Reading Like a Writer

"Portrait of a Good Father" by Kristiana Kahakauwila (found in the collection This Is Paradise) is a short story that takes place over many years, following different family members as they cope, or fail to cope, with a traumatic loss. It's devastating.

Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels is a novel about werewolves. Oh! I've spoiled it. But of course that much is spoiled. We live in a world of hype and trailers and book covers. You might only pick it up because you are looking for a book about werewolves. (You should pick it up either way.)

Erin Kate Ryan's novel Quantum Girl Theory starts with a true story of a missing girl, but instead of centering those left behind, the novel imagines the many different lives she may have lived. It's a beautiful book that is clever and subversive but also suspenseful.

Crystal Hana Kim's novel If You Leave Me opens with three teenagers living in a refugee camp in Korea in 1951 and follows them for many years after the war, as two of them settle into a bad marriage and all three into some serious regrets. I'm interested in a scene early on.

Premee Mohamed's Beneath the Rising is about two teenagers, Nick and Johnny, who inadvertently awaken The Ancient Ones and must race around the world to save humanity. It's also about good and evil, the perils of transactional relationships, and what makes friendship real.

Kate Kitamura's A Separation is about a woman who travels from London to Greece to find her estranged husband so she can ask for a divorce. The book is her physical search for him, but more than that, it's the narrator's search through memory and fantasy for some understanding.

Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, opens in a strange and magical way. Not only is the POV “we,” the narrators are not yet born and might be magical. When we first encounter this voice, it's hard to tell what is happening—what is "real," what is human, what is something else.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn is about a Hawaiian boy with special powers and the rest of his family. I'm interested in how the specific language choices make us understand those powers, creating a thrilling sensation, and also resonating with the book's bigger themes.

Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay is a novel about a recently divorced therapist who stops a man from jumping off a bridge and then befriends him. One of the ways Cross-Smith makes the characters both real and compelling is through her deployment of setting and subtext.

Salt Houses is a novel that follows multiple generations of a Palestinian family. It opens during a wedding, in the perspective of Salma, who is the bride's mother. Against her own mother's advice to never do a reading for family, Salma is about to read her daughter's fortune in coffee grounds.

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro is a fantasy novel about a young queen traveling in a hostile land. Queen Talyien is the narrator—she's messy and violent and also cunning and sometimes vulnerable. Her tone is conversational, and her approach to storytelling seems straightforward—until it's not.

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, is a romance novel about an autistic woman, Stella, who hires a professional escort to teach her how to have sex. And it's sexy. It also uses some really great strategies in its depiction of sex.