The Names of All the Flowers by Melissa Valentine
I absolutely adore this extraordinary debut memoir, which captures the love and joy, the grief and heartache of growing up in a mixed-race Black family in 1990s Oakland, California. A love letter to the author’s brother, Junior, who was murdered one week after being released from prison, this book is a bold and poetic excavation of fear and trauma in Black families—a deeply American story.
What is particularly moving is how much the author’s family desperately works to protect Junior, a boy who remains unseen, unknown by the system, crushed by the school-to-prison pipeline. Also Valentine compellingly describes the yearning that she has as a child for a sense of “normalcy” and beauty in her life. “The Names of All the Flowers” haunts the reader with its honesty and grace. It’s one of those books that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford
A stunningly intimate and highly atmospheric novel with so much tenderness and heart, “Crooked Hallelujah” explores the complex mother-daughter relationships within four generations of Cherokee women in Oklahoma and Texas.
These women’s experiences are filled with often devastating hardships and disappointments caused by men, and yet the beauty and loyalty of their relationships with each other, in particular Reney’s with her mother Justine, carries them through life.
Ford is particularly detail-oriented, using objects such as bottles of Dr. Pepper and cans of Aqua Net to illustrate the daily realities and desires of these women’s lives. As a novel in stories, this book also carefully takes us through a landscape swelling with emotional power and forces of nature from tornadoes to wildfires. It’s such an honor to experience the magnificence of the everyday through these characters.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
This nonfiction book, which explores the stories of undocumented people in Latinx communities from Miami to Flint, left me breathless at its end. I love how the author weaves her own immigrant family’s stories through powerful essays that reveal not only the joys, the heartache and fears of her subjects, and herself, but the ways in which so much of American life—our food, even our safety—relies on the sacrifices of undocumented families.
Also I just adore the boldness of this book’s voice—Cornejo Villavicencio’s self-awareness of her role as a writer, and of her own power and privilege as a Harvard graduate, a “success story.” And she never fails to disclose her struggles with her own family and mental health, refusing any tidy labels. This is an exquisitely personal account of stories and lives of sweeping range and scope.
A Good Country By Laleh Khadivi
This book is as shocking and dark as it is seductive, scintillating like the surfaces of its idyllic setting in Laguna Beach, California. The main character, Alireza Courdee, a moody Iranian American teenager of a prosperous immigrant family, is achingly familiar and fully realized in his adolescent loneliness and struggles to find an identity.
Yet after a falling out with his surfer friends, the tragedy of the Boston Marathon bombing, and an attack at a local shopping mall, the local community turns on Rez and his Muslim friends, which pushes him toward extremism.
Although deeply unsettling, I loved the unflinching honesty of this book, which does not shy away from the realities and consequences of xenophobia and racism on both a personal and social level. “A Good Country” is a stunning and richly crafted meditation on the lengths that individuals will go for a sense of belonging in this world.
Saving Ruby West By Catherine Adel West
Incredibly compassionate and compellingly paced, “Saving Ruby King” explores though multiple perspectives the lives of two Black families on the South Side of Chicago bound by community, trauma, secrets, and faith. The book begins with the tragic murder of Ruby’s mother, Alice, who is also the victim of domestic violence by her husband.
As Layla, Ruby’s best friend, yearns to protect Ruby from more harm, Alice’s death unlocks some of the dangerous secrets holding this tight-knit community together.
I love how this novel tells a complex story while delving into the very real-life brutalities both within families and society at large. West could’ve written a book that gives us easy answers to all the questions that arise, but she honors each of her character’s humanity by refusing to shy away from the tough realities of their choices within the limitations of their lives, and the consequences they now, and we all, have to live with as well.
