Looking for some good reads? We bring you five books that you can add to your reading shelf this month, including Rebecca Caroll’s Surviving the White Gaze and Karuna Ezara Parikh’s The Heart Asks Pleasure First.
Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir by Rebecca Carroll *****
Rebecca Carroll details the aching journey to understand her racial identity in her memoir, Surviving the white gaze. Carol was the only black person living in a small New Hampshire town while growing up. She grew up in a white household with her white adoptive parents. Rebecca soon reconciles with her birth mother (a white woman) who constantly tore apart Rebecca’s identity. Reflecting on her early life, and all the people who were part of her life, the author portrays what it means to belong, revealing the appalling terms of all she had to endure in order to heal and be free.
The Soul of a Woman by Isabel Allende ****
New York Times best selling author, Isabel Allende brings her fans a wonderfully passionate and inspiring memoir about what it means to be a woman,
Isabel brings snippets from her past and how the changing relationships around her impacted her thoughts while growing up. Everything she experienced led her to become a fierce and defiant woman who is determined to fight for a life that her mother couldn’t have. She shares her philosophy of woman, relationships, parenting, pandemic, and much more in her memoir.
Men we reaped by Jesmyn Ward *****
Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life within a span of five years to drugs, suicide, and accidents. Dealing with these losses, she tries to find out the reason behind their deaths only to realize that their deaths were the result of the long history of racism that they lived with. The economic struggles of the black community foster drug addictions and dissolute family relationships.
Meditative and moving, her memoir recounts her childhood and the biographies of the five young Black men in her life who all died within a span of five years.
Waiting for the Night Song by Julie Carrick Dalton ***
Author Julie Carrick Dalton makes her debut as an author with this brilliant moving novel. The book is about the friendship forged in childhood magic that will leave you in awe once you finish reading it.
The novel revolves around the lie of Cadie Kessler who has spent most of her life covering up a truth. Deep down she always knew that this secret will one day surface. One day she receives an urgent message from her long-estranged friend Daniela Garcia. The message brings her back to her childhood home where she is forced to face the secrets that he has been running away from.
Now Cadie must decide if she is willing to sacrifice to protect the people she loves and the place she calls her home. Waiting for the Night song is a love song, an ode to nature that reminds us that no matter what we do, the truth will always prevail.
The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Karuna Ezara Parikh *****
Author Karuna Ezara Parikh brings you an extraordinary tale of love that gets torn by the world from which they belong. Daya is a young ballet student from India who is living in Wales. She meets Aaftab, a Muslim Lawyer from Pakistan and they fall in love.
The couple tried to overcome the barriers of nationality, religion, and language to make their relationship work. But soon they are met with unprecedented cataclysmic events that shift the course of their lives forever.
The Heart Asks Pleasure First is a spellbinding novel that speaks urgently to the frailties of our times. The author humanizes the themes of love, friendship, family, migration, and xenophobia.
