Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!

I thought we would do something kewl for the final book club of the year and have an epic battle royale of all the second runners up throughout 2026 that our club almost chose. I left a couple out (I'm sorry but I don't want to read Yesteryear lol) but would be thrilllled to read anything on the list! Without further ado, here are 9 juicy options for you!

Sunny’s Book Club is a monthly book club highlighting both new releases and backlist titles we love. A virtual discussion is hosted over Zoom on the last Sunday of the month.

A new physical book will be shipped to you (or available for in store pickup) the month prior to when this month’s book club will take place. The December pick will ship the last week of November to ensure you have the entire month to read the book.

The link for sign up is not a subscription service, you opt in on a monthly basis dependent on your interest in that months chosen title. We do however have a recurring book club subscription if you are interested here.

A rollicking debut novel about a cautious daughter and her eccentric, estranged mother venturing west in search of buried treasure—and a way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options

After being fired for taking an uncharacteristic risk at her commodities trading job, Bea Macon sublets her New York apartment and books a one-way ticket to stay with her mother, Christy, a free spirit who has been living in Salt Lake City on Bea's dime. 

Usually the responsible one, Bea isn't about to admit exactly why she's suddenly decided to visit, but she isn’t the only one keeping secrets: Christy has a man. She has a map. She has . . . a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western U.S.?

Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks, an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s arranged a rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the guy she’s been obsessively trading theories with online to prove it. Out in the desert that one woman believes to be a promised land, the other a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative escapade than either of them could have imagined.

Populated with unforgettable characters and set against one of the world’s most oddly enrapturing landscapes, Scavengers is a funny and heartbreaking novel about old injuries, new beginnings, and the lengths to which we’ll go to find, escape, and reinvent ourselves.

A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

“Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett, author of Whistler

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

“If Philip K. Dick had written The Bell Jar” (Camille Bordas) it would resemble Albertine Clarke's mesmerizing debut about the frayed borders between our bodies and minds.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Debutiful, Lit Hub, and Our Culture

Ada lives a solitary life. She spends her days in her London apartment building's swimming pool, occasionally visiting with her cousin Francesca and meeting her friends, each of them chatting, drinking, posing invitations Ada ignores. Ada's parents are recently divorced after her father became a bodybuilder: he spends his days at the gym, which is crowded and bright, warm with human proximity, infrequently calling to express minor concerns around his daughter's well-being.

When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately feels an intimate connection between them: they share a life, in a way she can't explain. Little by little, Ada's estrangement from her familiar surroundings and from reality widens, as though seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. After her mother entreats Ada to join her on a remote Greek holiday, Ada is jolted out of the physical world and into a new, artificial environment, one that a mysterious and potentially otherworldly force has created and designed for her. As this brilliant first novel pivots with masterful effect into the surreal and speculative, we move through Ada's experiences of life like spokes on a wheel, profoundly surprised by the enduring mystery of our existence, and of our relationships with ourselves and others. When a person's life, in the odd space between mind and body, is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?

Albertine Clarke transforms the speculative into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The precision, subtlety, and confidence of her writing is nothing short of astonishing. THE BODY BUILDERS is new classic of the speculative fiction genre, landing like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world wholly differently than we ever imagined.

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival's so-called "celebration of life." Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

The spellbinding new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of family legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark secrets lurk behind their mother's creative genius?

Part fairy tale, part literary family drama, The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.

“Charming . . . There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.”—The New York Times

A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

Annie Bot meets Fallout in this dystopian satire: six women created in a lab, designed to serve the billionaires of the future in a luxury fallout shelter, rebel against their programming after the end times arrive.

Welcome to the Felicity Complex! Constructed during the height of the Cold War, our unique hotel is prepared to protect you, the billionaire class, from nuclear annihilation! Shielded from radiation and supplemented with closed air systems and hydroponic gardens, this resort bunker offers a prime existence underground: full gymnasium and spa, gourmet meals, top-tier medical care, and the best in entertainment.

Meet Hallelujah! Grown in a lab and educated in the ways of concierge hospitality, she believes in her duty to comfort the Lord-anointed refugees of the apocalypse. (Even if her lover Anastasia disagrees. Even if her creator Dr. Younghusband is disappointed in her.) Don’t worry—everyone is safe from communists in the Felicity Complex!

Look, Hallelujah, guests have finally arrived! Hallelujah and her sister specimens have waited ages for you. Never mind the secrets other rich survivalists may be hiding. Just make sure they don’t notice the violent intentions behind our staff’s wide, wide smiles…

A sendup of traditional womanhood and lampooning the paranoias of the elite, The Felicity Complex questions the ambitions behind the entitled few who plan for the end times—and who truly survives them.

Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.

A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for. 

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all. 

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story. 

A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

From the Booker Prize finalist and author of Sisters: a haunting novel about the complexities of motherhood, nested within three generations of women and children searching for each other to find themselves.

Found alone on a remote island as a toddler, Ori grows up mired in the mystery of what happened to the young mother who left her. When Ori welcomes a child of her own, years later, maternal doubt creeps in. As sleepless nights slacken her grip on reality, she travels back through memory to that stormy island, waiting in the shadow of a beaconless lighthouse, straining hopefully for the sound of her mother's return.

In ways she doesn’t yet understand, Ori’s unraveling binds her to her mother and grandmother, whose lives were also shaped by the brutal intimacies of motherhood. But can exhuming the past alter the future? Is Ori’s fate—and the fate of her child—intractably tethered to the secrets of those who came before her?

Set in the uncanny, coastal England of Daisy Johnson’s imagination, Long Wave immerses the reader in a physical landscape reflective of the novel’s intense, interior drama. With the hypnotic language, ferocious emotion, and inventive imagery she is known for, Johnson offers a masterfully layered and moving story that looks beyond traditional understandings of family to examine the many elemental forces of generation and transplantation that graft us to one another.

Eight very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading Public Access Afterworld in November. Today is the last day to sign up on our website. You never have to buy the book from Sunny's to participate in book club, we just love it when you do.

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This episode was edited and produced by Renee Powers on the ancestral land of the Dakota people.

Original music by Amarissa

Chapter 20

Burning. 

Icarus’s eyes were burning. 

He roared against the pain and tried to rub the Eidolon out. He dropped to his knees and the grasses huffed under his weight. He heard the tumult of the waterfall, the twittering of creatures in the rocks below, all of it tainted by the sound of his agony. 

“Damn it! God damn it!” He shouted.

Footsteps thumped in a jog in his direction and he forced himself to look up—someone was trotting towards him. Nobody ever trotted towards him, not in these between-states. It was a woman, vaguely familiar even in the haze of pain blurring his vision. Her hair was the red of a sunset on the sea woven in complex plaits studded with gold, eyes a rich forest green with a sparkle to them that had nothing to do with the perennial midday sun. 

Her dress was long and flowed around her like a current—wide sleeves brushed the grass tips and a neckline that bared her shoulders plunged to gather at a gold and pearl brooch between her breasts, all of it spun from ivory silk with edges that looked dipped in dye made of pale pink cabbage roses. She was barefoot, unconcerned with the prickle of the ground, and her slender fingers bedecked with rings and chains that made the most pleasant chime when they moved. 

He stared up at her, forgetting his pain when he spied the long, tapering shells of her ears that arced back in long points. The heel of one hand pressed into one eye and made it harder to register what he was seeing. It hit him like a carriage to the face. 

“Eilonwy?” He rasped and winced, gritting his teeth as another wave pierced his skull. “Wasn’t your hair brown?” 

“It’s called a glamour. I was trying to be inconspicuous,” she waved a hand and batted the moment away. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, Icarus. I couldn’t tell you.”

“You vanished! No, worse - you broke the salt on purpose and I could’ve died. Do you understand that?!” He snarled, anger amplified by the stabbing in his eye. 

A blush crept across her freckled cheeks, “I had no choice. He was going to expose me and I needed to buy time to get away. You would not have died, but I know you think that. Listen to me. We don’t have much time.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” he grumbled. “Was he even your brother?”

She winced, then nodded and he wasn’t sure which surprised him more, “He was. Dáire left to wake the Ancients, but he never came back. He wasn’t… he wasn’t supposed to offer himself, the fool. He was only supposed to wake it, but my brother wasn’t born with a lick of sense in his head. Now he’s paid for it and we’ve lost an Ancient.”

“I won’t apologize for killing him, that thing was going to rip my throat out,” Icarus hissed. “You keep saying we, what does that mean? What are you? It sure as all the Stygian hells isn’t a fae.”

The tips of her ears drooped in what he chose to believe was guilt, “Not fae the way you know them. Dáire could cross without taking a host, all my kind can. We’re… I’m Tuatha de Danann. High fae.”

His one-eyed glare could wither a forest, “Of course.”

She sighed and placed both hands on his shoulders to cut off whatever else he might say, “I know you don’t trust me, but I need you to try. The gaol that’s got your father won’t hold. The Morrigan is trying to free him. If she does, he’s going to unleash hell upon us all. He won’t just destroy our world, what he’s planning will destroy yours, too. You need to get there and stop him before she sets him free.”

“What happens if he gets free?” Icarus winced against another lash of fire whipping across his skull. “Why can’t you just kill him?”

“He’s got the blood of a demon in him, the only thing we’d succeed in doing is casting it out if we tried. Look, get to the gaol and I’ll find you. A fae can’t kill him in that state, that’s why we put him there in the first place,” she lifted her head, ears twitching at a sound Icarus couldn’t hear. “Get there. Find it or all of us are doomed.”

He growled incoherently and doubled over under the force of another wave, spilling out from under her hands. He collapsed on all fours with a groan, nausea welled up in his gut and turned into scorching bile in his throat. He spit and dry heaved until it passed. Everything was aflame, he could barely think. He managed to ease himself up on shaking limbs and sit back on his heels, then took a long breath before looking up at her again with both eyes. 

She startled. 

Icarus did not like that she startled. 

Eilonwy leaned down, wide-eyed, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

He furrowed his brow, “What? This is my-”

“Not you,” her eyes narrowed. “You.”

“What-”

She pointed at him with a scowl, “Get out.”

The tip of her finger tapped his forehead and Icarus was rocketed backwards, falling through the world and watching the colors bleed in that wet-paint way he was tragically getting used to. He cried out in alarm, cut short when he was unceremoniously dumped back into the human world and the aching physical body that came with it. 

He scrambled to his feet and bolted from his office. He threw open the door to the washroom, ignoring Edith’s worried calls after him. The water was cool and blessedly purifying when he splashed it into his face to smother the fire in his eye. Relief swept through him and the lingering Eidolon swirled and roiled until it was sipped away down the drain. 

Brass chilled under his palms, Icarus gripped the basin tighter and tried to steady his breathing and the mad dash of his heart at the same time. His mind reeled and tumbled over the faded edges of everything he had seen while desperately trying to commit it to memory.

Eilonwy, Tuatha de Danann. It explained a lot. Too much, if he thought about it. 

Danann were very rare, so rare they were mythologized and dismissed in some parts of the country as fiction which always amused Icarus considering the state of things. High fae could travel the realms without anchoring into a human host, no need for possession when you’re full to the brim with their weird magic. 

He blinked rapidly until his vision cleared and everything stopped coming in doubles. Maren’s voice carried in an unintelligible question he could guess at and the door creaked when it opened. Her hand was on his back and she lifted his chin to inspect the damage.

“Tell me.”

He flexed his hand, the chill of the brass must have crept into that damned wrist of his again, “I don’t know. I did everything

Hey Inkmongers!

October is nearly gone, which means it’s time to make our November book club selection!

My dream for Inkmonger is to one day publish a winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction (or make the world a better place in the attempt). All of the Inkmonger book club picks will help us achieve this by teaching us all about Le Guin's literary lineage, and the qualities that give stories their hope-generating capacity.

Here are the contenders, hand-picked from the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlists, and Le Guin’s own bibliography:

Elder Race • Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.
But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).
But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, and his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon. . . .

The City in Glass • Nghi Vo

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.

And then the angels come, and the city falls.

Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.

Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.

The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.

Audition • Pip Adam

2026 Winner of the UKLG Prize!

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves – experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

Five Ways to Forgiveness • Ursula K Le Guin

Here for the first time is the complete suite of five linked stories from Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed Hainish series, which tells the history of the Ekumen, the galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain. First published as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and now joined by a fifth story, Five Ways to Forgiveness focuses on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe—two worlds whose peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain future after civil war and revolution.

In “Betrayals” a retired science teacher must make peace with her new neighbor, a disgraced revolutionary leader. In “Forgiveness Day,” a female official from the Ekumen arrives to survey the situation on Werel and struggles against its rigidly patriarchal culture. Embedded within “A Man of the People,” which describes the coming of age of Havzhiva, an Ekumen ambassador to Yeowe, is Le Guin’s most sustained description of the Ur-planet Hain. “A Woman’s Liberation” is the remarkable narrative of Rakam, born an asset on Werel, who must twice escape from slavery to freedom. Joined to them is “Old Music and the Slave Women,” in which the charismatic Hainish embassy worker, who appears in two of the four original stories, returns for a tale of his own. Of this capstone tale Le Guin has written, “the character called Old Music began to tell me a fifth tale about the latter days of the civil war . . . I’m glad to see it joined to the others at last.”

The Eye of the Heron • Ursula K Le Guin

In Victoria on a former prison colony, two exiled groups--the farmers of Shantih and the City dwellers--live in apparent harmony. All is not as it seems, however. While the peace-loving farmers labor endlessly to provide food for the City, the City Bosses rule the Shantih with an iron fist. When a group of farmers decide to from a new settlement further away, the Bosses retaliate by threatening to crush the "rebellion."

Luz understands what it means to have no choices. Her father is a Boss and he has ruled over her life with the same iron fist. Luz wonders what it might be like to make her own choices. To be free to choose her own destiny.

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We've read some wild books this year, and want to hear what your favorite balls-off-the-wall books are. Any genre or release date is fine, the only criteria is that it made you go WTF

It's Election Day!!! Well no, not that one, for our book club's November pick :)

I think we're past all the big name author releases for the year, but there are still some interesting books to look forward to. Here's what I have my eye on for November. Summaries are from the Storygraph. Are you looking forward to any of these? Did I miss any of your most anticipated? Let me know in the comments!

Monsters of Ohio by John Scalzi (11/3) - Daniel Garvey left Richland decades back, to find his own way in the world. But when he is called back to his hometown to tie up some loose ends, he finds more going on than he bargained for, and is caught up in a sequence of events that will bring this tiny farm village to the attention of the entire world... and, perhaps, spell its doom. 

Sunflower Season by Danica Nava (11/3) - Drained by her high-pressure tech job, June quits and buys a crumbling sunflower farm in rural Oklahoma, where she grew up. She thought her biggest challenge in restoring Sunshine Farm would be the rotting fences but soon comes to the crushing realization that “positive vibes” are not a business plan. Nothing, however, tests her resolve quite like running into her first love, the boy she left behind after her world imploded when she was seventeen.

And If I Die Before I Wake by George M. Johnson (11/10) - George M. Johnson is no stranger to death. In this debut adult memoir, readers are invited to witness as they navigate an HIV diagnosis, alcoholism, tremendous loss, and nationwide book bans over the span of 15 years. Through the highs and lows of life in the spotlight, they have clung to family and community like never before -- finding their most authentic self along the way.

Take My Word For It by LeVar Burton (11/10) - Tracing the different eras of his life—from Kunta Kinte to Geordi La Forge to Reading Rainbow and far beyond the camera—celebrated actor LeVar Burton fearlessly opens up about growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, being raised by a remarkable mother, and discovering his calling as a storyteller.

Two Can Play That Game by Zakiya N. Jamal (11/17) - Chelsea has never cared about sports. But when she’s invited to sit courtside at a New York WNBA game, she welcomes the break from her usual routine. What she doesn’t expect is a basketball nearly colliding with her face—or the six-foot-four hottie who jogs over, flashing a heart-stopping grin, to retrieve it.

Content Warning: This post discusses death by suicide and sexual assault, specifically sexual assault against an enslaved woman.

I recently finished reading A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America's Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes to try and get in the Halloween spirit. Ghosts have long been a fascination of mine, ever since I was a child, despite the fact that I am and always have been terrified of them. Yet in all of my years of ghost lore, this book, moreso a collection of stories regarding ghosts than a collection of ghost stories (and I maintain that there is a difference), has caused me to see the role that ghosts play in a whole new light. I had never thought about the fact that most ghosts, including the few in my own family, are women, or, as the authors bring up, ghost tours are thereby a continuation of exploiting these women beyond their deaths. Both authors are ghost tour hosts, by the way.

I should mention that I absolutely believe in ghosts. To me, ghost tours aren't so much a fun late-night activity with your friends as they are somewhat a history tour where we learn the stories of our past. Despite my interest in ghosts, I have a healthy respect and fear of them, so there are some places I refuse to step near, let alone visit. The main one, as someone from LA, is the Stay on Main Hotel, previously known as the Hotel Cecil. The other main one though is any plantation, which is why one story that the authors shared stayed with me the most.

Plantation tours, especially ghost tours, feel especially exploitative. These are horrific places where innumerous tragedies occurred, and yet there are people who claim them as part of their heritage and throw weddings and parties there (on a side note, I recommend reading When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen for a novel about returning home for a plantation wedding and the erasure of history that said venues do). So the chapter about Molly and Mathilda of the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, Georgia really stuck with me. The house's history is often colored with language about "affairs" between Francis Sorrel, the man who owned the house, and Molly, an enslaved woman at the house. People say that he was "caught being intimate" with Molly, as if intimacy is the same as sexual assault. Both Molly and Mathilda, Sorrel's wife, were reported to die by suicide within weeks of each other, with Mathilda apparently doing so after catching her husband with Molly. Molly is considered a direct cause of Mathilda Sorrel's suicide, how horrifying is that?

Of course, both women supposedly haunt the Sorrel-Weed House today. There are a number of reasons why I hate this, one being the minimizing and sanitizing of what Molly endured from Sorrel, and another being that I hope with everything in me that enslaved people are free from plantations at the very least in whatever afterlife exists. Apparently though, Molly, Mathilda, and the Sorrel-Weed House bring a lot of money to Savannah's ghost tourism industry, so much so that I had actually forgotten the name of the Sorrel-Weed House, yet found it easily. All I did was Google "Savannah ghosts" and the first link was a list of "Most Haunted Places in Savannah, Georgia", where I easily found the Sorrel-Weed House and a sanitizied version of Molly and Mathilda's story where they stated "being intimate" instead of being raped and briefly mentioned that she was enslaved. Don't worry though, the author made sure to emphasize that the Sorrel-Weed House is haunted, that people are allowed inside the house to search for ghosts, and that they loved seeing what the house looked like "back in the day". On a side note, I only want to see plantations look like the Noroway Plantation - burnt to the ground.

I wish I could end this post with advice on how to ethically consume ghost stories, the way that many of us are finding ways to ethically consume true crime. I suppose they're one and the same though. There's a quote from author Michelle McNamara that has stuck with me ever since I read her book I'll Be Gone in the Dark.

"I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane."

I think the same applies when it comes to ghost stories, because rarely do we ever hear stories about happy ghosts who lived long and happy lives. Even in A Haunted History of Invisible Women, we start with the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and immediately go into a story of a woman who died by suicide at the Hotel Coronado. Regardless of if you believe in ghosts, these women (for the most part) existed at some point. Even Toni Morrison's Beloved is based on the real story of Margaret Garner, who killed her two-year-old daughter Mary and attempted to kill her other children to spare them from slavery when caught by the slave patrol.

All ghost stories start somewhere, so my hope is that after this, we all take the time to recognize and think critically about the language we use when discussing them, as well as how we may profit off of them (and yes, I am fully aware of the irony that this post is behind a paywall). As always though, the goal of Feminist Book Club is to launch conversations, so please comment below what thoughts that this post brings you. And please take a moment to think about Molly, Mathilda, Margaret, and baby Mary.

Tuesday might be our favorite day of the week! Here are some titles releasing today that we think you should add to your TBR (to be read) shelf.

Let us know in the comments which book release you are most excited for or which release you are grabbing today that's not mentioned!

Two gods strike a bargain that leads them on a journey with devastating consequences in this lush historical fantasy from New York Times bestselling author Ann Liang.

China in the age of brilliance, where gods freely wander the three realms. Amongst them is the cruel and beautiful Death God, who has never failed to collect a soul on time. Until now. For when he seeks out Rujia, the noble god of healing―and the only god he is fated to kill with his own hands―she makes him an offer he can’t refuse: she will help lift the excruciating, century-old curse placed upon him if he gives her a one-month reprieve.

Rujia knows she isn’t as noble as everyone believes. Her deal with Death is merely an excuse to buy herself time while she figures out an escape plan. But when her plan causes the Celestial Palace’s collapse and the beloved crown prince’s disappearance, she and Death are both held responsible. The only way to avoid the wrath of all the other gods is to travel across the realms and safely retrieve the crown prince themselves.

Yet the journey proves far more treacherous than expected. As the unlikely alliance between them blooms into more, and Death’s resolve to kill Rujia weakens by the day, neither can outrun their intertwined fate without devastating consequences: A mysterious plague. An empire-destroying flood. A thousand deaths―and rising―to restore the balance Rujia's disrupted. And if Rujia continues to live despite the will of the Heavens, this is only the beginning...

 From the author of the beloved The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, an imaginative celebration of T Rex from hatching to adulthood

Tyrannosaurus rex is a prehistoric celebrity. Exceeding 40 feet in length and weighing over 9 tons, the largest individuals of this dinosaurian species were intimidating predators capable of crushing bone and consuming more than a hundred pounds of flesh in a bite. But the last of the tyrant dinosaurs had a life beyond ripping and tearing. More than 66 million years ago, T. rex courted each other, nested, watched over their offspring, slept, drank, and explored ancient floodplains inhabited by a fantastic cast of impressive dinosaurs like the huge long-neck Alamosaurus and burly, three-horned Torosaurus. For the first time, the life story of this impressive, sensitive predator is told as if you were there to watch it unfold.

In her latest prehistoric nature walk, bestselling and award-winning author Riley Black follows the life of plucky T. rex Snaggletooth from the time she hatches through her tumultuous adulthood. The prehistoric forest Snag emerges into is full of danger, and yet, as Riley weaves the latest fossil discoveries into the story, the carnivorous dinosaur survives to play, court, fight, sleep, nest, and more as she grows up in Cretaceous North America. She tussles with rival tyrannosaurs, hunts for delectable prey, and finds soft moments of connection in the forest. Even the most die-hard dinosaur fan will come away with a new perspective and appreciation for the Tyrant Lizard Queen.

When Rabbit was ten years old, she was abducted by aliens. Then, it happened again when she was twenty. Now thirty, she’s ready for their next visit. What she isn’t prepared for is her boyfriend callously ending their long-term relationship and ejecting her from their shared home.

As her birthday approaches, the aliens still haven’t arrived. Rabbit descends into a spiral of growing paranoia and bizarre bodily transformations, until soon it seems that even her reflection has a mind of its own. With her only refuge being the chaos of strangers who might not have her best interests at heart, Rabbit worries that her ex’s abandonment not only severed her from his life, but also from her own. Struggling to orient herself within a world growing more topsy-turvy by the day, Rabbit must regain control before her aliens at last return.

Marge Piercy’s final memoir is a testament to her legacy.

After revered poet, writer, and feminist icon Marge Piercy dies in a medical emergency in October 2022, only to be resuscitated, she wakes to create her legacy piece. The Hour of My Death: A Journal of the Year After I Died is a personal narrative in the Japanese Zuihitsu literary form that encompasses diary-style entries, recipes, gardening advice and her luminous poetry, all detailing a joyful year of living in her resurrected old age. 

A beloved American progressive activist, feminist, and writer, her seminal work includes Woman On The Edge Of Time; He, She And It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone To Soldiers, the New York Times bestseller and sweeping historical novel set during World War II. She has authored fifteen other novels and short story collections, and penned twenty volumes of poetry with poems regularly reprinted in anthologies, on artwork, as song lyrics, and more. Piercy also was a pioneer in the use of gender-neutral pronouns in the 1970s and is a staple in Women’s Studies programs. Marge is now 90 and has completed her final memoir, The Hour of My Death, with her reflections on a life extended and the grace and wisdom that comes with that.

Unsettling and charged, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is equal parts psychological thriller and social satire that explores the disquieting qualities of a privileged family’s mundane cultural assumptions.

Sue, her husband, Luke, and their children, Caroline and Wheatley, present as a picture-perfect family living the American dream of ascendancy and affluence in their Brooklyn neighborhood. They purchase a brownstone at auction on a coveted tree-lined street with the intention of renovating it and moving in. At once avoidant and consumed by the renovation, Sue is torn between her aspirations to have what those around her seem to possess—from her therapist, Diana, to her alluring, insufferable neighbor Chantal—and her urge to escape the grip of their influences. Sue’s obsession and paranoia grow while the neighborhood becomes a hotbed of pulsating antagonisms.

It is only after moving in that Sue becomes aware of the mysterious deaths of the brownstone’s former residents, a mother and daughter whose voices echo in the silence. The house begins manifesting disturbing signs, such as wounds that bleed, just as Caroline and Wheatley exhibit their own troubling symptoms. Sue’s nightmares proliferate and a vacuous stupor overcomes the family as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of life in what should be their dream home. When information arises that threatens to devastate her family, Sue must finally confront the explosive charge of personal and social reality once laid bare.

With exacting psychological detail and a trenchant atmosphere, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is a darkly comic and piercing social critique that examines the troubling territory of awareness, the lengths some go to avoid it, and what must be confronted for change to occur.

Polls have closed and the votes have been counted. For November we will be reading:

Adventures of a Decaffeinated Coffee Gremlin by Trash Panda

Written by an Independent Author, this book is promising to be full of hilarity mixed with vulnerability as a coffee addicted creature is forced to quit the hot bean juice cold turkey. Formatted as a diary spanning 30 days, we get to follow along through the caffeine withdrawled madness.

I'm quite excited to read this one, as I'm fond of light-hearted humor, and I'm so excited to discuss it with you in Discord!

Happy Reading.

I love books by Pippa Grant! ♥️

And the mad house is back!! 😍😂 I missed Aunt Pip, Lavender, Mabel, the chicken, the cat. And there are so many new characters 🤌

Ginny is living in a winery with women who have been victims of going viral on social media. Years ago her video of objecting her ex's wedding went viral. Now, her ex's best friend, a previous hockey player, Declan, is there to shoot a documentary. But didn't he hate Ginny, so what has changed now?

The dynamic of Ginny and Declan is so good. Ginny has gone through so much. There are so many elements as to why she went viral. I want to befriend Ginny!

Declan is a green flag. Though resolved in the end, I never understood why so much importance is given to Alex. I would have liked more insight into Declan and Alex's relationship.

I was afraid there was going to be a third act breakup. But thankfully that wasn't the case. The ending is perfect! Declan took the right call! I was so proud 😍🤌

Thank you Pippa Grant and team for this wonderful gifted copy!