowships and awards from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation/J. Paul Getty Trust, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the Clarion Foundation’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of a scholarly monograph, Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion. He lives in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts. Confessions of the Fox is his first novel.”
African-American
Ayiti, Roxane Gay, Grove/Atlantic, June 12, 2018, DRC available by request
Originally published in 2011 by the Artistically Declined Press, this new edition from Grove Press, according to the publisher, “includes several new stories,” which may qualify it for the LibraryReads list.
Chinese-American
The Lost Vintage: A Novel, Ann Mah, HarperCollins/Morrow, June 19, 2018, DRC available
GalleyChatter comment, “Loved the LOST VINTAGE by Ann Mah- historical fiction with a mystery about a family member no one knew about, WWII & it’s set in a vineyard.”
In an unusual vote of confidence for a film with no stars attached so far, Sony has announced a release date for Tri-Star’s adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s NYT bestseller, The Nightingale (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Macmillan Audio, OverDrive Sample). Deadline Hollywood reports that it is set to debut on August 10, 2018.
The movie also features a first-time film director, Michelle McLaren. However, she has had wide-ranging experience in television, directing episodes of hit shows such as Game of Thrones and Modern Family.
The book also represents a first for author Kristin Hannah. Her first historical novel, after several best selling contemporary romances, the change in genre brought her to a new level of sales. The Nightingale was on the NYT best seller for almost two years, much longer than any of her previous novels. After its paperback release, it went immediately onto the NYT Paperback Trade Fiction list where it is currently #7.
The heavily promoted adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s debut YA novel Everything, Everything opens on May 19. The book debuted at #1 on the NYT Young Adult best seller list and stayed on it for over a year. The release of the trailer in February brought the book back to the list, again at #1
The film stars Amandla Stenberg (who played Rue in The Hunger Games) and Nick Robinson (Zach in Jurassic World). Stella Meghie (Jean of the Joneses) directs.
The three previous films in the series have been commercial, although not critical successes. The new film, featuring a fresh cast including Alicia Silverstone, Tom Everett Scott, Charlie Wright, and Jason Drucker, follows a family road trip.
Also opening May 19th is Wakefield, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s short story of the same name. Starring Bryan Cranston and Jennifer Garner, it tells the story of a man who “vanishes” but really only hides in his garage spying on the lives of his family and neighbors.
Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter posted reviews in 2016 when the film was making the festival circuit. While praising Cranston’s performance, Variety says the ending is “a cop-out.” The Hollywood Reporter agrees that Cranston “is the whole show” and calls the film “decreasingly convincing.”
There are nine books in the series. This newest adaptation is based on the sixth, titled A Fool And His Honey (PRH/Berkley; OverDrive Sample). This is also the 6th Hallmark adaptation, following A Bone To Pick, Real Murders, Three Bedrooms One Corpse, The Julius House, and Dead Over Heels.
The show stars Candace Cameron Bure (Full House) as the librarian sleuth. There is no tie-in, although the book is still available. See the Hallmark site for a preview (unfortunately we cannot embed the clip).
It’s not being propelled by the reviews. As we have been tracking (and here), they are pretty damning, but they are outweighed by considerable interest in the author.
The #2 and #3 best-selling books are middle grade and YA series, reflecting the strength of those series, something that is masked by lists that divide their rankings by age/category.
Dropping down the list is Bill O’Reilly’s Old School: Life in the Sane Lane (Macmillan/Holt; Macmillan Audio). It debuted at #2 on the April 5th list and began falling after his firing from Fox News.
James Patterson’s newest co-author is getting top billing. According to the Associated Press, Patterson and former president Bill Clinton are writing a thriller together, appropriately titled The President is Missing.
The Amazon listing shows that it will be released on June 11, 2018, ISBN 978-0316412698. In an unusual move, it will be published jointly by PRH/ Knopf, which has published Clinton’s most recent books, and Patterson’s publisher, Hachette/Little, Brown.
In a the press release announcing the book, the publishers say it will be “a unique amalgam of intrigue, suspense and behind-the-scenes global drama from the highest corridors of power. It will be informed by details that only a president can know.”
Clinton adds, “Working on a book about a sitting president — drawing on what I know about the job, life in the White House and the way Washington works — has been a lot of fun. And working with Jim has been terrific. I’ve been a fan of his for a very long time.”
Hearing the news, we had to check the date, but April Fools Day was over a month ago. Further backing it up, the story is being reported by several other sources, including the Washington Post. and the New York Times, which quotes unnamed sources saying the idea was cooked up by the agent the two men share.
River of Stars, Vanessa Hua, (PRH/Ballantine Books); DRC, Edelweiss and NetGalley
How Are You Going To Save Yourself, JM Holmes, (Hachette/Little, Brown); DRC NetGalley
Praise Song for the Butterflies, Bernice L. McFadden (Akashic, August), Original; DRC, Edelweiss
The Air You Breathe, Frances de Pontes Peebles, (PRH/Riverhead); DRC Edelweiss and NetGalley
Asghar, Fatimah, If They Come for Us , (PRH/Random House/One World, August). Pbk. Original; DRC, Edelweiss and NetGalley
