With the impact of the anti-Black racism protests last month, some of the celebrity-founded book clubs kept the focus on Black stories as others chose the top books of the summer including reads perfect for the beach (if it’s open) and texts exploring gender and sexual identity.

AMERIE’S BOOK CLUB

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

The debut novel features a Palestinian American girl who is yelled at by a group of men for showing her legs on a trip to Bethlehem. The experience eventually allows her to tell her mother she’s queer as she moves to different spaces to find her true self.

“I rooted for her and hurt for her as she tried to find her way through one bad decision after another,” Amerie wrote on Instagram. “The main character, whose name is never revealed, stayed with me long after I closed the book, as did her hope for yet another shot at love.”

BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB

The Dragons, The Giant, The Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore

The author of She Would Be King and founder of nonprofit One Moore Book has a new memoir about her experience living through the civil war in Liberia. At five years old, she’s waiting to be reunited with her mother, who’s studying in New York, then her world is turned upside down with the war. Her family flees on foot from their home and get smuggled across the border of Sierra Leone, where they get a chance to fly to the U.S.

Belletrist, founded by actress Emma Roberts and producer Karah Preiss, also chose the Black woman-owned Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago as its indie bookstore of the month.

GMA BOOK CLUB

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

The Crazy Rich Asians series creator’s new book takes place on the island of Capri with a half-Chinese, half-White woman trying to fall for the well-off White man her family likes while avoiding another man, who is Chinese, she keeps suppressing her feelings for.

“It’s a summer escape full of travel, food, fun and fashion,” Kevin told Good Morning America. “The outrageous characters will make your crazy families seem almost normal.”

KAIA GERBER’S BOOK CLUB

Darling Days: A Memoir by iO Tillett Wright

Born female, the author comes of age in downtown New York with a young widowed mother and adopts the persona of a boy amid the 1980s “intersection of punk, poverty, heroin, and art.”

“In talking to him about his experience publishing this book, he taught me that writers who happen to be queer too often are dismissed as ‘queer writers’ and their books, regardless of the topics they cover, end up exclusively stocked on ‘LGBT author’ shelves,” Kaia wrote in an Instagram post. “Darling Days goes far beyond this—it is a story about neglect, creativity, internalized homophobia, and the beauty you can make out of pain. it is a New York story of growing up and out of the life you are born into.”

NONAME’S BOOK CLUB

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith

Rapper Noname picks Are Prisons Obsolete?, a book that calls for the abolition of prisons and how it will benefit society as a whole. The homie pick, Captive Genders, comes from Che Gossett. It studies trans and gender-queer people in prison with the most recent version including a foreword from CeCe MacDonald, who was imprisoned for killing a transphobic attacker, and an essay by Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier who transitioned amid getting sentenced for espionage.

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

This novel tells the story of a church deacon who shoots the neighborhood drug dealer point blank range in front of the community and the aftermath.

“In naming Deacon King Kong my latest Oprah’s Book Club selection, I am hoping readers will find in it what I did: sorrow, joy, resilience, humanity, and an understanding that while we struggle with pain and trauma, we can find shelter in one another—just as the characters in the Cause housing project in McBride’s Brooklyn do,” Oprah wrote in the Instagram announcement.

READ WITH JENNA – TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB

Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan

Jenna Bush Hager’s book club via her Today Show gig is one of the hottest books of the season. The main character is a new mother who hires a college senior as a baby-sitter. As they grow close, the baby-sitter’s relationship with the mother’s father-in-law leads to a betrayal.

“I wanted to explore American life in the pre-Trump years and sort of how we got here,” the author said in an article introducing the book club pick. “The book very much digs into the gig economy, the shrinking safety net and the notion that privilege takes many different forms.”

REESE’S BOOK CLUB

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

After the book club delayed its selection announcement in June, actress Reese Witherspoon directed her book club to make two selections—a first to recognize current events. Both books will be read over June and July.

“Elevating women’s stories is at the core of Reese’s Book Club. I love how this community champions the narrative for women and we are just getting started,” the book club placed in a graphic on Instagram. “Unity and understanding through the lens of storytelling is how we will continue these meaningful conversations.”

Readers expressed their disappointment in the comments over the book club adding a book by a Black woman author last minute and not pushing back the book by a White woman author to another month.

July started with Reese Witherspoon, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jenna Bush Hager, Emma Roberts, and Emma Watson announcing their book club selections. Previous months’ book selections have been announced on she lit as book news, but while analyzing the monthly process, it became noticeably apparent that Oprah, the inventor of celebrity book clubs, hasn’t inspired any celebrity women of color to start their own massive book clubs.

Oprah’s Book Club was birthed in 1996 during the heyday of her famous talk show. A sticker with her book club approval on a hardcover meant automatic sales and best-seller status. It wasn’t until the last two years that celebrity book clubs have gained prominence again with mainly Reese taking the helm via her production company Hello Sunshine, which began with buying the rights of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl before it went on shelves in order to make the $168 million-grossing 2014 film.

As Reese takes on more projects stemming from books, Oprah hasn’t changed her book since November with her website still on Michelle Obama’s Becoming in anticipation of a new version of her book club on Apple TV+. Oprah told Silicon Valley insiders in March that it will be “the biggest, the most vibrant, the most stimulating book club on the planet.”

Other celebrity women jumped on the bandwagon like former first daughter Jenna starting her book club through her gig at NBC’s Today Show. Millennial actresses Emma Roberts and Emma Watson started their book clubs, with Roberts doing it through her literary website Belletrist and Watson getting help from administrators on Goodreads. But no celebrity women of color stand out as having an active and public book club beside Oprah.

Roxane Gay just started her own book club last week on HBO and online at Vice. Gabrielle Union seems to be a great contender to start a book club with multiple film projects in the works based on books by black women. Constance Wu is a chair of the Los Angeles Public Library Young Literati (disclosure: I’m a member) and received her biggest role yet in Crazy Rich Asians, based on the book by Kevin Kwan, and will star and produce the film adaptation of Goodbye, Vitamin, a 2017 debut novel by Rachel Khong. Mindy Kaling, who has written two novels with another expected next year, is another contender with a major role in A Wrinkle In Time, from Madeleine L’Engle’s classic book, alongside Oprah and Reese.

There was excitement in 2017 when Chrissy Teigen and Kim Kardashian announced they were starting a book club. Chrissy is half Thai and Kim is half Armenian, ethnically white but with a darker complexion, and both are constantly covered in mainstream media as well as black media because of their famous black husbands John Legend and Kanye West, respectively. But a year later, they revealed in a video how they met with author Betty J. Eadie, who wrote Embraced by the Light which they chose to be the first selection. In the video, Kim’s sister Kourtney Kardashian joins them. They said they thought it would be easy to start a celebrity book club, but they failed.

With so much publicity for the celebrity book clubs by white women celebrities, there should be more from nonwhite women celebrities. College-educated black women tend to be the most voracious readers, according to an old Pew research study, yet that demographic is underrepresented on the celebrity book club front.

Celebrity book clubs have a lot of influence, such as the aforementioned sticker meaning significant sales. Now with social media, thousands and even millions of readers could follow along with the book and interact with each other under the direction of the celebrity running the book club. This also furthers their influence, which was probably already established in entertainment, media, and politics. It gives them a more educated flair, such as with Watson of Harry Potter fame who began sharing pictures of the books she would read on the subway.

If there is a celebrity woman of color other than Oprah with a massive book club, then name her. The media seems to emphasize the celebrity white women and the books they choose for their fans, so maybe there’s more diversity representation in this game that’s not being covered.