Book of the Day Roundup: June 16-20, 2025
Chocolate Chip City
Be Steadwell
Bywater Books
Softcover $22.95 (370pp)
978-1-61294-315-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Be Steadwell’s novel Chocolate Chip City is about gentrification and protest. It is also a hymn to Black love, Black queerness, and Black spirit that pulses with the joy of existence.
The Jones sisters—Ella, Jasmine, and Layla—inherited their mother Ro’s lessons: The world’s gaze does not dictate beauty, and magic isn’t supernatural but rather deeply empathetic and human. Their power comes not from fantasy but from their sisterly bond and their ability to heal, connect, and resist. They claim their bodies—short, thick, dark, and androgynous—without apology, knowing beauty is not a standard but a birthright.
Ella, a bodyworker, mends wounds with her touch, sensing pain buried beneath skin and bone. Layla, an activist, moves through the city like a conduit, drawing strength from the living and the dead. Jasmine, a baker, pours love into her food, each recipe a balm and an act of restoration. Ro, diagnosed with cancer, treats dying like a passage and an opportunity to heal generational wounds. Through her, the book sings of traditions that expand religious practices, wherein faith means embracing one’s ancestors, the elements, and timeless rhythms.
Layla’s fight against a luxury development spirals into a trip through the historical Black Broadway of Washington, DC, a once-thriving arts and business hub. Jasmine’s love story revels in queer desire, with spiritual sex scenes shifting from tender to raw and embodying connection. Jasmine’s story is also about celebrating addiction recovery and multiple gender identities. And the novel’s elders dance, joke, and live, twirling through the pages with elegance and mischief.
A vibrant, defiant tapestry of Black life in all its magic, Chocolate Chip City is a triumphant novel—a love letter to the past, present, and future.
PINE BREAKS (April 21, 2025)
Nelly the Very Different Bird
Alex Macdonald
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books
Hardcover $18.99 (40pp)
978-1-83600-076-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A bird who can’t fly learns to do so much more in this quirky picture book about the power of being different. Nelly is left behind when the other birds migrate, but she’s not one to sit and wait; she sails seas, scales mountains, and traverses deserts to find her flock—only for them to head back as soon as she arrives. The return trip, however, comes with some company, and Nelly is happy to pass her knowledge on.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 21, 2025)
Drought
Scott Alexander Hess
Rebel Satori Press
Softcover $17.95 (166pp)
978-1-60864-358-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Scott Alexander Hess’s pastoral novel Drought, an isolated man inherits a farm and learns about the estranged relative who left it to him.
When Parnell, an aimless orphan, inherits a tobacco farm from his Uncle Willy, he moves to Kentucky. There, he meets a wacky preacher, John, with ties to his late uncle and a jovial fast-food employee, Darl, who becomes his closest friend. As Parnell grows closer to Darl, John makes a confession about Parnell’s uncle that shifts Parnell’s perspective in a radical way.
Parnell’s loneliness is palpable, and his childhood recollections are so traumatic that he replaces them with film scenes, adopting moments from beloved films as his own memories. His haunting isolation is interrupted by Darl’s enthusiasm, positive attitude, and welcoming nature, which allow Parnell to take hesitant first steps toward friendship. Strong sensory details vivify the setting, from descriptions of the farm to those of the Sonic where Darl works, which sticks out among the pastoral landmarks. This juxtaposition enhances the story, as Willy, Parnell, and Darl stick out, too.
Beginning in the present before shifting back to Willy’s life in the 1950s, Drought tells the story of two men separated by geography and generations while leading parallel lives. Both Parnell and Willy find solace in their relationships with other men, and the transitions from friendship to greater intimacy are smooth and natural. Willy’s romance is innocent and sweet despite harrowing circumstances, like a homophobic villain who is cruel and relentless. Through John’s connection to both timelines, Parnell contends with a dark choice Willy made to protect his lover.
Drought is an intricate, moving novel about a lonely farmer who wrestles with his uncle’s past and learns what it means to belong.
LEAH BLOCK (April 21, 2025)
Porthole
Joanna Howard
McSweeney’s
Hardcover $28.00 (325pp)
978-1-963270-28-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Joanna Howard’s sardonic novel Porthole, a famed director is forced to seek rest following the death of her star.
Yacht-raised by an uncle who cycled between young women and filmed it all, Helena learned to master classic film techniques and opportunism early on. Now an auteur whose success is as wrapped up in her relationships with her stars as it is with her own vision, Helena is shaken when Corey, her latest leading man, drowns in the pursuit of the perfect scene. Her studio, still invested in her contract, sends her to a mountain retreat for some recuperative therapy. There, between cryptic encounters with other patients, she thinks back on her career and reckons with self-blame, musing “my life seems to have been a series of lost or last resorts.”
Helena fretted little when she had to leave her first stars, Emile and David, behind; they proved replaceable. But Corey’s death prompts her to examine her bloodlessness and flirt with leaving the industry behind. As a fellow resident observes, though, “the real problem is having a career that people think matters. Then someone is always invested in you keeping at it.” Even Helena’s psychiatrist seems more interested in the tabloid details of her past than he is in her redemption.
Helena is a fascinating narrator, both solipsistic and aware of her vices. Her tales fascinate, from the background on each film and her cynical notice of audience responses to the salacious encounters she had with her leading men. Through indulgences like a seance, a dinner in a dining car, and a curious encounter in a tree house, she reshapes her sense of self into something she can live—and work—with again.
A work of seductive cynicism, Porthole is a novel about great sacrifices made in the name of true art.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (June 15, 2025)
Songs of No Provenance
Lydi Conklin
Catapult
Hardcover $28.00 (368pp)
978-1-64622-251-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
What was supposed to be a chill gig turns into a lurid exhibition from which an indie musician fears she may never recover in Lydi Conklin’s lush novel Songs of No Provenance.
To escape the reality of what she’s done, Joan drives to Virginia and the summer camp that invited her to teach songwriting. She had turned them down, but now it is the only place for her to lie low and hope her transgression passes unremarked. Running away also provides Joan a clear opportunity to reassess her relationships with herself and her music.
There are no easy answers. The book questions what it means to be accountable for one’s actions and inactions and who is allowed to claim harm, impact, and forgiveness. Its exploration of queerness and kink is messy. Queerness, as articulated by Joan, defies simple explanations and refuses to be contained by labels. Her kink is presented in matter-of-fact terms, but it is also a source of shame.
Joan is the headliner in the book; everyone else is a supporting act. The tight focus on Joan is almost claustrophobic but necessary. The story homes in on her contradictory nature. She is by turns frustrating and endearing. Her depth of emotions terrifies her; she avoids feeling even as she stews in her feelings, exorcising the biggest through song and kink. There’s a tender balance between uncomfortable encounters, startling self-awareness, and Joan’s aching need to be seen but not perceived—an impossibility, as she discovers, as to be known in complete honesty and loved anyway is a release as good as, or better than, any she’s had with nameless randoms in bathrooms.
Songs of No Provenance is an astonishing novel, without artifice and unflinching in its presentation of its subject in her full humanity.
DONTANá MCPHERSON-JOSEPH (April 21, 2025)
Kathy Young
