My Favorite Books: January-June 2026
I began writing this essay in mid-June, a month that symbolizes a half way point in the year where I reflect on what I accomplished, experienced, and how I want the remainder of the year to go. June also symbolizes freedom, liberation, pride, and Blackness. I love that the summer starts with us commemorating Juneteenth, celebrating LGBTQ+ lives, and uplifting the art and impact of Black music. In honor of this reflective and joyful time, I want to highlight the books by Black authors I most enjoyed reading the past six months. All the books, in their own way, exemplify the themes of liberation, freedom, pride, and Blackness.
Love Across Time
I started the year reading two books that transported me all over the world, from the antebellum south, to 21st century Atlanta, back to the Harlem Renaissance, and over the ocean to Paris and London. The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter by Brionni Nwosu and A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams took me on a ride that I did not want to get off! Both novels center Black women finding love and themselves under difficult circumstances while also dealing with the supernatural. In The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter, the title character Nella makes a risky, dangerous, but ultimately fulfilling bargain. This leads her to experiencing lifetimes of adventure, heartbreak, great sex, loss, and love. Despite all that she loses and endures, Nella never gave up on the capacity to love and her belief in the goodness of humanity. Nella’s story took my breath away; when given a second chance at life, she made it count, and she experienced life to the fullest.
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde indulged my passion for Harlem Renaissance history and music. I relate to Ricki Wilde, a woman stumbling through life whose personality and interests makes her feel like she doesn’t belong anywhere. It was great to go on Ricki’s journey of striking out on her own to take a risk that she succeeds at. She pursues her dreams even though her family doesn’t understand them. When Ricki meets a handsome and mysterious stranger we are taken on a time travel journey where we witness murder, heartache, mental illness, and loneliness. This is truly a love story for the ages! There’s also elderly queer love, which I adored. I couldn’t put this book down. There are two quotes from A Love Song for Ricki Wilde that express an important theme that both books embody:
“There’s a few more you’s you haven’t met yet”
“There isn’t one way to experience a life well lived”
I group these two books together because both center Black women characters that experience profound life changes; they reinvent themselves, find love, and are forced to navigate the supernatural and its impact on their lives. If you enjoy romance with a sprinkle of history and the supernatural, you will love both of these books.
Generational Love, Protection, and Trauma
Don’t Cry for Me by Daniel Black and The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams, while very different books, both examine the multi-generational impacts of our parents’ actions and in-actions. Parents finally decide to tell the truths of their lives to free both themselves and their children from the bondage of history, trauma, and shame.
In Don’t Cry for Me, Jacob writes letters to his son, Issac, sharing the stories of his family lineage and heritage in rural Arkansas and the shame he carries from his own violence and acts of betrayal that impact his relationship with his son. I was deeply moved by this story of reckoning with your own past and how you passed on hurt and shame to others and how it shaped the person you became. It was powerful to read about an older Black man choosing to reckon with the ways that oppression shaped the person he became. Vulnerability is hard for so many of us and I think it can be especially hard for Black men due to societal expectations and stereotypes. If this book could get into the hands of Black men, I think it could help open pathways to expressing vulnerability and begin a journey of healing. The format of the book being letters was an effective way to share the arc of a life and allowed readers to see the contrast between Jacob’s past and present.
The Seven Daughters of Dupree is a multi-generational family saga that spans the middle passage, slavery, the Jim Crow south, and the south side of Chicago in the 80’s and 90’s. Seven generations of Black women inherit, in different ways, the shame and trauma in their lineage that has its roots in the violence visited upon their enslaved ancestor. The knowledge of the fate of their ancestor leads each woman to make choices that change the trajectory of their lives and their descendants. Every Dupree woman carries a secret, and 14 year old Tati in Chicago in 1995 is determined to discover the closely guarded secret her mother Nadia has kept from her. Jubilee tries to escape her heritage and history; Gladys believes that adhering to rigid ideas of what’s respectable and proper will protect her children. We also see how the creativity and ingenuity that we develop to liberate ourselves is punished so severely that we come to demonize our cultural practices.
Our Black Girl Stories
Black single mother. Tenderheaded. Two common phrases in Black communities that also carry their own unique stigmas and loaded meanings. These phrases are also the titles of two memoirs released by Jamilah Lemieux and Michaela Angela Davis. Jamilah is a long-time culture writer and commentator and Michaela is a storied fashion stylist and media activist. What both these women have in common is their genuine love for Black women and girls and their work always being in service to us, which comes across very clearly in each of their memoirs.
Black. Single. Mother: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging by Jamilah Lemieux is divided into three parts: Longing, Belonging, and A Baby Mama Multiverse: 21 Black Single Mothers Speak. The first two parts tell a linear story of how Jamilah has navigated both her own and society’s stigma against Black single mothers as the child of one who also became a single mother. I loved the inclusion of the essays by other Black women (including Michaela Angela Davis) because it drills home that there is no one single narrative of Black single motherhood. Every woman’s journey is valid and valued. A passage that stood out to me was in the first chapter, where Jamilah shares that she was upset with her mom for not being married due to societal messaging about single moms. I find it disheartening and angering that societal narratives are focused on how single mothers are deficient, a drain on society, cause of all manner of chaos due to their “illegitimate” children. The moms are the ones who stay and take on the responsibility of raising children the best way they know how. The men who leave and have the freedom to come and go in-and-out of their children’s lives don’t receive the same level of public vitriol. It’s easy to see how a child would have positive feelings about the parent they only see weekly or biweekly; you get to do mostly fun stuff with the noncustodial parent. They’re not making you eat your vegetables, or do your homework, or doling out discipline on a daily basis. We see our moms on her best and worst days.
Michaela’s memoir, Tenderheaded, brings us into the world of 1970’s Washington D.C. and the 1980’s New York City underground art and music scenes as she navigates childhood trauma, belonging as a light-skinned Black girl in Chocolate City, establishing a career in the fashion industry, and motherhood. Breaking up the linear storytelling are short chapters that are titled “tangents” where she tells a separate story either from the past or nearer to the present day. The “tangent” chapters, while including interesting stories, made reading the memoir a little frustrating, as it was jarring to go from the main narrative to a tangent chapter and then back again. I did love reading about the underground art and music scenes that Michaela was a part of and her interactions and relationships with artists who would go on to be legendary. In high school, my career goal was to be a music journalist. I had big dreams of moving to New York City and working at Vibe Magazine, so I appreciated Michaela bringing us into the world of music and fashion media in the 90’s, giving us a peak into the glamorous and not-so-glamorous aspects of the business. Her story of styling Diana Ross for a photoshoot back in her hometown of Bessemer Alabama is everything!