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New Year, Old Books

SHE LIT: New Year, Old Books 🥳

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Out of the 16 books below, I’ve only read seven 📚😬

Books with red covers by female authors on the shelit.com bookshelf.

Staying relevant as a book blogger by still reading new books, rediscovering old books

Happy 2023! Champagne clinks and literary links ushered in the new year. Innovating shelit.com for another year means thinking more about the blog’s future and purpose.

Like many readers, my library has expanded beyond its limits, multiplying on several shelves and already outgrowing those spaces. I love buying books from thrift stores, used bookstores, new bookstores, book festivals, library fairs, yard sales, garage sales, estate sales. Anywhere a book can be bought, I bought it.

The urge became more important when I noticed books by Black women on sale, sometimes a rare sight, a revelation I learned from The Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles. Books by Black women are usually not uplifted online or in the bricks-and-mortar as much as they could be. Neither are books by women of Indigenous, Latine, and Asian descent.

Young adult author Kalynn Bayron shared her disdain for walking into a bookstore that promoted books by BookTokers and noticing only one out of the 10 books was by a non-Black author of color. Diversity is still a problem in the publishing industry in many aspects, especially when it comes to fewer marketing dollars being given to non-celebrity authors of color.

While I’ve been collecting gems by female authors, I also haven’t been reading as many books as I want. As a book blogger promoting new books for search engine optimization and overall audience boost, I ignored most of my books in favor of buying new books, getting new books from publishers, and checking new books out from the library.

Books were piling up like I hadn’t learned anything from Christine Platt’s The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less where she offers the viewpoint of having too much stuff to meet a Eurocentric society’s desire for excess. Or when Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace advised on how to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not working and reflect on how to make things work for you. So, I have too many books that will take me years to read. And I need to refocus my love for books on forgotten treasures while still checking on the over-marketed new books, especially if they’re written by a woman of color. #PublishingPaidMe is still relevant today as it was in 2020.

I have read books in the last year that I want to share more with readers who may not have known about the book or maybe never had the chance to read it. One example is Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, which I bought from Myopic Books in Chicago. Another is bell hooks’ Bone Black. Both had been on my bookshelf for a while, so it felt gratifying to finally read these great works by great authors and discuss those stories.

More bookish outlets are also trying to elevate older works like Belletrist’s 2021 book club selection with Tananarive Due’s The Between, which was originally published in 1995. That book is also on my bookshelf. Thanks to the Ladera Heights Goodwill Store in Los Angeles for that find.

Books from previous years and even decades still need our support and attention. The marketing problem is a historic problem, where books by women, particularly women of color, got lost in the mix among Harry Potter-type fantasies, mysteries by men, and celebrity memoirs, just to name a few. I look forward to sharing my library and love for curation this year by discovering works that deserve to be rediscovered.

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What we’re highlighting

2023 forecasted to be a rough year for books

The spike in book bans spreading from school libraries to big-box retailers over the debate of what’s appropriate in children’s literature is considered to be a major factor in the book sales slump, according to end-of-year media reports. Mostly works by non-White authors and LGBTQ+ authors are at the center of these book bans.

How the publishing industry markets books was one of the insider secrets the public received during last year’s blockbuster trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and Penguin Random House over the publisher’s proposed merger with Simon & Schuster. A federal judge blocked the merger in October. PRH’s global CEO stepped down. Authors and readers alike worried about the Big Five becoming the Big Four. Most of the books we tell you about are from Penguin Random House, as you will notice linked below in other news.

Publishing industry employees going on strike echoed all last year. The only major unionized publisher, HarperCollins, went on strike in November. Workers are still on strike, according to updates to the union’s Twitter feed. They claim that “untrained temps” will be hired to replace them to edit stories, design covers, and promote books. This week, the union asked the publisher’s CEO to return to the negotiation table to end the strike. The employees are demanding mostly fair wages to live in the publishing megalopolis of New York City.

Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry sold less than one quarter of the first week print sales of her 2018 memoir Becoming, the NPD Group found, as the Forever First Lady’s book had a massive book tour with rock concert audiences (and prices) and still became a No. 1 best-seller. The NPD Group also noted Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home by the global superstar organizer ranked as low as No. 4,742 on Amazon.com upon its release, as reported by The New York Times. The reason for the lower book sales: The industry is trying to rebound from the pandemic highs. And a recession is looming.

Ketanji Brown Jackson announces upcoming memoir

The first Black female Supreme Court justice will write about her journey to the highest court. Titled Lovely One for the translation of her West African name, Justice Jackson plans to discuss her upbringing in Miami and her advancement in Big Law as a mother, a wife, and a Black woman. Publisher Random House has not shared a release date.

“Mine has been an unlikely journey,” she said in a statement from Random House. “But the path was paved by courageous women and men in whose footsteps I placed my own, road warriors like my own parents, and also luminaries in the law, whose brilliance and fortitude lit my way.”

Celebrity-helmed book clubs select January picks

What we’re reviewing

From Scratch Episode Recaps

Luckiest Girl Alive Film Makes Character’s Traumas Leap Off the Page

What we’re watching

Kindred on FX Hulu

Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel Kindred has been adapted to the screen with an eight-episode series streaming now on Hulu via FX. The story follows a Black woman living in modern-day Los Angeles who keeps getting transported to antebellum Maryland. She ends up saving her White ancestor as a child and embarks on a journey of fighting for her freedom physically on the plantation and mentally in order to return to her present life. Our book review can be found here.

Want your book and bookish news to be featured? Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

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Book Review: ‘The Gilded Ones’ by Namina Forna

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna is a heavy fantasy young adult novel that forces the main character to face her blood, sweat, and tears for a war she’s not sure she should be fighting in.

Deka lives in the village of Irfut inside a kingdom called Otera with her sickly father as she lost her mother recently to red pox. While taking care of her father and the household, she is apprehensive about the forthcoming Ritual of Purity that expels girls who bleed gold instead of red from society. At the ceremony, Deka’s worst nightmare comes true: she is impure. She is thrown into a dungeon where she is killed several times. But she doesn’t die. She falls into a gilded sleep until she awakes repaired without a scar in sight. Her immortality attracts a woman Deka dubs as White Hands, who whisks Deka away with another girl named Britta to a training ground where other young women, known as alaki, who also bled impure are trained to fight flying demons known as deathshrieks. Accepting this journey as her destiny, she trains as hard as she can to fight the deathshrieks, who are known to destroy whole villages, killing everyone in sight. The better the fighter Deka becomes, the more she questions how she became a fighter. When one of her new sisters in training dies in battle, she promises to avenge the killing. But she starts wondering if the deathshrieks are as dangerous as she has been taught to believe.

The storyline emphasizes the impurity girls can be accused of, particularly around the time they begin menstruating. The girls are declared not only discardable but also devilish, another accusation real-life girls face rooted in the story of Eve. Throughout the book, Deka still prays to her god, Oyomo, despite the cards she has been dealt. Others around her tell her she shouldn’t pray because she has been cursed, but she upholds her religious faith.

Comprehending why war is taking place is also a theme ripped from reality. Deka feels saved by White Hands to become a warrior for the king to fight deathshrieks. But Deka can communicate with the deathshrieks and wonders if they are the true enemies. She tries to piece together the origins of the war and why she and the other alaki have been chosen to be the warriors other than their immortality.

With Deka scared about the purity ceremony, she foresees the worst-case scenario is her destiny. Then arriving at the training grounds seems to be her final destiny as a warrior forever bound to killing deathshrieks, but the more she evolves, the more she is realizing her destiny goes beyond what feels like servitude to the kingdom.

As fantasy YA novels continue to overpower the entire kidlit genre, there are still tropes in this book. The girls training together must become sisters in the fight, for example, like many characters before them with finding family along the journey especially when their biological families have disappeared. A furry feline creature arrives on the scene that only knows Deka, and of course, it’s a shape-shifter. The story is so jam-packed with tension that the world-building takes a hit. It sounds like they’re in Africa, but the girls come from all over the world evidenced by their ethnic names that may sound like they’re from Europe or Asia or Africa. More description of the geography would have helped boost the imagination of their location; the map at the beginning of the book shows the kingdom, but the character names steeped in real cultures contradict the map of an imaginary region.

Overall, the book has strong feminist yet disturbing elements of showing girls being disrespected and disregarded because of who they are. There is no ceremony on testing boys’ blood, but these girls are subjected to this sexist tradition that defines their futures that are chosen by men and a patriarchal society. It reflects the minor and major events affecting girls around the world like those who cannot seek an education. Like a lot of other fantasy novels threading real-world themes in make-believe lands, this novel has a lot of scary familiarity in its storyline.




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Black Fantasy YA Authors Discuss How They Are Revolutionizing the Genre

Up-and-coming Black fantasy young adult authors convened on a YouTube video chat hosted by Black Girls Create to go deeper into how they gravitated to the genre and what they hope their works can achieve for readers.

Bayana Davis of Black Girls Create, a hub for Black female creators, moderated the first half of the #KuumbaKickback conversation featuring Nandi Taylor, Jordan Ifueko, Namina Forna, and Roseanne A. Brown. Porshèa Patterson-Hurst moderated the second half with authors Kalynn Bayron, Tracy Deonn, and Bethany C. Morrow.

All the authors, who also participated in a #DontRush video challenge, mentioned how they fell in love with the fantasy genre but failed to see characters that looked like them and how the lack of visibility led to their writing careers. The video of the conversations are available on the Black Girls Create’s YouTube channel now.

Nandi Taylor is the author of Given. The story is about why “island princess Yenni is searching for a way to save her father’s life, but a handsome yet infuriating shapeshifting dragon becomes an unexpected distraction,” according to publisher Wattpad. The book is out now and has reached 1.2 million reads.

Nandi opened up about how she felt when trying to insert herself into certain fantasy stories, which created a conversation among the authors about being a Black girl who loved fantasy but not seeing Black girls in the stories.

“I loved reading fantasy, but the fantasy worlds I was reading about were very Eurocentric and it felt—how do I say this?—it felt wrong to insert myself in those worlds, which is sad to say. I felt kind of guilty like I wasn’t meant to be there. So I started writing my own world, so I can do that self-insertion without feeling guilty or ashamed.”

Jordan Ifueko is the author of Raybearer. Publisher Abrams’ imprint Amulet Books says “with extraordinary world-building and breathtaking prose, Raybearer is the story of loyalty, fate, and the lengths we’re willing to go for the ones we love.” The book is available on April 14.

Jordan spoke about how African influence in fantasy and science fiction stories was historically erased or not accurately documented amid colonialism.

“I wanted to write fantasy because I wanted a story about a magical Black girl who didn’t have to endure slavery or systematic subjugation to win something. I feel like there are so very few stories based on real life, which that happens to Black girls, not because there weren’t Black girls who were awesome and powerful but because those stories were not recorded in history. Precolonial Africa, especially West Africa, had powerful women all over the place, but we don’t hear about those women because you have to dig and dig and dig and dig to even get a reference to some of those heroines because the history was written by the colonizers and they didn’t care.”

Namina Forna is the author of The Gilded Ones. The debut novel is described as “the start of a bold and immersive West African-inspired, feminist fantasy series for fans of Children of Blood and Bone and Black Panther. In this world, girls are outcasts by blood and warriors by choice.” The book is scheduled for release in spring 2021.

Namina described her experience of immigrating to Atlanta from Sierra Leone at a young age and dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome once she was old enough to understand the effects of the civil war in her native country.

“One of the ways I was able to cope with everything that was happening was by disappearing into fantasy. I would read, read, read, read a lot. When you read, you’re able to ignore what is happening around you and even when I came to America and really started understanding what was happening more, for me I loved disappearing into fantasy worlds. They’re my safe space. I think that is the importance of fantasy: it’s a place in which you can disappear, in which you can deal with things you might not have the wherewithal to deal with.”

Roseanne A. Brown is the author of The Song of Wraiths and Ruin. Publisher HarperCollins calls the book “the first in a gripping fantasy duology inspired by West African folklore in which a grieving crown princess and a desperate refugee find themselves on a collision course to murder each other despite their growing attraction.” The book will be out June 2.

Roseanne, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana at a young age, said fantasy was the genre of choice for her to weave in today’s racial issues.

“While I really respect contemporary writers in what they can do to bring things in the here and now to engage on our level, I found putting it a step away and putting it in a different world—in a world that mirrors our own, reflects our own—to really come to terms with heavier things like we see in race. We have intergenerational trauma, we have violence against girls, we have self-harming—those are all real things teens in our world are dealing with.”

Tracy Deonn is the author of Legendborn. The novel is “filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn’s YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of City of Bones with a modern-day twist on a classic legend and a lot of Southern Black Girl Magic,” publisher Simon & Schuster wrote. It’s scheduled for a Sept. 15 release. Tracy also contributed to Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real About Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America.

Tracy spoke about noticing the very few Black characters in science fiction and fantasy media while she was growing up and trying to connect as a Black girl to the characters she loved.

“I remember being drawn to certain characters consistently and wanting more from them. We talked about Star Trek already. Obviously, I liked Uhura. I could’ve watched the whole show about her. I wanted to watch a whole show about her. I was drawn to any character in any fantasy TV show, cartoon, or otherwise who looked vaguely Black in any sort of way I was like that’s me.”

She mentioned her feelings when Storm Reid, who’s Black, was cast in Disney’s 2018 Ava DuVernay version A Wrinkle in Time based on Madeleine L’Engle‘s middle grade fantasy classic, which also starred bookish celebrities Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling. “

The little part of me inside was, ‘This is revolutionary. This idea that we can be Meg.’ That was fulfilling in a long arc in a way of reading that and wanting to be Meg and actually seeing it later as an adult.”

Bethany C. Morrow is the author A Song Below Water. It is “a captivating modern fantasy about Black mermaids, friendship, and self-discovery set against the challenges of today’s racism and sexism,” wrote publisher MacMillan. The book is expected to be out on June 2. Bethany also wrote Mem and edited and contributed to the YA anthology Take the Mic: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance.

Bethany promoted science fiction in the post-slavery diaspora since many recent Black fantasy stories take place in Africa, saying these stories are necessary to tell to incorporate all types of Black characters.

“Even when I do science fiction, I’m always dealing with what it means to be a Black American. I think that is extremely important. I think that Black American kids need fantasy and science fiction that is Black American science fiction, Black American fantasy that doesn’t make them feel like it’s second fiddle to something else, like it’s derivative, it’s not as important, to liken it to something to be ashamed of. Again feeling like you’re supposed to take ownership of something and divorce from what has been done to you is something I’m not OK with… I love all the West African folklore that’s coming out. Central African fantasy and that sort of thing. I’m in love with all that stuff. It’s never a neither nor situation but again as a Black American child who grew up on the West Coast, I deserve to see myself specifically too. I deserve not to be erased from the American tradition, from the American culture, from American histories and storytelling, so I’m specifically writing diaspora fantasy, diaspora science fiction.”

Kalynn Bayron is the author of Cinderella Is Dead. The story takes place “200 years since Cinderella found her prince, but the fairytale is over” according to publisher Bloomsbury, which adds it’s “an electrifying twist on the classic fairytale that will inspire girls to break out of limiting stereotypes and follow their dreams!” The book will be available on June 8.

Kalynn discussed the hardships of growing up as Black girl in Portland, Oregon, where Bethany’s A Song Below Water takes place, and how reading fantasy became a refuge.

“What happens there when you are a brown girl, growing up there as a child, it makes me emotional to think about the environment there and how it affects you and how the racism is very polite…. Writing about characters that fit into the intersection of race, gender, sexuality in the fantasy genre is really important to me. It is something I want to keep doing.”