"The Squatters"

New from The Dial Press: The Squatters: A Novel by Saba Brelvi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Two families collide in this provocative debut about motherhood, migration, and the distance between who we are and who we want to be.

How far are you willing to go to help someone in need?

Surrey is a quiet, affluent area just outside of London, replete with tree-lined streets, great schools, and friendly neighbors. Though she and her husband embody second-generation immigrant success, Dalia Waheed has never quite felt like she belongs.

While volunteering at a local nonprofit called Refugee Resettlement, Dalia meets the very pregnant Hajira and her husband, who are seeking asylum in the UK. In Hajira, Dalia feels a kinship she can’t quite explain. So, when Hajira asks for help finding an alternative to their grim government housing, Dalia knows she will not ignore her plea. Helping another mother secure a safer place to live seems less like charity than duty.

But what begins as a simple act of compassion quickly spirals into something far more treacherous. Soon, Dalia finds herself engulfed in a political firestorm that forces her to confront what she's truly willing to risk—for her ideals, her family, and for a woman who has already lost everything.

Visit Saba Brelvi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Holding On to Home"

New from the University of California Press: Holding On to Home: Immigrant Women and the Promise of Sanctuary by Sarah Bruhn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over twenty million Americans live in cities that have passed sanctuary policies to protect the rights of immigrants and their families. However, contentious public conversations surrounding sanctuary obscure what these policies actually mean to the immigrants they purport to serve, making it hard to see what strengthens the power of sanctuary and what undermines its protections.

Holding On to Home, based on five years of fieldwork and over one hundred in-depth interviews, illuminates how immigrant women’s care work―in their families, schools, and communities―makes real the promise of sanctuary. Through their resistive care work, immigrant women weave together an enduring fabric of protection that transforms inclusive policies into meaningful practices that support immigrant mothers as they nurture their children and loved ones. Holding On to Home reveals how these women confront both overt threats to sanctuary―anti-immigrant policies and increasingly violent and arbitrary immigration enforcement―alongside a less obvious threat to sanctuary, but one that widens inequality in our urban landscapes: gentrification. Tracing the meaning of sanctuary across shifting political contexts, Sarah Bruhn powerfully demonstrates how immigrant women resist these forces of exclusion to lay claim to their right to create a home and to belong in our shared cities.

Visit Sarah Bruhn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bear Brawl"

New from Blackstone: Bear Brawl: A Novel by Jon Finkel.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Fight Club meets The Revenant in Bear Brawl, a heartfelt revenge-and-redemption story that asks, Could a man really take on a bear?

Brick Bridger is a two-time NCAA heavyweight wrestling champion and the winner of eight UFC fights before retiring. One summer night, running late to his mom’s barbecue, disaster strikes. A rogue black bear goes on a rampage, breaks into the cabin, kills his mom, and puts his brother in a wheelchair. Devastated, Brick knows that had he been there, he could have stopped the bear. With the help of a top zoologist, his old wrestling coach, and his training partner, Brick vows to get revenge.

Bear Brawl takes readers on a blockbuster adventure from the first page, with a cast of unforgettable characters you’ll root for like you’re watching your favorite action movie.

Visit Jon Finkel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mary Kay"

New from Columbia Unversity Press: Mary Kay: How a Cosmetics Empire Transformed Women’s Work in America by Cassandra L. Yacovazzi.

About the book, from the publisher:

When Mary Kay Ash founded her company, Beauty by Mary Kay, in 1963, women had limited options in a male-dominated business world. By the 1970s, the cosmetics and skincare company had a salesforce of tens of thousands and became the first woman-founded firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Mary Kay and the pink Cadillac turned into cultural icons, and the company remains a billion-dollar global business. Often dismissed as a lipstick-selling side hustle or labeled a predatory multilevel marketing scheme, Mary Kay drove a major and surprising shift in women’s economic opportunities outside the office.

This book tells the story of Mary Kay Ash and the cosmetics firm that bears her name, from its founding and growth to the distinctive gendered corporate culture she cultivated. Ash combined direct sales and multilevel marketing strategies with workplace flexibility, a rhetoric of “be your own boss,” and a sense of community and recognition for American women as they entered the workplace. She monetized women’s social networks and fostered a lifestyle brand built on values of faith, family, and free enterprise. Cassandra L. Yacovazzi explores how women in Mary Kay have navigated opportunity, structural constraints, and shifting gender norms, showing how they are sometimes empowered and sometimes exploited. She also considers Mary Kay Ash’s complex personal life and carefully constructed public image, simultaneously a maternal icon and a driven executive. In this nuanced view of Mary Kay that elevates the voices of the women who participated, we find new insights into the history of the beauty industry, female entrepreneurship, and women’s work in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Meaning of Daughter"

New from the University of Iowa Press: The Meaning of Daughter by Alexia Nader.

About the novel, from the publisher:

After immigrating from Lebanon to Haiti as a young girl, Merjan comes of age in an insular, conservative community, where it seems as though her sole escape is marriage. Striking a bargain with a young art dealer, she marries and dreams of becoming a painter, only to discover her husband’s support tethered with expectations.

In the late 1970s, Merjan’s daughter Yvonne is a young woman on the cusp of a marriage of convenience. Though resentful of her mother, Yvonne dreams of establishing a Haitian art gallery in New York with the help of a well-connected older man—but her time there ends disastrously, creating a deep rift between her and her family.

In the present day, Yvonne’s daughter Eva is a student whose art draws inspiration from her grandmother Merjan’s largely undiscovered work. When Eva becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she moves back to her childhood home in Miami to sort out her ambivalent feelings, where she finds her family upended by feuds. An intimate family saga, The Meaning of Daughter explores questions about maternal ambivalence, ambition, artmaking, and how desire resists gendered expectations.

Visit Alexia Nader's website.

See Alexia Nader's seven books that weigh the choice of motherhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Forces of Creolization"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Forces of Creolization: Glissant and a Decolonial Feminist Aperture by Ruthanne Soohee Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking feminist and decolonial reading of Édouard Glissant

Forces of Creolization reads Édouard Glissant’s poetic and philosophical work through a feminist, decolonial lens, foregrounding creolization as a force of resistance, relationality, and submerged becoming. Drawing on Caribbean poststructuralism, Black feminist thought, and Global South epistemologies, Ruthanne Soohee Kim unveils a method of reading Glissant that centers diffraction, opacity, and errantry―not merely as metaphors but as political and poetic strategies.

Reading Glissant alongside Luce Irigaray, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Kamau Brathwaite, Kim shows how creolization resists colonial genealogies, racial essentialism, and patriarchal closure. With her close readings of Glissant’s novels, essays, and theoretical writings, Kim theorizes the abyss, the open boat, and the Medusing shoreline as sites where historical trauma becomes creative insurgency. Here, chaos, revolt, and carnival emerge as generative forces of world-making. Forces of Creolization offers an interdisciplinary framework for rethinking kinship, identity, and futurity, and contributes a necessary feminist aperture to Caribbean thought.

Follow Ruthanne Soohee Kim on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Call of Crowns"

New from Harper Voyager: The Call of Crowns: Book Two of Birth of a Dynasty by Chinaza Bado.

About the book, from the publisher:

It’s a game of palace intrigue, survival, and plotting as Khalil and Zikora continue to grow up under the thumb of a tyrannical family in this electrifying second book in the Birth of a Dynasty trilogy.

The kingdom of Ahkelbulin is on the brink of war. Following a shocking death, the royal court is a viper’s nest of ambition and betrayal. The princes, once united, now eye the throne with hungry gazes, forging dangerous alliances that could tear their dynasty apart.

In the heart of the palace, Zikora navigates the treacherous political currents. Far from home and concealing a powerful secret, she is drawn into a high-stakes game where one wrong move could mean her end. Elsewhere, a new commander, Khalil, finds his loyalty tested as he is caught between warring factions, forced to choose between duty and morality.

As power shifts and loyalties are questioned, unlikely alliances will form and ancient powers will awaken. In a world where blood oaths hold immense power and the line between friend and foe is blurred, the struggle for the crown will demand unimaginable sacrifices. The very future of Ahkelbulin hangs in the balance, and not everyone will survive the call of crowns...

Visit Chinaza Bado's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Virtually Latinx"

New from the University of Texas Press: Virtually Latinx: Identities in the Age of Social Media by Urayoán Noel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining how Latinx identity reimagines and connects communities through social media.

The very idea of Latinidad flattens identities, subsuming diverse peoples under a single racialized framework useful for corporate and political marketing. But it is not only ethnic identity that Latinidad tends to erase. In the first-ever study of Latinx social media, Urayoán Noel shows how historically marginalized Latinxs―including Black, Trans, undocumented, and disabled people―have used digital platforms to challenge hegemonic Latinidad and to build alternatives communities.

Incorporating elements of history, ethnography, and performance studies, Virtually Latinx traces the evolution of Latinx social media and blogging since the early 1990s, focusing on creative movements and vocabularies emerging and consolidating online. From Chicano/LatinoNet, Latina Lista, and Remezcla, to activists and performers on TikTok, online creators and platforms have spurred modes of art and activism that counter both Latinidad’s essentialized body politics and Big Tech’s domination of the information sphere. In dialogue with scholars of media, virtuality, and identity, Noel theorizes how hashtags like #Afrolatina, #Latinx, and #Latine have not only facilitated online exchange but also nurtured new knowledge formations surrounding Black, feminist, undocuqueer, Trans, and disability poetics and politics.

Visit Urayoán Noel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Best Revenge"

New from MIRA: The Best Revenge by Amy Carol Reeves.

About the book, from the publisher:

Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Beach Read in this wickedly funny romantic comedy with a delicious jilted-lover-gives-just-deserts twist.

Librarian Hannah is furious when her freeloading boyfriend, Chad, steals her book idea, leaves her for his agent, and becomes wildly successful. She teams up with other women Chad has wronged (and there are a lot of them!) to get revenge—just a little comeuppance.

The fabulous news is Hannah has a new boyfriend. Unfortunately, Hannah has to hide her schemes from her hunky Scottish love, James, who claims to hate revenge plots of any kind. But it gets harder to hide her increasingly elaborate plans—even as he hides his own messy past…

And everything goes hilariously wrong.

Visit from Amy Carol Reeves's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Zoo Lady"

New from the University of Nebraska Press: The Zoo Lady: How Belle Benchley Built the San Diego Zoo by Sandra E. Bonura.

About the book, From the publisher:

The struggling San Diego Zoo received a miracle in 1927: Belle Jennings Benchley, a middle-aged, newly divorced mother, reluctantly accepted a temporary job she openly “dreaded.” Small in stature and matronly in appearance, she charmed everyone she met―but beneath that gentle demeanor lay a leader of steel.

Benchley was just as likely to be found nurturing a vulnerable infant animal or calming fighting primates as she was wrestling a rattlesnake. Through these hands-on encounters, she won the deep affection of staff and visitors alike. Despite her lack of scientific credentials, the “Zoo Lady,” as she was fondly called, relied on curiosity and common sense to help build what would become a world-class institution. Drawing insights from the animals themselves rather than the era’s rigid authorities, she pioneered conservation practices guided by her “animal instinct,” a term she coined.

Benchley authored four best-selling books that humorously illustrated that animals are not so different from people. Even as she faced relentless pressure to “stay in her place,” she met every challenge with unshakable courage. Over nearly three decades, Benchley transformed the San Diego Zoo into a global landmark, inventing groundbreaking educational programs that mentored generations of conservation leaders.

A true trailblazer, Benchley paved the way for future icons like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, becoming the world’s first woman director of a major zoo and the first woman elected president of the national association now known as the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The Zoo Lady tells the extraordinary story of a woman whose courage and compassion forever changed zoology and reshaped the way we see―and care for―the animal world.

Visit Sandra E. Bonura's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Sugar King of California.

--Marshal Zeringue