Janiene Julia

When They Find Her is a bit of tearjerker. With some some really shocking twists and turns, namely toward the end, this is a book about one woman and how her love for her daughter and her complex web of lies and secrets are fundamentally incompatible.

Living While Black is an exploration and confrontation of “the nuances of Blackness,” and how to heal and overcome when anti-Blackness breeds racial trauma by formulating a “tailored self-care plan.” This book is borne out of author Guilaine Kinouani’s lived experiences and evidence as a Black woman.

Girl A is a gripping look at collective, familial healing and how raw and complex this journey and experience can be. Lex is a fiercely convincing protagonist: she’s intriguing, with a distinctive voice and outlook on the situation. Lex is an individual, and the product of Dean’s incredible skill as an author. Dean’s writing has made for an exceptionally strong debut – making those that read Girl A excited for her next title, which she is currently working on.

The Lost Sister seems like the kind of novel that is great in theory, but in practice it falls very short. With a seemingly underdeveloped writing style, which then takes away from the strength of its plot, constituting a read I honestly found disappointing and lacklustre, The Lost Sister only earns 2 out of 5 stars.

In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro completely reframes the genre of dystopian science-fiction by restructuring what one has come to expect from it: the despair; the desperation; the futurism; the love. This novel is such an enchanting and immersive read led by an exceptionally strong-willed an exceptionally strong-willed and kind-hearted (artificial) girl that it easily earns five out of five stars.

Having won gal-dem’s Valentine’s Day giveaway on Instagram, I got a free copy of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel Open Water in the post sometime last month. And it is an absolute gem. Open Water reads much like a love song, or like an open love letter.

Why haven’t they grown? This impossible question is one that this entire novel is written around, and it certainly is intriguing. From this premise alone I truly had no idea what to expect by way of explaining Thomas and Emily’s seeming inability to grow. At first, I thought it might be some science experiment gone awfully wrong, or, even worse, perfectly right. Then I wondered if the explanation was more sinister, more evil, and indeed it is as twisted as you can imagine.

Kink, with its multitude of characters across the spectrum of sexual interest, is profoundly queer in its nature. The link between queerness and BDSM is one that hasn’t received much attention historically, but Kink explores this phenomenon from start to finish through the art of storytelling.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan respectively, quickly became a much-loved duo following the development of their on-screen friendship in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Sarcastic and seriously passive aggressive, they’re beyond entertaining to watch together, and trailers for the Disney+ miniseries starring the pair seem to suggest no different.

The Halo Code is a guide for schools and workplaces to prevent discriminations around Black hairstyles and/or textures. In the words of Katiann Rocha, one of the Halo Code’s co-founders, a 16-year-old based in London: “It will allow for Black people to be fully accepted in an environment that celebrates their natural hair and styles, because we’ve been discriminated against it for so long.”

Being the middle child sounds difficult enough, and for eleven-year-old Lincoln Loud those trials and tribulations are worsened by being the only boy… with ten sisters. Inspired by creator Chris Savino’s own childhood growing up with five sisters, the show is set in the fictional suburb of Royal Woods,...

LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace is something that has been a struggle to implement for decades. People who identify as anything but cisgender (those who identify with their assigned ‘sex’ at birth), or heterosexual (those attracted to people of the ‘opposite’ gender) have been struggling to gain real inclusion free from discrimination since before the 1980s, and still do so today.

Full of anthropomorphic animals, hard-to-swallow self-truths, addiction, generational family trauma, and raunchy sex against the glitzy backdrop of Los Angeles, this unforgettable series was never for the lighthearted.

Helen Fisher’s Space Hopper has been called ‘the most recommended debut of 2021’ and for good reason. This novel is about mothers and daughters, and how memories alone are not enough to cope with the grief caused by losing a loved one, especially a parent, and that, if given the opportunity, you would do something absolutely insane just to see them again. The unreliability of our memories is also hugely important in the telling of this story.

The Glass House (also known as The Daughters of Foxcote Manor) is a lush, deeply descriptive novel about mothers and their daughters – about families and the age-old secrets they hold deep in the pits of their memories and their hearts. A suspenseful family mystery, with some elements of romance, this novel unravels in two distant (yet fundamentally connected) timelines.