When Stars Are Scattered

Written by: Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed

First line: For me, the first years are lost. 

Why you should read this book: This is an award-winning graphic novel memoir for children, and about children, and so full of tragedy and privation and heartache and loss and suffering and trauma that I personally was crying for about fifty percent of the book. Orphans Omar and his nonverbal brother Hassan have lived in a refugee camp for most of their lives, and the story follows Omar's trials and triumphs when he is persuaded to go to school. It's difficult to succeed academically in a refugee camp, and even if he finishes high school, there's no guarantee that he will ever be able to leave the camp or live a life with any sense of hope or possibility.

Why you should read this book: It does have a happy ending, but that doesn't mitigate the author's pain or make up for the childhood that was stolen from him. 

The Girl Who Married a Skull and Other African Stories: A Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales Book

Edited by: C. Spike Trotman, Kate Ashwin, Kel McDonald, and Taneka Stotts

First line: Once there lived a young woman.

Why you should read this book: Like the other five books in this series, it compiles a diverse collection of stories from all over the continent, some modernized, others seemingly ancient, illustrated by a variety of artists who put their hearts into the subject matter. Monsters, talking animals, culture heroes, and clever children populate the pages, teaching caution and perseverance, offering lessons and merriment, and showing young readers a road map for navigating the world. Joyful, uplifting, and entertaining.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're, like, a talking skull or something. 

Anna Hibiscus

Written by: Atinuke and Lauren Tobia

Why you should read this book: At the heart of this warm, charming chapter book about a little girl growing up in a big family compound in Nigeria is the idea of community, in the African sense of the word, where no sensible person would ever want to be alone even for a moment. Anna Hibiscus can't imagine a world without aunties and uncles and cousins and parents and grandparents and siblings all around her, and when her nuclear family attempts to take their own vacation, disaster ensues! Anna Hibiscus, like a young Ramona Quimby, learns important lessons about life, culture, and caring for others, driven by her own exuberance and her family's loving guidance. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You absolutely despise other people. Just hate them. Misanthropy squared. Can't stand having them in the vicinity.  

Yoshi and the Ocean: A Sea Turtle's Incredible Journey Home

Written by: Lindsay Moore

Why you should read this book: There's something quietly stunning about this nonfiction picture book, which recounts the story of an injured sea turtle who is rescued by Japanese fishermen and taken to an aquarium in South Africa for rehabilitation. Her injury healed, Yoshi spends twenty years on exhibit at the aquarium before marine biologists recognize that she should be released back into the ocean. By gluing a tracking tag to her shell, scientists are able to track her journey from Capetown back to the Australian beach where she was born, and the author recreates this underwater journey in beautiful detail.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You are wholly unconcerned with the plight of sea turtles, you monster. 

The Black Snowman

Written by: Phil Mendez and Carole Byard

First line: Somewhere in a lonely grass hut in western Africa, an aged storyteller prepares for the arrival of the village children. 

Why you should read this book: Jacob, a young boy disdainful of his family's economic status and ethnic, cultural heritage, announces that "Everything black is bad" before grudgingly agreeing to help his little brother Peewee build a snowman—a black snowman—with the dirty snow in their neighborhood. When Peewee scrounges a magical kente cloth, brought from Africa centuries earlier, to dress the snowman, their creation comes to life and does its best to teach Jacob to take some pride in the richness of his ancestry. Although not immediately convinced, Jacob gets a second chance to understand who he is and what he can do right now, as catastrophe looms and the snowman's wisdom and history help Jacob save the day. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't let your kids touch anything you perceive as being dirty.

David Mogo Godhunter

Written by: Suyi Davies Okungbowa 

First line: This is going to be a bad job. 

Why you should read this book: David Mogo is a demigod raised by a wizard—he doesn't know his divine mother or his human father, but he's stronger and tougher than an ordinary man—and when his hometown of Lagos, Nigeria was overrun by a variety of god and godlings falling from the heavens ten years ago, it made perfect sense for him to make his living hunting down the weaker godlings annoying his neighbors. He has no interest in tangling with the big gods, but he really needs some money to fix his foster father's roof, so he takes a bad-news gig to capture the twin orishas of abundance for a dangerous and powerful wizard, and there his real troubles begin. Mogo has stumbled into an all-out war for the future of the planet, and he's the only one with the power to stand against the coming onslaught. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: Plenty of supernatural violence, and despite his power, Mogo gets his ass handed to him a lot.

 

Children of Blood and Bone

Written by: Tomi Adeyemi 

First line: I try not to think of her. 

Why you should read this book: It's been over a decade since magic was eradicated from Orisha, over a decade since the powerful maji like Zélie's mother were brutally, publicly murdered, and young maji like Zélie, whose powers had not yet manifest, were branded "maggots" by the royal government and persecuted with unpayable taxes, indentured servitude, and death. A seemingly chance meeting binds Zélie and the princess Amari together as they embark on an dangerous and seemingly impossible mission to collect three powerful artifacts and return magic to Orisha with the help of Zélie's brother, Tzain. Meanwhile, Amari's brother, Prince Inan is hot on their trail, intent on winning his father's love by killing Zélie, and anyone who comes between and his goal, even his own sister. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: This is a young adult novel; as an older adult, I found myself shaking my head and screaming helplessly at the characters' obvious bad decisions.

The Old Drift

Written by: Namwali Serpell First line: Zt. Zzt. ZZZzzzZZZzzzzZZZzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzzZZZzzzzzZZZzzzzo'ona. 

Why you should read this book: A multi-generational epic steeped in history, tinted with magical realism and afrofuturism, narrated by mosquitoes (maybe), and framed by the lifespan of the Kariba Dam, The Old Drift covers more than a century of struggle, following the lives of three families in Zambia. Characters are born, grow, rebel against their parents' mistakes, make similar mistakes to the ones their parents made, have children, and the cycle repeats, but time keeps thrusting them away from the past and into the future. Beautifully written, bursting with revelation, and peopled with compelling characters, this is a book that you can fall into and devour with gusto. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: Occasionally, I found some of the ways it jumped around in time as characters appears in each others' arcs a little frustrating, but that's probably on me.

Praise Song for My Children

Written by: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley  

First line: Some of us are made of steel. 

Why you should read this book: This collection of new and selected poems offers a stunning journey through the author's work, the central thesis of which goes something like—the world is very hard and painful but women, by necessity, are tough and good at survival. Wesley's voice carries the reader through the war in Liberia and its aftermath, love and marriage and motherhood, the refugee experience, her fight with cancer, her life in America. Each poem stands as its own microcosm, a perfectly formed bubble of reality and experience, into which the reader can enter and be immersed. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: It took me two months to finish, because I had to put it down every time it made me cry, and it made me cry a *lot*.  

The Cooking Gene

Written by: Michael W. Twitty

First line: The Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell others who they are, and to tell stories about where they've been.

Why you should read this book: Powerful and poetic, this nonfiction narrative combines personal memoir, detailed historical research, and educated speculation to draw the reader deeply into its discussion of foodways as an avenue for understanding the history stolen from African Americans. Twitty delves as deeply into his own genealogy and self-image as he does into the discussion of individual ingredients, resulting in a work that is dense with meaning and emotion. Food is the lenses through which an examination of culture and self is made beautifully possible.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're one of those people who only eats six foods.

The Worst Witch to the Rescue

Written by: Jill Murphy

First line: It was early in the morning on what promised to be a fine day in March, a bit blustery by a perfect start for the first day of Summer Term at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches.

Why you should read this book: In a characteristic bit of optimistic kindness, Mildred shares her original research with Ethel, who immediately takes this information as license to commit physical assault, theft, academic dishonesty, further assault with a venomous animal, and aggravated turtle-napping/torture. Of course, Mildred takes the blame and punishment for all of it and spends a rather hard few days suffering before her daring, late-night turtle rescue redeems her. In a surprising reversal, Ethel is ratted out by a talking turtle, compelled to dig through the garbage to retrieve the evidence of her crimes, and forced to make a public apology to Mildred in front of the entire school, although, of course, she isn't actually punished.

Why you shouldn't read this book: One thing that bugs me in series is when the bad guy becomes a caricature of themselves and of villainy in general, to the point that their crimes are ridiculous but predictable and telegraphed in such a way that the protagonist ought to catch on to them but doesn't, which detracts from the suspension of disbelief in a story; in this case, for six books, Mildred is constantly threatened with expulsion, primarily as a result of Ethel's misbehavior, but here, where Ethel actually confesses to the assault, theft, academic dishonesty, etc., there's no mention of any repercussions beyond the humiliating apology.

Everfair

Written by: Nisi Shawl

First line: Lisette Toutournier sighed.

Why you should read this book: What if indigenous Africans had technological superiority over Europeans at the turn of the last century, and what if this reality existed within a society that allowed open discussion of race and sexuality in the same time period? This vast, populous steampunk alternate-history narrative follows an unlikely cast of Fabians, missionaries, escaped slaves, and oppressed native peoples in their attempts to build a socialist paradise in the wake of Leopold II's colonization of the Congo. Beginning with young Lisette Tourournier's love affair with a bicycle in France, the story criss crosses continents and decades, proposes complex love polygons among people with multiple loyalties, and introduces fabulous technologies and solutions in a dense and nuanced story that operates as science fiction and social commentary and a few other things.

Why you shouldn't read this book: I guess this book is not for unabashed racists, but they probably don't read interesting steampunk novels anyway.

My Heart Will Not Sit Down

Written by: Mara Rockliff and Ann Tanksley

First line: School day! School day!

Why you should read this book: When Kedi, a young girl in Cameroon in 1931, hears about American children who don't have enough to eat across the ocean because of the Great Depression, her heart "will not sit down," and she feel compelled to ask everyone she knows to donate to the relief effort. Money is scarce in Kedi's society—most people need to save every coin just to pay the head tax demanded by their colonial overlords—but her impassioned pleas convinced everyone to give what they have. This children's picture book is based on a true story in which the city of New York received a check for $3.77 from the people of Cameroon, a seemingly small sum that represented a vast portion of the wealth of the entire village.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't share.

My Name Is Sangeol

Written by: Karen Lynn Williams, Khadia Mohammed, and Catherine Stuck

First line: "Don't worry, the Wise One said as Sangoel prepared to leave the refugee camp.

Why you should read this book: Sangoel, a Dinka refugee from Sudan, is immigrating to America his mother and sister. All he has in this world is his name, but nobody is this strange new country seems able to pronounce it correctly. Is Sangoel in danger of losing some part of his identity, or can he find a way to communicate to his peers how he wants to be addressed?

Why you shouldn't read this book: You gave up and let people call you by a three-letter, one-syllable Americanized nickname.

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Written by: Lesley Nneka Arimah

First line: Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn't see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother's affection.

Why you should read this book: The fictions populating this collection are short, but they each pack their own powerful punch in a mixture of realistic, magical, and fantastic stories that deal with love and families and relationships, especially as these concepts pertain to mothers and daughters. Some stories speak of the reality of Nigerian children sent to other family members, other countries, for financial reasons or behavioral reasons or cultural reasons, while other stories examine grief and loss through the lens of speculative fiction. Delightful and provocative, each piece in this book is a polished, multi-faceted gem offering multiple windows into the world.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You never gave your mother a moment's worry.

Amber and the Hidden City

Written by: Milton Davis

First line: One more goal, that's all they needed.

Why you should read this book: Amber's upset that her parents are sending her to private school in the fall, when all her friends will stay in the public school system, but those worries evaporate when she's summoned by her beloved grandmother for what she believes will be two heavenly weeks at the beach. It turns out that Amber's grandmother actually wants to take her to a secret and magical African city, where Amber must use her newfound ability to read people's true intentions and select the next leader of her grandmother's people. Now Amber, her grandmother, and a handsome young warrior are being pursued across the planet by people who will do almost anything to keep Amber from her hereditary responsibility.

Why you shouldn't read this book: My edition needed a vast quantity of editing. I also felt like the romance aspect of the story was a bit forced.

Wild Seed

Written by: Octavia Butler

First line: Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.

Why you should read this book: In a vast, sweeping epic spanning two continents and several lifetimes, Doro, an immortal creature whose power to possess human bodies has taken him far from his human roots three thousand years in the past, discovers Anyanwu, a shape shifting healer, who, at three hundred years old, may be the key to Doro's quest to breed a race of superhumans. Anyanwu, who has known tyranny and loss, relishes her autonomy and is reluctant to bend to Doro's power or submit his experimental breeding program, but as the centuries pass, their relationship becomes deeper and more complex. This gripping novel is the first of a four-book story arc known collectively as the Patternist Series.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Content warning for a seriously abusive relationship.

Tsotsi

Written by: Athol Fugard

First line: There had been a silence, as always happened at about the same time, a long silence when none of them moved except maybe to lift a glass and hold it high above their heads for the dregs to drip into their open mouths, or to yawn and stretch and slump back into their chairs, when one of them might scratch himself, another consider the voice of the woman in the backyard, the old woman who was scolding, rattling her words like stones in a tin, and all of them in their own time looking at the street outside, and the shadows, wondering if they were not yet long enough.

Why you should read this book: Set in South Africa during apartheid, this novel details a moment of revelation in the life of Tsotsi (literally"gangster"), a boy without a past or a future, a young man living in the moment of drinking and stealing and killing, feeling no remorse, feeling nothing whatsoever, until the night one of his gang members calls him out for his lack of feeling. Tsotsi beats the accuser into unconsciousness, runs into the night, and ends up in possession of a helpless infant, whose presence helps Tsotsi comprehend empathy, recall the trauma of his past, and begin to care for something beside the next job. In addition to its excellent writing and exquisite description of the human psyche, this novel also provides a detailed understanding of the everyday horrors of apartheid and the casual dehumanization of black people in South Africa in the late seventies and early eighties.

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's not happy. Nothing happy happens. The ending is enlightening, but not uplifting.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

Written by: Zora Neale Hurston

First line: I was summer when I went to talk with Cudjo so his door was standing wide open.

Why you should read this book: This fascinating book, an interview turned on its head by the subject's desire to share his story in his own way, was an early work of a then relatively-unknown Hurston, who masterfully turned a series of conversations into the shape of a book that was then considered unpublishable, as Hurston insisted on retaining her subject's use of dialect; it has only been released now, nearly sixty years after the author's death (and even longer after the subject's). One of the few slave narrative recounting the middle passage, Barracoon follows the life of a young African man, plucked from the continent on a dare long after the transport of Africans to America on slave ships had been outlawed. The story covers traditional life in the village where Cudjo (originally know as Kossula) grew up, his kidnapping, sale, transport across the ocean, years as a slave, and years as a free man after the Civil War.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Don't care about history, hope to repeat it.

Things Fall Apart

Written by: Chinua Achebe

First line: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and beyond.

Why you should read this book: The life of Okonkwo, a strong man in a Ibo village in Nigeria, has long been a defining work that drew western readers into African literature. Detailed, meaningful, and deeply moving, this book paints a picture of world that has passed: a tribal world uncontaminated by colonial Christian influences, until, despite all of Okonkwo's beliefs and efforts, times change, and things fall apart. Okonkwo does everything according to the best practices of his civilization, even when there are questions as to the validity of the cultural knowledge, but when white men permeate the boundaries of his land, there is less honor for the traditional rules, and less of a place for strong men like Okonkwo.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're a missionary who finds other cultures fascinating as long as you can convert them.