Episode 805: A romance novel by a BIPOC author

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us on the 8th season of our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons and share more information with your library community. 

And this week we are focusing on romance novels written by BIPOC authors!
We love to see the increase of romance books published by authors who are Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color. And we’re excited to share all our suggestions! Special thanks to CMLE Podcast Correspondent and Literary Romance Expert Ariel Kirst for helping us learn about this genre! 

Beverages:

To celebrate this week’s topic of romance, we made drinks from the article “25 Love-ly Cocktails for Valentine’s Day” (note: these drinks are Extra Fancy – don’t feel bad if you have to look up certain ingredients, I know I did!) We encourage you to grab your own delicious beverage to enjoy as we chat books! 

The Honey Bee
Ingredients:

  • .75 oz Drambuie
  • 3 dashes walnut bitters
  • Prosecco to top

Instructions:

In a champagne flute, add Drambuie and walnut bitters. Top with prosecco and garnish with an expressed orange peel.

The Love Potion

Ingredients:

  • 3 oz gin
  • 1 oz lime juice
  • 1 oz elderflower liquor
  • 6 oz rosé champagne

Instructions:

In a cocktail shaker, combine the following: gin, elderflower liquor, and lime juice. Add ice and shake for 10 seconds. Add your rose petal ice cubes to an empty cocktail glass. Strain cocktail mixture onto the ice. Top with rose champagne and enjoy

Genre Discussion:

This article from the Vancouver Public Library explains:  “BIPOC” is the acronym for Black, Indigenous, and people of colour. BIPOC has replaced the phrase “people of colour” (POC) to acknowledge that 1) Black and Indigenous people in North America are severely impacted by systemic racial injustice, 2) not all people of colour face equal levels of injustice, and 3) the conflation of multiple identities into one group erases all variations in experience.

In the North American genre fiction and publishing context, the phrase BIPOC* is used to acknowledge that Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian groups may share a similar relationship to an industry focused almost entirely on white authors.”

The Ripped Bodice is an independent bookseller in LA who specializes in the romance genre and they put together this study: “The State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing Study tracks the publication of books written by authors who are BIPOC in the traditional romance publishing genre.”

You can view reports from 2016-2020 on their site, linked to from our shownotes page. 

They also have a very informative FAQ page where they answer questions such as why are you only looking at race? 

Answer: “While many groups are still woefully underrepresented in the romance genre, including people with disabilities, marginalized religious groups, and members of the LGBTQ community, racial diversity is the specific area we chose to focus on. And the truth is that racial discrimination and white supremacy is still dominant, even when in concert or combination with other marginalized identities.”

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 


Luster by Raven Leilani 

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties―sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage―with rules.

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric’s home―though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.

Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life―her hunger, her anger―in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai

Alisha Rai returns with a sizzling new novel, in which two rival dating app creators find themselves at odds in the boardroom but in sync in the bedroom.
Rhiannon Hunter may have revolutionized romance in the digital world, but in real life she only swipes right on her career—and the occasional hookup. The cynical dating app creator controls her love life with a few key rules: – Nude pics are by invitation only – If someone stands you up, block them with extreme prejudice – Protect your heart
Only there aren’t any rules to govern her attraction to her newest match, former pro-football player Samson Lima. The sexy and seemingly sweet hunk woos her one magical night… and disappears. 

Rhi thought she’d buried her hurt over Samson ghosting her, until he suddenly surfaces months later, still big, still beautiful—and in league with a business rival. He says he won’t fumble their second chance, but she’s wary. A temporary physical partnership is one thing, but a merger of hearts? Surely that’s too high a risk…

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her parent’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she’s able to ignore all the constant questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

Meet Yinka: a thirty-something, Oxford-educated, British Nigerian woman with a well-paid job, good friends, and a mother whose constant refrain is “Yinka, where is your huzband?”

Yinka’s Nigerian aunties frequently pray for her delivery from singledom, her work friends think she’s too traditional (she’s saving herself for marriage!), her girlfriends think she needs to get over her ex already, and the men in her life…well, that’s a whole other story.  But Yinka herself has always believed that true love will find her when the time is right.

Still, when her cousin gets engaged, Yinka commences Operation Find-A-Date for Rachel’s Wedding. Aided by a spreadsheet and her best friend, Yinka is determined to succeed. Will Yinka find herself a huzband? And what if the thing she really needs to find is herself? Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? brilliantly subverts the traditional romantic comedy with an unconventional heroine who bravely asks the questions we all have about love. Wry, acerbic, moving, this is a love story that makes you smile but also makes you think–and explores what it means to find your way between two cultures, both of which are yours.

Must Love Books by Shauna Robinson

When Nora landed an editorial assistant position at Parsons Press, it was her first step towards The Dream Job. Because, honestly, is there anything dreamier than making books for a living? But after five years of lunch orders, finicky authors, and per my last emails, Nora has come to one grand conclusion: Dream Jobs do not exist.

With her life spiraling and the Parsons staff sinking, Nora gets hit with even worse news. Parsons is cutting her already unlivable salary. Unable to afford her rent and without even the novels she once loved as a comfort, Nora decides to moonlight for a rival publisher to make ends meet…and maybe poach some Parsons’ authors along the way.

But when Andrew Santos, a bestselling Parsons author no one can afford to lose is thrown into the mix, Nora has to decide where her loyalties lie. Her new Dream Job, ever-optimistic Andrew, or…herself and her future.

Your next book club read touching on mental health, happiness, and the peaks and perils of being a young woman just trying to figure it all out. Nora Hughes is the perfect heroine for anyone looking to get past their own chapter twenty-something and build their storybook life.

I Love You So Mochi, by Sarah Kuhn

Kimi Nakamura loves a good fashion statement. She’s obsessed with transforming everyday ephemera into Kimi Originals: bold outfits that make her and her friends feel like the Ultimate versions of themselves. But her mother disapproves, and when they get into an explosive fight, Kimi’s entire future seems on the verge of falling apart. So when a surprise letter comes in the mail from Kimi’s estranged grandparents, inviting her to Kyoto for spring break, she seizes the opportunity to get away from the disaster of her life.When she arrives in Japan, she’s met with a culture both familiar and completely foreign to her. She loses herself in the city’s outdoor markets, art installations, and cherry blossom festival — and meets Akira, a cute aspiring med student who moonlights as a costumed mochi mascot. And what begins as a trip to escape her problems quickly becomes a way for Kimi to learn more about the mother she left behind, and to figure out where her own heart lies.

How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

The Hating Game meets I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter in this Pura Belpré Award–winning novel that’s an irresistible romance starring a Mexican American teen who discovers love and profound truths about the universe when she spends her summer on a road trip across the country.

When her twin sister reaches social media stardom, Moon Fuentez accepts her fate as the ugly, unwanted sister hidden in the background, destined to be nothing more than her sister’s camerawoman. But this summer, Moon also takes a job as the “merch girl” on a tour bus full of beautiful influencers and her fate begins to shift in the best way possible.

Most notable is her bunkmate and new nemesis, Santiago Phillips, who is grumpy, combative, and also the hottest guy Moon has ever seen.

Moon is certain she hates Santiago and that he hates her back. But as chance and destiny (and maybe, probably, close proximity) bring the two of them in each other’s perpetual paths, Moon starts to wonder if that’s really true. She even starts to question her destiny as the unnoticed, unloved wallflower she always thought she was.

Could this summer change Moon’s life as she knows it?

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

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Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!