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As Luz’s relationship with a firebrand lawyer complicates a budding romance with a sweet young musician, her visions of her ancestors’ origins grow more intense. Her first novel-a multigenerational, magical realist historical epic-delivers on the promise of that stellar collection.Ĭhronicling five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the region we now know as Colorado and New Mexico, Woman of Light focuses on Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and part time laundress who must navigate 1930s Denver on her own after her lothario snake charmer brother is assaulted and run out of town by a white mob. Bingham Prize, and the Story Prize, and the winner of an American Book Award, it immediately established the Denver native as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Latinx and Indigenous experience in the American West. A finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut, the short story collection Sabrina & Corina, was something of a sensation upon its release in 2019. Holding both sides of this coin is its own piece of artistry, let alone everything else that occurs in this fiery novel. –Julia Hass, contributing editor Love for Oakland seeps through these pages: love for the idea of it, love for what it is supposed to be, and love that reckons with the complexity of what it is now, a city with a notoriously violent and broken police force, a city of high-speed gentrification, a city pushing out those who made it what it was. I’ll read anything Sloane Crosley writes, of course, but Cult Classic is for everyone. It’s a little zany, sure, but in Crosley’s sharp and funny prose we get real insight into love and relationships, turning the who’s-behind-it suspense into a meditation on what it means to be in love and hope for happy endings. And then another! Her ex-coworkers are in on the scheme, part of a cult with a plan to manipulate Lola’s romantic past to help her figure out her future. The following night she runs into another former boyfriend. In Crosley’s second novel, Lola is out to dinner with some ex-coworkers when she randomly runs into an ex-boyfriend, an interaction that forces her to question her current relationship with “Boots” and their upcoming nuptials. Let’s just say… in your hand, but you know, summer. So let’s not overthink this, okay? Here are just a few of the books hitting shelves this season that the Literary Hub staff thinks deserve a place in your beach bag this season. “Summer Reading” may be a fraught concept in the world of literary thinkpieces and book promotion, but here’s something that’s the opposite of fraught: kicking back with a good novel on a warm summer evening.