According to StoryGraph, “Launched by Adriana Herrera, Nisha Sharma and Nikki Payne, the 23 for 23 Initiative amplifies and elevates marginalized voices in publishing by promoting, showcasing, and celebrating the works of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color dedicated to telling stories that center marginalized identities. This reading challenge encourages readers to read 23 books by BIPOC authors with BIPOC characters by the end of 2023”.
Now, I actually didn’t start out the year intending to do this challenge, mostly because I focus my reading in all margins, particularly including and uplifting BIPOC voices, queer voices, and lived mental health experiences. I worried that by taking on this challenge, I would lean away from the other marginalised voices I strive to support, and didn’t want to put that pressure on myself. However, by mid-year, everyone on Bookstagram (Booksta) taking part in the 23 for 23 challenge was sharing where they were up to, and I counted mine out of curiosity, and already had around 15 down. That’s when I decided this was something that was doable for me, and obviously wasn’t taking away from my other focus points, especially as many hit several points of interest.
I’ll go through my 23, including what made me choose to pick up the book, what intersections of marginalisation they each hit, and what I learnt along the way, listed in order of my reading, which mostly did hinge on library availability.
A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow – Laura Taylor Namey
Not the strongest reason to pick this first one up: my partner told me Kit Connor of the Heartstopper TV show was going to be in another book-to-screen adaptation and it piqued my interest. I read the blurb on Google, thought it sounded cute, and added it to my library holds on a whim (get ready to hear this phrase a lot).
A Cuban Girl’s Guide looks at mental health recovery through grief, brings together the cultures of Miami, USA, and Cuban heritage, particularly through food, when the main character holidays with family and helps out in the kitchen cooking her family’s favourite Cuban sweet treats. It was healing, exploratory through the eyes of a 17 year old, features a love story through a tea shop, and we watch the main character work through her grief in ups and downs. I absolutely loved this read!
Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I’d been reading reviews on this one since joining the book niche of Instagram and, overwhelmingly, my Booksta pals loved it, so that was an easy sell for me, and I added it to my library holds. It centres a Mexican woman visiting a cousin who’s sent for help from her family, as she’s fallen terribly ill in a manor house in the Mexican countryside. The family this cousin married into is English, and they have quite a hold over her, disallowing the main character from visiting her room, thus adding to the mystery of the situation. It falls into the horror genre known as fungal or spore horror, and led to my later reading She is a Hunting, as a result of how much I liked this one.
The Only Good Indians – Stephen Graham Jones
My first Stephen Graham Jones (SGJ), but not my last, this book was weird but enlightening, which seems to be a pervasive theme of his books, I’ve since found. SGJ as well as his main characters are Blackfoot Native Americans, which means I picked up from this very first book cultural details, from understanding the spiritual ceremony of the sweat, to body language such as the way they point direction with their lips rather than the head tilt like us white people do. The title plays on the saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”, and tells the story of a group of American Indian friends who face the repercussions of something that happened in their youth, as they each die in suspicious circumstances, hunted down by an elk… of sorts.
Felix Ever After – Kacen Callender
I picked this book up for the school-age transgender representation, first and foremost, though the main character (yes, Felix) is also a person of colour. If I’m being honest, I didn’t enjoy this book, though I deeply respect the personal nature (many Goodreads reviews boil it down to Felix coming off very “pick me” stereotyped), and therefore I didn’t review it out of respect for the author and personal representation. I do know a lot of trans people on Booksta do love this book and for them I’m very happy, it just didn’t speak to me (no, not because I’m cis, the story just fell short for me).
Emotional Female – Yumiko Kadota
This book was chosen by a friend in another challenge I took up for 2023 where I had 12 friends choose a book for each month for me to read, based on my interests and personality. This was my first nonfiction book of the year, an autobiography, about an Asian woman who moved to Australia (after, from memory, Singapore and the Philippines, following her father’s work) in her teens and became a successful surgeon.
This book was so gripping to me, as it explained the Asian influence of her parents and culture where showing emotion was a sign of weakness, and you pushed through to the bitter end. She worked amongst a horrifying amount of sexism from her university studies right through every level of her residencies and placements (which, it turns out, is nothing like Grey’s Anatomy, at least in Australia), both public and private, until she burnt out to a heartbreaking extent, and had to explain to her parents why she quit being a surgeon, something which obviously was a source of pride for her family.
She is a Haunting – Trang Thanh Tran
Another fungal horror, this book is set in Vietnam where the main character feels out of place for not being “Asian enough”, as a visiting American, at her father’s haunted house. This one I also didn’t choose for the BIPOC factor, but rather because the author is nonbinary. The horror was stunningly atmospheric, with a focus on visceral food descriptions and curious experiences with bugs in the house they’re temporarily residing in. Bonus: it’s a ghost story!
Cover Story – Valerie Gomez
If it looks like I read this early in the year, before it was published, it’s because I was hired as a Sensitivity Reader on this one. It’s a beautiful queer story of a Mexican American guy and an American guy falling in love, while one struggles with increasingly debilitating anxiety-turn-panic attacks.
The author is also a Mexican American and the descriptions of things like the family home and the family chancla joke really enriched the reading experience and drummed in the cultural differences, in an endearing way. To top it off, there’s absolutely fantastic representation of Autism (medium-to-high needs) in the sister of one of the main characters.
Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
This book was also chosen for me as one of my monthly recs chosen by a Booksta friend, and I loved it! This (translated) book follows a woman who has very obvious – though never actually labelled – undiagnosed Autism. As an autistic woman myself, along with many other readers, I heavily related to most aspects of the main character’s story. In it, we see the social norms, expectations, and gender roles of women of the main character’s age through her friends and coworkers in Tokyo, and how the main character stands out like a sore thumb by not meeting those expectations.
Ace of Spades – Àbíké-Íyímídé
When I placed a library hold on this book, I admit, I actually got the title wrong and this wasn’t the book I was aiming for – but I’m glad for it! This book was written by a Black author with a focus on the only two Black kids in the school, who have to trust each other to weed out the racism taking place as they’re targeted by heavy bullying both in and out of school, by an anonymous person or group going by “Ace of Spades”. It gave me Gossip Girl vibes with racism as a catalyst (rather than GG’s elitism) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Tender is the Flesh – Agustina Bazterrica
Again, I didn’t choose this book for the BIPOC aspect, but because I’d started branching into more “extreme horror”, and was delighted to find it was translated from original Spanish, written by an Argentenian author. As a dystopian novel, it has a fairly worldly view, in that it implies that what’s happening in the novel is happening worldwide, so it’s not heavily coded as being set in Argentina, but focuses more on the land itself than specific cities. I did enjoy the experimental premise a lot and it addressed many questions I hadn’t even analysed yet as I was reading, which felt thorough and well fleshed out (pun intended).
Pet – Akwaeke Emezi
This book was chosen for its transgender rep, written by a transgender author, and features a main character and community of Black people in a fantasy town in the USA. The transgender rep is presented very matter-of-factly and honestly brought me so much joy, I’ve since bought the book for a few of my trans friends for Christmas! The family values were also very beautiful to me, and heartbreaking, as you’ll find when reading this one yourself…
Mongrels – Stephen Graham Jones
Another SGJ title which I’m not going to expand on too much except to once again mention that the main characters, like Stephen himself, are Blackfoot Native American and is a werewolf book set in our world with emphasis on the topic of family.
Frostbitten – Nimmi Sheikh
I did a Sensitivity read of this one as well and, though it is as yet unpublished, the author granted me permission to talk about it, because I learnt so much from the culture! While it’s a sci-fi book and the setting is future Earth, with all new place names, the culture is heavily Muslim. This book encouraged some incredible conversations with the author where I got to learn about the importance of the prayers, meals, dress, language, architecture, and more! I can’t talk about much else, but to say that it was easy to understand what was happening based on context, despite being heavily enriched with culture, and the terminology was nicely explained for white folk like myself. For those wondering, the author is Pakistani, and so wonderful to chat with and open to talking about all things “desi” (which I learnt is the term for the diaspora of people from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or those cultures mixing with outside countries/ cultures… from my understanding).
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty – Akwaeke Emezi
This was another book by the author of Pet, which, after reading, I just went ahead and chucked a few of their titles on hold through the library. It follows a Black American main character who is an artist and visits Nigeria for the majority of the novel – where the author is from – for an art gallery and networking opportunity, meaning it’s hugely cultural, something I enjoyed immensely.
Undertones focus on the grief of the main character over her recent late husband and how she connects to another man through his own grief over his late wife. She’s also very free and open with sex, with commitment issues as a result of losing her husband, and it was empowering to see a woman so carefree and unattached, getting pleasure where and from whom she wanted.
Bitter – Akwaeke Emezi
I continued with Akwaeke’s novels, with Bitter being a prequel to Pet, set the generation before, following the main character’s mother’s story this time. Also set in the same fantasy town in the USA, it has a focus on liberation, fighting the system, and the on-the-ground reality of protests and the law’s reactions. Both are fantasy stories, the main character here (and mother of Pet’s main character) having a power in her art to draw creatures through from a sort of parallel universe, where they rally for the protection of humanity. It’s short, moving, and very queer.
Sorrowland – Rivers Solomon
This book was also nominated by a Booksta friend to read, and my goodness it blew me away. It follows a Black person of ambiguous gender who escapes from a cult sort of community for Black people in the USA, claiming protection from white people. This main character also has partial blindness due to Nystagmus. Experimentation of humans is a theme, as is the racism-seeded brainwashing, and it’s also super queer. The main character has twins who are brought up without gender, and together they have to unravel the mysteries of this cultish community and attempt to free the main character’s family, and expose this group to the world, despite how the group uses bribery to incentivise the powers that be in the States to turn a blind eye to their abuse and experimentation within the camp. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but it was an instant top read of the year for me.
My Heart is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper – Stephen Graham Jones
These are the first two in a trilogy (the third, The Angel of Indian Lake, is due in March of 2024) and they centre around a Blackfoot Native American girl who has a fascination with all things slashers – particularly those originals of the ’70s and ’80s – and the “final girl” trope.
In the first, she has to apply her knowledge of genre conventions to prepare the town and the girl she’s pegged to be this story’s final girl to face the serial killer tormenting their town. The town of Proofrock (Native land) is expanded upon by rich developers to bring a new community and town across the lake – a community of which the pegged final girl is a part. It also addresses some of the stereotypes of Native American families, and the “final girl” is Black. Obviously, the slasher genre has tropes of its own, and therefore the races and genders of the players all matter and are debated, which I found super fun!
The second book is set four years later, following the same main character and her friend, the “final girl” of the first book (Chainsaw), and once again the town is being targeted, though it’s focused to Proofrock this time, as the expansion across the lake kind of… didn’t survive the first book, but the lake itself holds stronger symbolism in this one.
In the Miso Soup – Ryū Murakami
This was another bit of an extreme horror, though it could be argued either way. It’s also a translated novella, set in Tokyo and explores the “night life” through the lens of a local tour guide leading a highly suspicious American man around over the course of three days.
To clarify, by “night life”, I definitely mean the sex scene of Tokyo, in a town renowned for being a place you can supposedly buy anything. I appreciated how matter-of-fact it was in language, despite the heavy sexual content, using biological terminology and focusing the body horror on the gore of the murders happening during those three days. Given the tour-guide focus, there was really lovely description of the architecture and local landscape.
Nerra – Tasma Walton (illustrated by Samantha Campbell)
By this point I was specifically choosing my reads to round out the 23 and decided I wanted to feature some of our own Aboriginal Indigenous stories in my reading for this year – it only felt right. This is a new, middle grade book which I hoped would be a nice introduction before taking on my next anticipated read, Wylah, and it definitely did just that.
It was short, fun, beautiful, spiritual, and there was great use of native language without it bogging down the story or confusing things. There is also a language guide in the back for clarification, but every term is explained well with context as you go, and it focuses on finding strength through the ancestors who believe in the next generations.
Wylah – Jordan Gould (illustrated by Richard Pritchard)
This was another Indigenous Australian, middle grade book by an Indigenous author, longer than Nerra and by the time I got to this, the second book was out, so I actually bought both. But for 2023, I only read the first.
Where Nerra is set in Indigenous culture, in our world, Wylah (pronounced wheel-la) is a fantasy book, inspired by Indigenous culture, with megafauna from bygone times such as the Tasmanian tiger and swamp cows. It’s a similar reading grade to Nerra, though I personally don’t think it used native language quite as well, in that it relied heavily on footnotes rather than using context and in-text explanation, which many fantasy books as well as books which introduce other languages I’ve read manage to do well, even at a middle grade reading level, with just a guide in the back for reminders and pronunciation. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable read with the fun of fantasy, inspired by First Nations culture.
You Exist too Much – Zaina Arafat
Of course, there was a huge push and even a dedicated week in the world of Bookstagram to reading Palestinian stories by Palestinian voices around early November, uplifting the silenced voices, but that also meant there was a bit of a wait at the library for these titles. I chose this book in particular, of all those available, due to its queer overlap, as with many other books on my list of 23.
You Exist Too Much not only centres a bi, Palestinian woman living in America, but also heavily features eating disorder recovery, love addiction, and a good chunk of the book takes place in an inpatient mental health recovery facility of sorts. We also get a look at not only the Palestinian and surrounds’ attitudes towards same-sex attracted people and relationships, and what is haram (forbidden) in the main character’s parents’ cities of residence, but also the main character’s coming out to her mother is on-page. The story flicks back and forth in a way that forms a tragic, compelling puzzle of the main character’s experiences in visiting Palestine annually growing up, her life and relationships in America, time spent living abroad in Italy, snippets from her childhood around her parents’ separation, and her mother’s abuse towards her. It’s deep and complicated and so very worth the read, in my opinion.
Leave the World Behind - Rumaan Alam
I chucked this one on hold at the library earlier as a result of talks with a good editor friend about the (at the time, upcoming) Netflix adaptation of this novel, which he said he absolutely loved when it was released, and I was interested in. I didn’t know a lot about it except that it explored the “complexities of parenthood, race, and class” and thus sounded like my kind of novel. I’m writing this on the 14th, the day before this blog post goes up, and finished You Exist Too Much just last night, so I can’t speak to it's other representations or quality of story from my personal opinion, but having it become a Netflix series speaks for itself, some would argue.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve read any of the books I spoke about, how you found them, and your own choices in reading diversely this year.
All in all, I found this “challenge” way more reasonable than I’d originally worried it would be at the start of the year, and it didn’t end up taking away from my usual diverse focus at all. It was heartening to note how many actually covered multiple points of representation, allowing me to continue in reading diverse gender representations, mental health and disablility rep, and all of them Own Voices!
I’ll chat with you all in the new year, enjoy your holiday period whatever your plans.
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