Diversify Your Bookshelf

By Willow Symonds
Staff Writer

Diversify Your Bookshelf introduces readers to books written from marginalized perspectives, including racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, disabled individuals, and more. These books come in all genres and targeted age groups, so there’s something for everyone.

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson (2022)
Genre: Family Saga; LGBTQ+
Matriarch Eleanor Bennett passed away at the age of 73, leaving behind her remaining Caribbean black cake and a voice recording she insisted her two adult children must listen to together. Byron and Benny have spent eight years not speaking, even though they’d grown up close in their hometown of Los Angeles. They’ve never visited the islands Eleanor speaks of in her story, and they’ve also never heard of Covey, the island girl with a talent for swimming and speaking her mind. But Covey’s life gets darker when her troubled father leads her into an impossible choice: stay in the only place she’s called home, or flee to where no one can track her down, especially not anyone who knows the man she may or may not have murdered.
This debut novel, “Black Cake,” is one of the rare times in fiction where the framing device is just as riveting as the story it surrounds.

Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert (2018)
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary; LGBTQ+
Danny Cheng always knew his parents had secrets. He hadn’t imagined what they could be hiding until he uncovered a box in his dad’s closet, containing old letters and a file on a powerful San Francisco family. But Danny also keeps secrets, especially the ones regarding his feelings for his best friend, Harry Wong. He keeps his internal life bottled inside for fear of upsetting his parents’ carefully curated life or Harry’s relationship with his girlfriend, though he wonders if everyone would be better off breaking free from the images they’ve worked so hard to protect. While Danny could leave his complicated life behind once he attends RISD next year, he knows his family and his friends need him to bring their secrets to light, even when they’re desperately trying to keep Danny in the dark.
“Picture Us in the Light” seamlessly blends multiple storylines into one big picture, filled with characters so real they’ll never leave one’s thoughts.

Plain Bad Heroines by emily m. danforth (2020)
Genre: Historical Horror; Hollywood Drama; LGBTQ+
“Plain Bad Heroines” switches between two timelines: the early 1900s, starting with Flora and Clara, two students in love at the Bookhaunts School for Girls who fell to their deaths, and then the modern-day, where a movie adaptation of the non-fiction book attempts to capture what happened so many years ago. Everyone from both time periods suspects one popular memoir-manifesto, “Plain Bad Heroines,” to have caused such a strange chain of events, but no one realizes how deep these chains go. Sure, the movie set is plagued with many unfortunate coincidences, but is it really haunted? And what exactly could be so special about this small New England town for it to hold such a power over so many generations?
Our narrator remains anonymous but has no less of a personality, and cartoonist Sara Lautman’s illustrations perfectly capture the whimsically gothic vibes of this 500-page novel.