New Year—New Reads
Start the new year with a hilarious detective story, learn about an activist fighting against gentrification in her neighborhood and discover the power of truly being there for somebody.
When the shopkeeper downstairs is murdered, a class full of pregnant women all become suspects. They band together to find the actual killer in the delightful "The Expectant Detectives" by Kat Ailes. "The Queen of Sugar Hill" by ReShonda Tate is based on actress Hattie McDaniel’s real-life fight to keep Black residents from getting pushed out of her LA neighborhood.
People hire Shoji Morimoto to show up and do nothing much. In his new memoir "Rental Person Who Does Nothing," he reflects on the people who hire him to tag along on errands or sit in waiting rooms and ponders the power of simply being there. Antonia Hylton’s "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum" is a fascinating and necessary look at the horrific abuses and cover-ups at a segregated asylum, Maryland’s Crownsville Hospital.
Younger readers will be gripped by Emmy’s story when, after the Japanese invasion of Dutch Batavia (modern-day Indonesia), she is separated from her father and sent to a prison camp in "The Songbird and the Rambutan Tree" by Lucille Abendanon, based on the author’s grandmother’s real-life experience.
For teens, "The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee" by Ellen Oh features a girl who gets sucked into her webtoon and has to find her way back out to the real world.
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