Winter 2025 Book Recommendations
Now with more feminist rage!
I thought I’d send this list slightly earlier than “winter” because 1) all the “year’s best book” lists are going to start rolling out, but also 2) I thought you might need some reads for over your Thanksgiving break. Enjoy!
Book recommendations later. But first, book news!
I have another cover release! This one is for FORTS, illustrated by the illustrious Kenard Pak. It’s available for pre-order now at all the usual places. Signed copies are available through Dotters Books if you preorder by 7/29/25 (which is also the release date!).
Isn’t it gorgeous! I’m in love with this cover.
Books I Read and Loved Recently
Now, onto the books I didn’t write. 😁
Read to the end of this newsletter to get a bonus non-book recommendation!
Picture Books
Touch the Sky by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic and Chris Park
One of my kids struggled to learn how to pump on the swings and this strikingly illustrated book shows us the tiny moment of a boy learning how to swing. It's one of those rare picture books that I not only wish I had written but also have no idea how Stephanie conjured this magic. I'll be pretty mad if this isn't honored in some way at the ALA awards. Great for young school aged kids.
Stranded: A Mostly True Story from Iceland by Ævar Þór Benediktsson and Anne Wilson
A fun and not-at-all scary nonfiction story about the author's grandfather, an explorer, who was stranded (temporarily) on a new island off the coast of Iceland. A fun book to learn about how volcanoes make new land. Come for the stranded story, stay for Anne Wilson's wonderful illustrations of Norse gods peeking out from the lava flows. Might be better for slightly older PB kiddos, 5 and up.
Middle Grade
Artie and the Wolf Moon by Olivia Stephens
Wonderful graphic novel about a Black girl who discovers that her mom is a werewolf. And, actually, so is she. And she comes from a long line of werewolves who have a war going on with vampires. An exciting coming-of-age story as Artie learns about her family, how her dad really died, and finds a girlfriend along the way. There are a few scary battles with the vampires and the story deals with the death of Artie's father, so I'd recommend this for 10+, unless your kids are hardier than mine.
For some reason, I found myself drawn to some truly rageful feminist reads lately in teen and adult books. If you are also feeling like that’s what you want to read right now, I invite you to dig in. These were cathartic, motivating, thoughtful, and inspiring.
I’ve ordered the books below by order of rage and age category.
Teen
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
This lovely, hopeful YA novel-in-verse tells the story of a high school sophomore as she tries to find her own identity as a poet and a young woman while keeping the peace with her restrictive and religious Dominican mother who punishes X for her "big body," her temper, her gender, and her spirit. The poems are beautiful and the story compelling. If I had to pick one line that sums up the theme of the book, it would be "God just wants me to behave so I can earn being alive." Oof. There’s a whole lotta things to unpack with that. This book won so many awards when it came out, and I can definitely see why. It’s really good.
Paper Girls created by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang
Think Stranger Things but with girls. This 6-book series of thin graphic novels tells the story of four girls are minding their own business on their paper routes in 1988 until they get sucked into a time war. They fight alien monsters (or what look like alien monsters), tech overlords, even different versions of themselves. A must for any high school kid (or middle schooler who doesn't mind very strong adult language) who loves speculative comics. Do yourself a favor and request the whole series from the library some cold weekend and read them all at once.
Pick the Lock by A. S. King
Every so often, you finish a book and think, "how am I supposed to just go back to my life the way it was before?" FEED is one of those books, and PICK THE LOCK can hold its own with FEED. 16-year-old Jane's mother, when she's not on tour as a punk rocker, lives in their house in a series of pneumatic tubes. Jane and her brother have been taught to hate their mother, something Jane never questioned until she finds home movies (from creepy cameras set in every room) that show her how wrong she's been about everything. Just a warning: this whole book is about domestic violence (hitting, emotional and verbal abuse) and sexism. There's also a fair amount of alcohol abuse. I'd say it’s for high school kids and adults.
Adult
You may have thought an entire book about truly messed up domestic violence would be the most rage-y of my feminist rage reads this season. But no.
The Change by Kirsten Miller
Three perimenopausal woman develop supernatural powers and use them to exact revenge against whoever has been killing teenaged girls in their island in New York State. This is a banger of a book. I stayed up until midnight reading it multiple nights in a row. It was enraging and cathartic and gave me a new appreciation for my middle-aged body and what I'm capable of (I mean, I probably can't melt a pen with a hot flash like one of the characters does, but, still). This book gave me the same feeling of empowerment that I had when I watched the first Wonder Woman movie (but not the second movie, which was terrible). Having said that, there are quite a lot of references to sexual assault and murder. These women are avenging a lot of wrongdoing. None of the sexual assault was depicted on the page, but if that's triggering for you...tread carefully. One of the women, Harriet, will live forever in my heart. Picture Samantha from Sex in the City as a witch, and you'll come close.
The Power by Naomi Alderman
This is way darker than my usual recommendations with rather a lot of sexual assault in it (less than Outlander, but still quite a bit). However, it was a deeply compelling, eerie, imaginative novel about what would happen if all the women in the world developed the power to generate electricity as a weapon. It's about how power, both political and physical power, corrupts the wielder, and the lengths people will go to in order to burndown the status quo. I wouldn't call it disturbing as much as unsettling. Margaret Atwood endorsed this on the cover, and I can see a strong connection between her work and this one.
Thus ends my rage recommendations.
Random Bonus Recommendation
Nobody Wants This
I love romcoms, but what I don’t love is when two people who can’t seem to act decently towards each other fall in love. Or there are conflicts that no one bothers to straighten out, and somehow they regardless reconcile in the end. Or the dreaded “one person overhears something out of context and blows up the whole relationship without talking about it until a tearful reunion out of the blue.”
Nobody Wants This on Netflix avoids all of those. It’s just a delightful series about two people (a rabbi and a host of a sex podcast) who shouldn’t fall in love, but do. When there are issues, they talk about them. When there are misunderstandings, one of them says, “hey, that was weird.” They have realistic conflicts, and they work through them realistically. Their families are a mess, but they are all just trying to do what they think is the right thing for the family. It’s glorious. A romcom for all of us stressed out by 2024.
Book I Read a While Ago and Keep Thinking About (So You Know It’s Good)
As promised, if you made it to the end of the newsletter, here’s a book I read a while ago and can’t stop thinking about:
The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor
This series of novellas—which won basically all the SFF awards—follows a young Himba girl as she leaves her home to travel to a university on another planet. But her ship is attacked and the crew brutally murdered. She has to survive the journey with the beings who killed everyone else on board, and then save the a whole other planet after she does that.
The writing is gorgeous, the plot is compelling and ambitious. I could not put it down and its haunted me ever since. Even though the protagonist is technically a young adult, personally I’d suggest this for adults and older teens.
Read more about the whole series here.
Leave Me a Comment!
Have you read any of these books and have thoughts about them you want to share?
Is there something you want me to talk about in my next newsletter?
Have a question about my books or about the publishing process?
Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for the newsletter! I'm looking forward to Fort.