Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

“If you cannot respect this family and this function, at least respect yourself.”

"Cursed Daughters" is a story of generational trauma, following the lives of several Nigerian women of the same bloodline. The story is deeply entrenched in what it is like to be a woman and to have those gender expectations placed upon you. As the title suggests, there is a spiritual element to the story, mystifying their experience into something worth awing at.

I found this book entrancing as it jumped between the perspectives of the women. It follows a very nonlinear story pattern, jumping across years, but stays very coherent all the way through. The information provided in the past provides context to the present, and vice versa. It is an art in writing.

Give this book a try and leave your thoughts. The library's Black Author Book Club is meeting on Wednesday, July 29th (2026) to discuss the book, so come on out! If you liked this book, try Oyinkan's other book "My Sister, the Serial Killer"!

- Leo

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

The 2026 novel Yesteryear begins - seemingly - as a time travel story about a woman at the center of a family farm run on "traditional" values of simple living, hard work and wholesome, organic food production. Oh, and female subservience. And a woman's willingness whether she likes children or not to have as many of them as physically possible until reaching the end of her fertile years. A mix of ideologies and beliefs that isn't wholesome for anybody, it turns out in this story.

It all begins when 24-year-old Caleb Mills and 19-year-old Natalie Heller meet in a church group near Boston. Natalie, a student at Harvard, is an attractive and naive young woman from small town Idaho. Caleb, a graduate of the university unsure of what to do with his life, is from a politically powerful west coast family. All they seem to have in common is having been raised in conservative Christian families, though Caleb's life experience has been more worldly than that of Natalie.

Aside from obvious attractions, it appears that Natalie's lack of worldliness (and presumed lack of discernment) are strong attractions for Caleb. After his campaign of relentless love bombing, the two are married within 3 months. Nevermind the creepiness of her suiter's suffocating behavior toward her; everything else about the vortex Natalie is letting herself be sucked into appears attractive enough. If she was meant to follow Christian family and faith traditions, it might as well be with this impressive family. Instead of the easy life she expected however, during the first year of marriage she finds herself bound to a child-like man who has no ambition whatsoever and who refuses to take responsibility for anything in their life together. As if anyone with such negligible ambition could get into Harvard! 

After a period of financial support from his parents - conditioned on an agreement with her father-in-law that the couple continue growing their family - Natalie realizes that it's up to her to figure out a way to earn a living for her young family. But having given up a full scholarship to Harvard in the middle of her sophomore year to marry this wastrel with whom she is now pregnant with a second child, how is she to do that?  

Thinking over possibilities, she concludes that the only viable one is to become an influencer in the online world of traditional wives - the so-called tradwives. Other women have found it to be lucrative, and for this occupation she has had a lifetime of preparation, having been raised in an ultra-conservative faith community and indoctrinated with beliefs in large families, female subservience, and homemaking over professional ambitions. This perhaps explains the apparent ease with which she walked away from a full Harvard  scholarship when she decided to get married at age 19.  

Her in-laws, exasperated with their son but a little skeptical, don't have any better ideas, and they want Natalie to take their aimless son off their hands. They agree to help the couple set themselves up for this enterprise by purchasing a farm in a remote and beautiful part of Idaho. After settling into it, Natalie's plan falls into place. She begins to create a phony persona and a phony life on Instagram and in videos portraying how an attractive young Chirstian family ostensibly living off the land manages its daily routines. She does it so well and convincingly (to some) that before too long she has thousands of fawning followers and lifestyle aspirants. Meanwhile the family continues to grow along with the family enterprise. A line of popular, ridiculously overpriced Natalie-branded merchandise is developed and soon its website is overwhelmed with purchase orders. Followers enchanted with Natalie and Caleb's rural life don't question how these lifestyle products are manufactured within this "natural" lifestyle. Caleb - learning from YouTube videos and online forums - throws himself into gardening and livestock acquisition and management. He has found that farm life makes him feel purposeful for the first time in his life. Or so he says. And so it appears.

Natalie is so attractive and charming in her videos that within a couple of years - to their astonishment - she and Caleb have a cottage industry earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. But ah, if only she liked children, especially her own! And if only the children didn't find being constantly filmed for public consumption to be so trying! 

In addition to ardent fans, Natalie's videos attract a lot of haters, whom she dubs The Angry Women. The Angry Women are relentlessly skeptical and critical. Natalie tries to ignore the criticisms. Despite the entirely farcical structure of her enterprise, for Natalie it is a psychic contest between The Angry Women and "good Christian women" like herself and her loyal followers. 

Eventually Natalie begins to experience herself as a schism of two distinct personalities that she refers to as online and offline Natalie. Offline Natalie becomes an increasingly angry woman, the impact of which is felt harshly by her family - offline, of course.

In addition to online and offline Natalie there is another duality in the story line: a parallel story that looks like time travel. The short chapters of this novel are organized to switch back and forth between this family's life in the present and its life on the same farm in the year 1855. Their life in 1855 though, is so cold and harsh that re-entering it every other chapter started to feel like a side track I wanted to skip. Natalie herself is constantly trying to figure out how to escape from the 1855 homestead and from her brutal husband. She has little affection for their children, who in return don't show her the affectionate respect one would expect. It's not clear until the very end of the book why we are exposed to this grim, alternate reality.

Back in the present, keeping up the pretense of a perfect and perfectly homespun life nurturing a continuously growing family with love and simple, wholesome, organic food in front of the whole world eventually drives Natalie to exhaustion and an addiction to pills that "calm her down." I stopped reading around this point to listen to a 1966 Rolling Stones song called "Mother's Little Helper," remembering lyrics that capture the dynamics of this family's predicament. 

Had Natalie and her followers read Betty Friedan's 1963 study The Feminine Mystique they could have predicted the outcome. Both Friedan and the Rolling Stones as well as the housewives of the 1950s and '60s had the copyright on the unsustainability of tradwife life.

-Marianne W. 

Goth by Otsuichi

Goth was added to my TBR at a time when I dreamed I'd live in Japan for a year, reading only Japanese literature. Years later, that aspiration has faded, but Goth remained. 

Side question: Do books ever fall off your TBR until they are read? There is a t-shirt I saw online that briefly tempted me, a skull and a headstone reading "Bury me under my TBR." But enough talk about mortality! 

Through a series of short stories, Goth introduces us to two high schoolers obsessed with true crime. Initially, the stories were released online, and they retain that creepypasta vibe and style of writing, with all the limitations that entails. The writing does improve as the collection goes on and the author matures. 

The narration, like the teens, are detached, even as they encounter increasingly gruesome situations. The book is not for the faint of stomach. In the first story, the kids visit a remote mountain in search of a crime scene -- and find it. Even as they find clues to uncover the murderer, they don't turn them over to the police. They are interested in why and how a criminal commits atrocities, not in justice or preventing future crimes. And as in places where Jessica Fletcher goes, there is plenty of violence for the kids to explore. 

The collection cast a kind of spell over me. The first story involves a disturbing series of murders, but mostly serves to introduce us to our mysterious, unnamed narrator and his classmate Morino. The narrator is outwardly normal, he plays sports and jokes with his classmates, but inside he covets a dark fascination with the macabre. Morino, on the other hand, is outwardly "strange," dressed all in black, she is abrupt with classmates and teachers and completely uninterested in social niceties. In other words, my type. The second story explores the inner mind of a criminal while we learn more about our two central characters. Even though, or perhaps because, it is about a person who cuts off as many hands and paws as he can get away with, this is the silliest story, and I'm not sure if it is always intentional. As here, when the narrator is exploring the criminal's house:

"Each time I left a room, I checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, like my student ID, a uniform button, a textbook, or a sock." 

Student ID I can understand, a uniform button, sure, but already that's weird, but why would he leave behind a textbook? And then: Sock. How would you not notice leaving behind a sock? 

And then later, when the criminal has to go to work knowing that his prized collection of hands has been stolen, he obsesses for half a page over hands and here, the repetition lends humor to the macabre: 

"Hands. Hands. Hands were more important than the other teachers. First, there were hands, and then the human followed. There was no point in talking with the human." 

On the last page, the narrator asks Morino what she would be doing if she had been one of the victims. She considers and replies: "It would be very hard to put on a watch."

However, it is the third story ("Dog") where the collection really kicks into high gear. I would argue this is Otsuichi's best writing in the collection, and from this story on I was captivated. What surprised me was I found it rather moving by the end. I wasn't expecting that at all, given how distant we were from the main characters at the start. 

The collection comes together as a whole towards the end, and what is fascinating is to see that through it all has been planted a surprise that makes sense only at the end. There's a lot more a person educated in Japanese mystery stories could say about this (see: honkaku), but that person isn't me. I will note that I didn't read the afterwards or the bonus story. 

-Michael G. 

Never Touch the Dinosaurs by Rosie Greening; illustrated by Stuart Lynch

Five little dinosaurs get into mischief at school. This interactive board book is perfect for toddlers who will delight in touching the bumpy dinosaurs found on each page while learning to count. More books in the series include: Never Touch the Bugs,  Never Touch the Wild Animals, Never Touch the Sharks and others.

This is also a perfect book to go with this summer's reading challenge, Unearth a Story! Reading a book about dinosaurs to your little one helps complete their reading log faster, which means two special prizes and a raffle ticket for the end-of-summer drawing. Find more information and register your family here. 

-Julie B. 

Riding Magic by Kelly Starling Lyons

 While the gorgeous illustrations in this brief, impactful book are reason enough to savor it, it also illustrates an important life lesson. In it, an adolescent girl from a family of horseback riders overcomes mixed feelings about learning to ride, resulting in a significant developmental milestone.

There is one horse Dom loves to spend time with in her uncle's barn, but she is afraid to ride horses, and she envies the ease with which the other family members do it. It takes the better part of a summer, but after gentle encouragement from her uncle, mother and older sister throughout the summer, she has an unusual dream one night that finally enables her to push through her ambivalence and out of her comfort zone. 

Then, wow! What joy she feels on her first ride! There is no going back. Dom's confidence in herself soars. Her world and her self perception have changed irreversibly; she knows that she and the horse she has been building a friendship with all summer in the barn have now crossed through a special portal. "We can do anything. Even fly through the sky" - she thinks. 

This is a book to inspire readers of any age to try that thing they are longing - but afraid - to do, and to experience the exponential growth in self agency and self esteem that can result.

- Marianne W.