POP SONG: Adventures in Art and Intimacy, by Larissa Pham. (Algonquin, 352 pp., $16.95.) According to our reviewer, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Greenidge’s second novel is “a feat of monumental thematic imagination.” This book mines history to tell the story of Libertie, the restless daughter of a female doctor - based on Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black female doctor in New York State - as she comes of age in a Black community in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn.
(Anchor, 336 pp., $17.) This debut novel follows a Jamaican family that emigrated to a British coal town in 1959 and the series of events that lead to Jesse, a Black 19-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, being forced to start his life anew when he is exiled from his church for flirting with another boy.
Our reviewer, Matthew Desmond, called this - one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021 - a “rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you’ve read them.” (Random House, 640 pp., $20.) In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Elliott, a Times reporter, chronicles the life of Dasani, a child living in New York’s shelter system, for eight years to tell an unsettling story of inequality in America.
INVISIBLE CHILD: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City, by Andrea Elliott.
