I’m a huge book nerd and while I do enjoy classics I love looking forward to new books.
Here are the best new books that I’m anticipating in 2023 and I’ve done a lot of research. Now I haven’t read these yet and some aren’t released yet but yet is the keyword here because I’m very excited to get my hands on these! I know if you are a book lover like me you’ll probably enjoy these too.
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The Bird Hotel by Joyce Maynard
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About The Book: After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano.
Along the way, we meet a rich assortment of characters who live in the village or come to stay at the hotel. With a mystery at its center and filled with warmth, drama, romance, humor, pop culture, and a little magic realism.
Release Date: 05/02/2023
The current Goodreads rating is 4.37. I might be biased because the book is set in Guatemala and that is where I now live. My Guatemalan book club is actually reading this book for August!
Black Candle Women by Diane Marie Brown
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About The Book: A warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women, a family love curse, and the secrets they keep for and from each other over one very complicated year.
Generations of Montrose women—Augusta, Victoria, Willow—have always lived together in their quaint California bungalow. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. But when young Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the family has withheld a crucial secret from Nickie all these years: any person a Montrose woman falls in love with will die.
Release Date: 02/28/2023
This book has a current Goodreads rating of 3.4, which of course can fluctuate. I’m drawn to this book because I love supporting women authors. I also like magical realism and I love the idea of four generations of black women. Although this book is already released it is on my waitlist with the library. Yep, that’s right! I’m poor and I use my local library.
Updated,
My Review, 3 Stars
The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer
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About The Book: Folktales and spirits animate this lively coming-of-age tale of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn grappling with their mother’s illness, their father’s infidelity, and the truth of their family’s past.
Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home. But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to beings greater than themselves and reckon with a family secret buried in the past.
Release Date: 03/28/2023
This book has a current Goodreads rating of 3.99, which can change. This is a debut novel and I’m intrigued. I do love a good ghost story and this one seems worth the wait.
A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung
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About The Book: Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle-class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle-class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.
When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.
Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.
Release Date: 04/04/2023
This book has a current Goodreads rating of 4.39, which can change. I’m not crazy about the cover, and yes the cover does matter to me, but the content of this book is something I feel very passionate about and it isn’t discussed often enough. Poverty and health care in the United States. I do love reading memoirs and this is one I’m not going to miss.
The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro
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About The Book: A woman is haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona as she unravels the dark secrets of her family history in this ravishing and provocative horror novel.
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.
When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.
But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
Release Date: 04/28/2023
This book has a current Goodreads rating of 3.70, which can easily change since it has not yet been technically released. This is on my list because I’m fascinated with other cultures and I love horror plus the cover! It is pretty. lol!
Save What’s Left by Elizabeth Castellano
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About The Book: An outrageously funny debut novel about a woman who moves to a small beach town looking for peace, only to find herself in an all-out war with her neighbors.
When Kathleen Deane’s husband, Tom, tells her he’s no longer happy with his life and their marriage, Kathleen is confused. They live in Kansas. They’ve been married thirty years. Who said anything about being happy? But with Tom off finding himself, Kathleen starts to think about what she wants. And her thoughts lead her to a small beach community on the east coast, a town called Whitbey that has always looked lovely in the Christmas letters her childhood friend Josie sends every year
Save What’s Left can best be described as the “un-beach read.” It pulls back the curtain on life in a beach town, revealing the true cost of a pretty view. Told from the candid and irreverent perspective of a newcomer turned local, this is a story of forgiveness, fortitude, and second chances.
Release Date: 06/27/2023
I’m not going to include the Goodreads rating just because it doesn’t release until June. I’m looking forward to a funny debut. I’m excited to give this one a try.
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher
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About The Book: A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.
In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of all Rummani lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
Decades later, Betty returns to her Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s ever known or should she follow her heart for the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family emigrate to the U.S. But as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.
The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and even wield the power to restore a broken family.
Release Date: 04/25/2023
This book is one I might buy so I don’t have to wait. This story sounds absolutely intriguing. I love stories supporting discussions about gender identity and sexual preference. I love folklore and traditions and this book from a debut novelist sounds right up my alley.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
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About The Book: Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully guarded, old-money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, middle-class and from New England, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider, wondering how she might ever understand their WASP-y ways. Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t (and really shouldn’t) have and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.
Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is a smart escapist novel that sparkles with wit. It’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love.
Release Date: 03/07/2023
This book is being discussed and I must know what the hype is about! Let us confront the choices we’ve made that have impacted our daily lives and read Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. The good news? It is already published!
Updated,
My Review, 4 Stars
The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants by Orlando Ortega-Medina
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About The Book: Award-winning author and immigration attorney Orlando Ortega-Medina returns to 1990s San Francisco in The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants, a powerful family drama that plays out within a captivating legal thriller.
Attorney Marc Mendes, the estranged son of a prominent rabbi and a burned-out lawyer with addiction issues, plots his exit from the big city to a more peaceful life in idyllic Napa Valley. But before he can realize his dream, the US government summons his Salvadoran life partner Isaac Perez to immigration court, threatening him with deportation.
Release Date: 04/18/2023
This book is written by an immigration attorney and who would know more about the life-altering circumstances of those faced with deportation. The main characters also are homosexuals. This is a book that I am dying to read. Immigration isn’t discussed enough in the US and I’m very interested in this perspective.
Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn
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About The Book: The acclaimed author of Love Lettering weaves a wise and witty new novel that echoes with timely questions about love, career, reconciling with the past, and finding your path while knowing your true worth.
Longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy has made a career out of putting others before herself. When an unexpected upheaval sends her away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, Georgie must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page.
But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact—a “friendfic” diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. To an overwhelmed Georgie, the diary’s simple, small-scale ideas are a lifeline—a guidebook for getting started on a new path.
Release Date: 01/24/2023
I hope I’m not wrong about this one but it looks quirky and enduring. It is already published so I’m excited to read this one soon. It seems like the perfect light-hearted story after something heavy. This book is rated a 3.94 on Goodreads as of right now.
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
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About The Book: From bestselling, National Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes her first novel for adults, the story of one Dominican-American family told through the voices of its women as they await a gathering that will forever change their lives.
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake–a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led–her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila. But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets.
Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces–one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.
Release Date: 08/01/2023
I’ve told you I love stories about generations of women. Who doesn’t? That is why this book made my list. Also, I swear I had that same wicker chair in my house as a little kid.
House of Cotton by Monica Brashears
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About The Book: Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn’t have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown.
One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around. He offers her a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home. Magnolia accepts. But despite things looking up, Magnolia’s problems fatten along with her wallet. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.
Sharp as a belted knife, this sly social commentary cuts straight to the bone, revealing the aftermath of the American plantation and what it means to be poor, Black, and a woman in the God fearing south.
Release Date: 04/04/2023
I know what it is like to be haunted by an overdrawn bank account with few future prospects. I love horror and so I’m going to give this book a try. This book is rated a 3.46 on Goodreads right now.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
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About The Book: Two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates.
Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.
Release Date: 05/02/2023
This book is on everyone’s to-read list for 2023 and so it is on mine too! It is giving me The Hunger Games vibes.
The Only One Left by Riley Sager
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About The Book: The Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.
It’s now 1983, and home health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.
Release Date: 06/20/2023
If you love thrillers you may want to give this one a try. The storyline captured me and I’m interested enough that I’ll probably devour this book.
Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley
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About The Book: Perry Firekeeper-Birch was ready for her Summer of Slack but instead, after a fender bender that was entirely not her fault, she’s stuck working to pay back her Auntie Daunis for repairs to the Jeep. Thankfully she has the other outcasts of the summer program, Team Misfit Toys, and even her twin sister Pauline. Together they ace obstacle courses, plan vigils for missing women in the community, and make sure summer doesn’t feel so lost after all.
But when she attends a meeting at a local university, Perry learns about the “Warrior Girl”, an ancestor whose bones and knife are stored in the museum archives, and everything changes. Perry has to return Warrior Girl to her tribe. Determined to help, she learns all she can about NAGPRA, the federal law that allows tribes to request the return of ancestral remains and sacred items. The university has been using legal loopholes to hold onto Warrior Girl and twelve other Anishinaabe ancestors’ remains, and Perry and the Misfits won’t let it go on any longer.
Using all of their skills and resources, the Misfits realize a heist is the only way to bring back the stolen artifacts and remains for good. But there is more to this repatriation than meets the eye as more women disappear and Pauline’s perfectionism takes a turn for the worse. As secrets and mysteries unfurl, Perry and the Misfits must fight to find a way to make things right – for the ancestors and for their community.
Release Date: 05/02/2023
This is one YA book that I’m excited to read. A tribe of girls restoring ancestral artifacts, uhhh, yes, please!
Banyan Moon by Thao Thai
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About The Book: When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test.
With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng. Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.
Running parallel to this is Minh’s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House’s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life—and beyond. Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.
Release Date: 06/13/2023
A mother-daughter story spanning generations is one that I refuse to miss out on and this book is rated a 4.56 on Goodreads.
Have you had the chance to read any of these new books yet? What did you think?
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I Chug My Wine 