10 Must-Read BIPOC Novellas for a Diverse Reading List

You’ve been hearing over and over again how important it is to diversify your reading, but you don’t know where to start? Well, you have come to the right place. In this post, I will provide some brief, diverse book recommendations that not only help you meet your annual book goal but also offer a good introduction to own-voices books.

 

1. Things Hope For by Chenica C. Higgins

Can two women who only want to be loved, find a home in each other when the world around them is moving too fast for them to settle down?

Growing up in an intolerant town, Latrisha Martin was used to shrinking the most important parts of herself. She hid her loneliness within a busy life and kept the yearning in her heart tucked away from those closest to her. Just as the fa ade became too heavy to maintain, Trisha received wise words from a strange woman that helped redirect her life’s journey. On a whim, she relocates to Houston, and while adjusting to a new normal, she finds that those desires she’d once hidden begin to manifest in ways she never imagined.

With her star attached to a rocket ship, Xenobia Cooper was quickly transforming from a locally known talent into a name known in households across the nation. Viewed as an overnight success to many, the only thing that the veteran of the Houston underground music scene hadn’t prepared for was living a life without someone to come home to at the end of the day. A reckless tweet sent out in the middle of the night brings an influx of women with stars in their eyes, but they all lack the key component that Xeno is looking for. A chance encounter after her largest show to date and she’s convinced that those things she’d hoped for are just within her grasp.

2. Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look?

There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question–How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

In their riveting and timely young adult debut, acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.

3. Debate and Decadence by Sula Sullivan

Like any good mysterious witch, Amaya seldom ventures further than the woods that surround her cottage. She fills her days with foraging, spell testing, and reading. Amaya would happily spend all her days and nights curled up with a steaming mug of tea or playing her harp. Anything would be preferable to trying to contain Rue, the chaotic runaway bride who suddenly appears on her doorstep insisting they’re fated, mates. Rue is determined to take charge of her life and by extension Amaya’s. She’s convinced all she has to do is miss her own wedding, learn how to cook a decent stew and show Amaya what fate has in store.

4. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.

Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor’s lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She’s a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.

5. Love After the End (Anthology) by Joshua Whitehead

This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Here, readers will discover bio-engineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, motherships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.

6. Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse

Celeste, a card sharp with a need for justice, takes on the role of advocatus diaboli, to defend her sister Mariel, accused of murdering a Virtue, a member of the ruling class of this mining town, in a new world of dark fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse.

The year is 1883 and the mining town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity from the high mountains of Colorado with the help of the pariahs of society known as the Fallen. The Fallen are the descendants of demonkind living amongst the Virtues, the winners in an ancient war, with the descendants of both sides choosing to live alongside Abaddon’s mountain in this tale of the mythological West from the bestselling mastermind Rebecca Roanhorse.

7. Goddess of Filth by V. Castro

“Five of us sat in a circle doing our best to emulate the girls in The Craft, hoping to unleash some power to take us all away from our home to the place of our dreams. But we weren’t witches. We were five Chicanas living in San Antonio, Texas, one year out of high school.”

One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It’s all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors.

Over the next few weeks, shy, modest Fernanda starts acting strangely—smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty. The local priest is convinced it’s a demon, but Lourdes begins to suspect it’s something else—something far more ancient and powerful.

As Father Moreno’s obsession with Fernanda grows, Lourdes enlists the help of her “bruja Craft crew” and a professor, Dr. Camacho, to understand what is happening to her friend in this unholy tale of possession-gone-right.

8. Safe Place to Land by Ryan Ramirez Webb

Autistic architect Rafael has been in love with his best friend, Henry, since they were teenagers.

Over the nearly two decades of their friendship, they’ve had many romantic close calls. But something always gets in the way, including Henry’s cross-country move.

Now recovering from losing his leg to cancer, Rafael is reunited with Henry for his dream road trip to the Golden Gate Bridge. But can they overcome the baggage between them to finally end up together? Or will life continue to get in the way?

 

9. Mirror Monster On My Wall by Tam M. Nicnevin

In a battle of wills against her wicked stepmother and a cruel earl intent on her dowry, Alice Blanchard is positive she has no one to turn to…

Regency England is a hostile place for twenty-five-year-old Alice Blanchard: half-Black, autistic, and wholly uninterested in the romantic company of men, her current plan in life is to endure the tyrannical abuse of her stepmother until the racist old woman dies of an apoplexy. That plan goes out the window when the cruel Madame Blanchard informs Alice that she’s been betrothed to the equally cruel Lord Matthew Hillborough, Earl of Pennwood.

Until four old friends show her what she’s truly capable of…

Ever since she was a little girl, the only people who’ve ever shown Alice real love were Magpie, Silver, Kapri, and Glashtyn: four strange, clawed, fanged, many-limbed creatures carved of black glass that appeared to her in her dreams. Now these beings are all grown up, and so is Alice. They love her, they’re willing to do anything for her, and she’s willing to do anything for them. She just has to find the desperation she needs to let her monsters step out of the dream world and into reality. All it takes is a full moon…and human blood like a scarlet tide…

Mirror Monster on My Wall is a 22k-word erotic monster mash-up novelette of “Snow White” and “Alice in Wonderland” set against the backdrop of Regency England and featuring a new kind of monstrous lover.

10. Ink by Jade Hernandez

.Xiomara

My whole life has been riddled with nothing but bad luck, especially when it comes to jobs.

I can never seem to hold anything down, and the truth is, nobody wants to work with someone as volatile and angry as me.

But to take care of my family, I need money, and when the opportunity arises to work the front desk at Devil’s Ink, the local Motorcycle Club’s tattoo shop, I’ll do everything I can to not mess this up. It doesn’t matter that there are rumors of darkness and blood surrounding Los Diablos MC. Or that my dangerous new boss doesn’t think I can do the job. Or that his hungry eyes follow me every step of the way, inciting a lust for someone I can never be with, someone who hates everything about me.

I guess if there’s one thing they’re about to find out, it’s that violence never scared me anyway.

Ink

Only the best work at Devil’s Ink and Xiomara is anything but. With a reputation like hers, I knew she was sure to fail within the week.

I never expected that her steely determination to prove me wrong would result in a lust I don’t need or want. I’m her boss. She’s my employee. Anything between us is bound to end in disaster.

That doesn’t stop my gaze from going over her body. Or obsessing over her laughter. Or wanting my ink tattooed on her skin.

I try to tell myself that my lifestyle is too dangerous for someone like her. And when the violence and blood of my MC touches her perfect skin, I know I’ll do anything to protect her from it.

I guess she’ll see for herself how many souls a Diablo can reap for his woman.

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These books are all under 200 pages and it’s easy way to get a taste for BIPOC ownvoices books. What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for books I have missed? Let me know down in the comments.

 

 

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