"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

"Are You Staying, Mandy Boyle?"

New from Blackstone: Are You Staying, Mandy Boyle? by Melanie Moore.

About the book, from the publisher:

A brilliant debut from Melanie Moore, Are You Staying, Mandy Boyle? will have you laughing, crying, and aching with the frustrations and joys of taking huge risks and falling in love big time.

Mandy Boyle is thirty-five, still living with her stepfather in his rent-stabilized apartment, and still stuck as a copy editor at The New York Times, awaiting the next big layoff. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but ten years ago, she put her journalism career on hold and moved back to the city to care for her dying mother. Of course, she can’t be salty about that.

Then everything changes when Mandy wins a one-hundred-plus-year-old newspaper in Vermont and the apartment over it—a New Yorker’s dream! The only catch? She must run The Liberty Eagle for one year and can’t sell it to a conglomerate until that year is up. Sounds great, until Mandy discovers the Eagle is definitely old school, definitely not profitable, and that she is definitely in way over her head.

Suddenly she’s a city girl thrust into a quaint Vermont town at Christmastime, where everyone knows everything about each other. One plus? The mechanic in the next building, Greg Stewart, who keeps trying to sell her snow tires, is very easy on the eyes. Mandy would like to know more about him, but he’s plenty guarded. As she struggles to right the sinking newspaper, she bonds with people in the town, including a young woman who is losing her own mother to cancer, an emotional connection that cracks open Mandy’s own guarded heart.

Through it all, Mandy is drawn to Greg. He just may be her best friend. Maybe the love of her life. But how can two such guarded hearts ever fully fall for each other—especially when Mandy is sure she’ll be leaving by the time next Christmas rolls around?

Visit Melanie Moore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Justice Was Her Calling"

New from the University of California Press: Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon by Jennifer L. Brinkley.

About the book, From the publisher:

Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint.

Justice Was Her Calling is the first full-length biography of the New York judge, lawyer, and civil liberties champion whose litigation strategies helped transform the Equal Protection Clause into a powerful tool for women’s rights. Across decades, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal and into the rise of second-wave feminism, Dorothy Kenyon stood at the forefront of reform.

A longtime ACLU national board member, the only woman appointed by the League of Nations to study women’s legal status worldwide, and a US delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Kenyon pushed equality onto the global stage long before it was widely embraced. Her career was nearly undone when Senator Joseph McCarthy named her first on his list of alleged communists, a spurious accusation that cast a lasting shadow.

Drawing on letters, speeches, and fresh archival research, Jennifer L. Brinkley restores Kenyon to her rightful status as a legal pioneer and reminds us that civil liberties endure only when defended.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Prairie Oyster"

New from the University of Iowa Press: Prairie Oyster by Sophie Robinson.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Pearl is a thirty-something filmmaker balanced precariously on the edge of an addiction-fueled breakdown. But when she is invited to interview her idol and crush, lesbian cult filmmaker Mitch Meyer, her stilted life restarts.

Buoyed and seduced by Mitch’s interest in her and her work, Pearl swaps alcoholism for romantic obsession and London for a summer in New York with Mitch. All the while she is haunted by a project she has been toying with for years: a film about Veronica Lake, a 1940s film star who drank herself into obscurity.

Follow Sophie Robinson on Instagram and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Interrogating Nazism"

New from Cambridge University Press: Interrogating Nazism: Spies, Soldiers and War Criminals in Second World War Britain by Artemis Photiadou.

About the book, from the publisher:

Behind the front lines of the Second World War raged a different kind of battle. In secret camps across Britain, thousands of enemy spies, soldiers, and war criminals were interrogated in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany and the ideology that drove it. Drawing on extensive British archival sources, Artemis Photiadou uncovers the methods, motives, and moral tensions behind this vast machinery of questioning. Within it, officers, scientists, and linguists sought to extract military intelligence, as well as to grasp why individuals fought Hitler's war and, eventually, to assess their complicity in the regime's crimes. The resulting interactions expose the complexity of those who were questioned, the assumptions of their interrogators, and the ethical contradictions of a liberal state at war. This is a vivid account of how Britain attempted to comprehend the enemy it was fighting.

--Marshal Zeringue