In Reading Color

A weekly newsletter focusing on literature by and about people of color!

Prince Harmon, known as Fitz, has earned quite a reputation in Westemere. He’s heir to the fae kingdom, as well as a bit of a playboy. His father, though, is tired of Fitz’s reputation and lays down an ultimatum: Fitz needs to court and marry a princess who is visiting from the neighboring kingdom of Alanza.

There’s a big problem, though. Fitz doesn’t speak her language, so he doesn’t know how he can fulfill his father’s demands.

Ava Lemontree is the answer. She’s a celebrated scholar of the language of Alanza, but she doesn’t care for Fitz one bit. She agrees to tutor him, knowing that it could help her get what she needs to save her own dying father.

Ava and Fitz are hostile toward one another, even though each needs the other. But the longer they’re working together, the more that sparring turns into something more romantic. Too bad the expectations on both of them may put a damper on a budding relationship.

While Kiki doesn’t look for meet-cutes, they seem to find her. The problem is that she’s not interested in them. She wants to find The One.

Then Kiki’s best friend Manny, who has been in a long-term relationship, suddenly finds himself single. Kiki suggests maybe he’s better off not hopping into the next partnership, and he says to her that maybe she’s never really understood what true love feels like.

Enter the promise Kiki makes to prove Manny wrong. She’s going to find The One and soon–even with graduation looming. The hardest part isn’t the timing, though. It’s that Kiki may be realizing her real One True Love is Manny himself.

This memoir follows Roy’s coming of age after he immigrated to the United States at age nine. By day, he cleans houses with his undocumented mother and helping his stepfather at his factory job. By night, he’s sharing a bed in a house with his mom and several other women.

Roy doesn’t attend school until fifth grade, and he’s subject to terrible bullying for being a queer immigrant struggling to learn English. When he’s 13, though, he moves to a private school where his life looks a lot different–and where he begins to understand how difficult it is to be an immigrant child in America.

Rory Newbourn-Garcia has death magic, but she’s been unable to cultivate it because it is accessible only through a language she’s never learned. When Rory’s mother dies, she moves to Pleasant Cove. It’s known as the Salem of the West, and Rory quickly finds friendship in two witchy girls. They don’t take their magic seriously, though, and when one of them dies, Rory wants to use her skills to bring her back.

The problem is that her poor grasp of Spanish means her ability to access that death magic is questionable. When she’s able to access the afterlife world, what Rory brings back to Pleasant Cove isn’t her new friend. It’s a demon wearing her friend’s face–and now, Rory has to stop what’s about to be unleashed.

This one doesn’t have a cover yet.

Paloma O’Hare, 17, presents herself as quiet, gentle, and well-behaved. But inside, she’s wrestling with OCD and anxiety. To quell the intrusive thoughts and feelings, she uses a journal to jot those things down. Her mental health has only gotten worse because that very journal was found by her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend, and Paloma is worried that if word gets out about it, people will think she is a Very Bad Person.

One of Paloma’s hobbies–and a way for her to soothe her mind–has been birding out in the forest. But then dead animals begin to show up with pages of her journal stuffed inside, and the crows that she thought she had befriended have begun to attack. All of the worst thoughts Paloma’s ever had are coming true, and she believes it is all her fault.

She needs to stop the attacks, and to do so, Paloma teams up with one of the town’s loners. The problem is that Paloma’s hardest work will come from within; she’ll have to wrestle with her own thoughts in to make sense of what’s happening in her town.

Juliet Montague is a local socialite who always ends up in the local tabloids. But recently, she’s dealt with heartbreak, and her solution to getting over it is to crash a party hosted by family rivals.

Meanwhile, Juliet Capulet is quiet and reserved. Her dad wants her to find a suitable male partner at the family’s annual ball, but she hasn’t yet had the guts to tell him she’s just not that into boys. But she’s going to attend the ball anyway, even if she ends up connecting with someone totally unexpected.

Juliet meets Juliet, and it’s a story neither of them could have ever expected in this fun graphic novel twist on a Shakespearean classic of star-crossed lovers.

Camila Jiménez thinks the women in her family who claim there is a curse upon them are just unable to let go of the tragedies they’ve experienced. When Camila’s aunt dies, Camila decides she’ll be the one to clean out her home. That’s when she finds out her aunt had been digging into a long-held family mystery. In 1895, during the Cuban War of Independence, Luisa–one of Camila’s distant relatives–was kidnapped by family friend, Hector, and neither was ever seen or heard from again.

When Camila touches a photo of Luisa and Hector, she’s able to see everything that happened back then. She’s transported to the 19th century, and now, she’s set on figuring out what happened to Luisa and Hector. If she can figure it out, she’s hopeful that that will allow her to be sent back to her own life, in the present timeline.

The deeper she digs, though, the more cracks Camila finds.

Annabelle Romo doesn’t have friends, and she’s desperate for connection. She decides to create a fake social media account, and she uses images from a favorite fashion influencer to populate it. Now, she’s being flooded with friend requests, including one with a cute boy named Luis.

The attention is what Annabelle craved, and even outside of this fake profile, she’s seeing the benefits. Two girls from school now want to be her friend. But as her social media reputation grows, she’s beginning to wonder how many lies she can keep up with between her new friends, as well as her growing feelings toward Luis.

This looks like a fun graphic novel.

Adam, his brother Abel, and two of their friends are working in a grain silo when one of the most commonly lethal accidents happens to them–they fall into the corn and are swallowed by it. Adam barely survives, and when he does, he’s saddled with the grief of losing his brother and his friend. Those losses are forcing Adam to also re-confront losing his baby sister years ago.

Adam’s dad is a long-haul truck driver, and he’s wrestling not only with the tragedies in his life, but also the weight of being a certain type of Christian man.

Both Adam and his dad find their stories are more and more intertwined, and it will take them both confronting the struggles before them–including the weight of intergenerational trauma and expectations of masculinity–for them both to find a way forward toward healing.

Asha lives in Tindara, where one’s magic follows trauma, and the power comes with a cost. When her parents were murdered by the king’s orders, Asha’s power emerged. She can kill anyone with a simple touch. Enraged by a kingdom eager to kill its people, Asha wants revenge. The royal family must go.

Prince Maxim is desperate for his father’s approval, and that desperation is made worse because he’s dying. Time is not on his side, and it doesn’t help that his magic–shape shifting–has become but a curse.

Asha and Maxim unknowingly pair up in search of what could help them both: a wish granted by the goddess Malthea. It’s a hunt that could be lethal for both of them, and it could force them to confront something dangerous brewing between them: romantic feelings that may defy what each wishes for.