Having Read That with Brian Vakulskas

Author: Tony Keith Jr.

Book: HOW THE BOOGEYMAN BECAME A POET

Publishing: ‎ Katherine Tegen Books (February 6, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

Poet, writer, and hip-hop educator Tony Keith Jr. makes his debut with a powerful YA memoir in verse, tracing his journey from being a closeted gay Black teen battling poverty, racism, and homophobia to becoming an openly gay first-generation college student who finds freedom in poetry. Perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo, George M. Johnson, and Jacqueline Woodson.

Tony dreams about life after high school, where his poetic voice can find freedom on the stage and page. But the Boogeyman has been following Tony since he was six years old. First, the Boogeyman was after his Blackness, but Tony has learned It knows more than that: Tony wants to be the first in his family to attend college, but there’s no path to follow. He also has feelings for boys, desires that don’t align with the script he thinks is set for him and his girlfriend, Blu.

Despite a supportive network of family and friends, Tony doesn’t breathe a word to anyone about his feelings. As he grapples with his sexuality and moves from high school to college, he struggles with loneliness while finding solace in gay chat rooms and writing poetry. But how do you find your poetic voice when you are hiding the most important parts of yourself? And how do you escape the Boogeyman when it’s lurking inside you?

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Author: Hannah Durkin

Book: THE SURVIVORS OF THE CLOTILDA: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade

Publishing: Amistad (January 30, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.

The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history.

In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.

An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.

The Survivors of the Clotilda includes 30 artworks and photographs.

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Author: E.A. Aymar

Book: WHEN SHE LEFT: A Thriller

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Publishing: Thomas & Mercer (February 6, 2024)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

A young couple fleeing a criminal family confronts a reluctant assassin in this heart-pounding thriller from E.A. Aymar.

When Melissa Cruz falls hard for a dreamy-eyed photographer named Jake, she can’t resist the urge to run away with him. The problem is that she already has a boyfriend, a rising star in his family’s crime organization. Betrayed and humiliated, Chris isn’t going to just let her go.

To find Melissa, Chris turns to Lucky Wilson, one of his family’s professional assassins. But Lucky has his own problems. After years of lying about his day job, his marriage is in shambles and he suffers from relentless panic attacks. He’ll do this job if Chris will let him out of the killing life.

Lucky knows this is his best chance at salvaging the home life he always craved. But Melissa and Jake aren’t going to abandon their chance at something real―something they’ve both been lacking in their lives. But they aren’t the only ones desperate to survive, and a powerful criminal family isn’t the only danger.

And soon, it’s clear that an unlikely partnership might be the only way for any of them to make it out alive…

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Author: Joanna Ho with Liz Kleinrock (Illustrated by Dung Ho)

Book: EYES THAT WEAVE THE WORLD’S WONDERS

Publishing: HarperCollins (January 23, 2024)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

“Ho now creates a beautiful book about family: what makes individuals and what connects us to one another. This book is a perfect addition to any children’s shelf, whether aimed at families, adoption, multicultural stories, or topics of love and ­acceptance.” —School Library Journal (starred review)

From New York Times bestselling Joanna Ho, of Eyes that Kiss in the Corners, and award-winning educator Liz Kleinrock comes a powerful companion picture book about adoption and family. A young girl who is a transracial adoptee learns to love her Asian eyes and finds familial connection and meaning through them, even though they look different from her parents’.

Her family bond is deep and their connection is filled with love. She wonders about her birth mom and comes to appreciate both her birth culture and her adopted family’s culture, for even though they may seem very different, they are both a part of her, and that is what makes her beautiful. She learns to appreciate the differences in her family and celebrate them.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for January 2024!

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Author: Mark J. Neary

Book: HOW CAN YOU TELL IF A LAWYER IS LYING?: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Mark J. Neary (Six Decades of Law, Laughs, Love and Lust, Some Suspenseful and Sensual Subchapters, and an Awful Amount of Alliteration)

Publishing: ‎ Independently published (January 18, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

From a small town to a small college; from the Big Ten to the big city; this is the story of Mark Neary. A tailender of the baby boom generation, he stumbles through a life and world beyond his dreams, expectations, and understanding. While living around the world, or at least in every state in the Midwest which starts with an “I”, he gathers stories great and small which all add up to a life full of joy, heartache, and all the other emotions that make us human. Or at least humanoid.

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Author: Nick Petrie

Book: THE PRICE YOU PAY (A Peter Ash Novel)

Publishing: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (February 6, 2024)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

Peter Ash must follow his closest friend, Lewis, into the criminal underworld when secrets from the past threaten everything they hold dear in this propulsive new thriller from the bestselling and award-winning series.

Lewis has helped Peter Ash out of more trouble than Peter cares to remember. So he doesn’t hesitate when Lewis asks a favor in return. Lewis has left his criminal past behind, but a former associate may be in trouble, and he and Peter must drive into the teeth of a blizzard to find him. When they discover blood in the snow and a smoldering cabin, both men know things are bad. Then they learn that someone has stolen notebooks full of incriminating secrets about Lewis’s long-ago crimes, and realize the situation is much worse than they’d thought.

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Author: Celeste L. Edmunds (with Richard Paul Evans)

Book: GARBAGE BAG GIRL

Publishing: Ascendt Publishing (November 15, 2023)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

This book is an honest and vulnerable first-person account of Celeste Edmunds a young woman who was raised by drug addict parents and, at a young age, learned to survive and protect her siblings among rapists and drug dealers. Eventually the state separated the family and Celeste was adopted, alone, into a dysfunctional, fractured home where she was treated, by a sadistic and manipulating mother, as an unwanted outsider. Contemplating taking her abusers life, she eventually ran away, finding shelter wherever she could, until a compassionate woman stepped in to give her a home and love. Ultimately, Garbage Bag Girl, is an unforgettable story of hope.

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Author: Deborah G. Plant

Book: OF GREED AND GLORY: In Pursuit of Freedom for All

Publishing: ‎ Amistad (January 9, 2024)debo

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America’s obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times–bestselling Barracoon.

Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American’s personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans—including author Deborah Plant’s brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on the history of slavery in America—are deprived of these basic freedoms every day.

In her studies of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant became fascinated by Hurston’s explanation for the atrocities of the international slave trade. In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote: “But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.” We look the other way when the basic human rights of marginalized and stigmatized groups are violated and desecrated, not realizing that only the practice of justice everywhere secures justice, for any of us, anywhere.

An active vigilance is required of those who would be and remain free; with Of Greed and Glory, Deborah Plant reveals the many ways in which slavery continues in America today and charts our collective course toward personal sovereignty for all.

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Book: REEF ROAD: A Novel

Author: Deborah Goodrich Royce

Publishing: ‎ Post Hill Press (January 9, 2024) – Paperback Edition

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

A Publishers Weekly Bestseller

Named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2023

When a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, the lives of two women—a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend and a panicked wife whose husband has disappeared with their children—collide as the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.

“Reef Road is magnificent. It feels utterly real, a novel of deeply personal context. It swerves between truth and lies—the lies that lead to an even deeper—and more devastating—truth. Though pure fiction, it reads as compellingly as a mixture of memoir and exposé. It has left me shaken to the core. Deborah Goodrich Royce writes with brilliant understanding of the mystery and occasional grace of trauma.” —Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them.

In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Reef Road probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy and, like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.

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Author: Patricia Cornwell

Book: UNNATURAL DEATH: A Scarpetta Novel

Publishing: Grand Central Publishing (November 28, 2023)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

Two mauled bodies in the woods. Top secret autopsies. The most chilling cases of Scarpetta’s career.

In this thrilling new installment of Patricia Cornwell’s #1 bestselling Scarpetta series, chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself in a Northern Virginia wilderness examining the remains of two campers wanted by federal law enforcement.

The victims have been savaged beyond recognition, and other evidence is terrifying and baffling, including a larger-than-life footprint.

After one of the most frightening body retrievals of her career, Scarpetta must discover who would commit murders this savage, and why.

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