There’s something about September that makes us crave freshly sharpened pencils and that new book smell more than ever. As we compiled our September reading list, we thought of a wide range of books to help us stay at home and read more deliberately.

RWL Book Club Pick Of The Month:
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

This Hugo award winning groundbreaking book has been on many of our reading lists for a while now and it’s time we finally check this onto our “been there, read that” list.

Summary:
The Fifth Season takes place on a planet with a single supercontinent called the Stillness. Every few centuries, its inhabitants endure what they call a "Fifth Season" of catastrophic climate change. In the prologue, an extraordinarily powerful orogene discusses the sad state of the world and laments the oppression of his race. He then uses his enormous power to fracture the entire continent along its length, threatening to cause the worst Fifth Season in recorded history. The story then follows three female orogenes across the Stillness from different time periods: Essun, Damaya, and Syenite.

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RWL Books & Tea Pick Of the Month
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

You really thought we were going to let Akwaeke write a new book and we DON’T read it? LOL!
The theme for this month’s Books and Tea package was ‘Raining Inside Me’ inspired directly from a line by Osita in Akwaeke Emezi’s beautiful third book, The Death of Vivek Oji.
This book builds on Freshwater & PET’s exploration of self-hood in a community through heartbreaking, visceral, and tender prose.

Summary:
One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom. 

Rebel Teens Lit Subscription Picks Of the Month
Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi
and Yusef Salaam &
Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

Cinderella is Dead
We wanted to take classic story and find a cool retelling through a feminist and queer lens that we thought tweens would love. Cinderella is Dead will make readers question the tales they’ve been told, and root for girls to break down the oppressive constructs of the world around them.

Summary

It’s 200 years after Cinderella found her prince, but the fairy tale is over. Teen girls are now required to appear at the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom select wives based on a girl’s display of finery. If a suitable match is not found, the girls not chosen are never heard from again.

Sixteen-year-old Sophia would much rather marry Erin, her childhood best friend, than parade in front of suitors. At the ball, Sophia makes the desperate decision to flee, and finds herself hiding in Cinderella’s mausoleum. There, she meets Constance, the last known descendant of Cinderella and her step sisters. Together they vow to bring down the king once and for all–and in the process, they learn that there’s more to Cinderella’s story than they ever knew…

Punching The Air

Summary

Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he’s seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. “Boys just being boys” turns out to be true only when those boys are white.

Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal’s bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it?

Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Classics:
Song of Night by Glenville Lowell

Rebel Caribbean Classics Subscription - September Books
Song of Night by Glenville Lovell
The Painted Canoe by Anthony C. Winkler
Buxton Spice by Oonya Kempadoo

Song of Night by Glenville Lovell

Summary: So the heroine of this evocative novel introduces herself to the tourist-woman lying on the sands of Accra Beach to whom she hopes to sell the dresses she is peddling. It is an unplanned encounter, but Amanda, the African American tourist, is not in Barbados just for a vacation. Nor is Night the simple, easy-going island girl Amanda takes her for. This is a meeting that changes both their lives

Summary: The poverty-stricken Jamaican fisherman Zachariah is stubborn and, some would say, foolish. When he is lost at sea, his stubbornness makes him refuse to accept that he will not survive, even after being adrift for many weeks. When he is diagnosed with cancer, his foolishness makes him refuse to accept that the disease will kill him. The English doctor responsible for the district is first frustrated, then incensed: what makes a man with so little cling to life with such senseless obduracy?

In this first novel by outstanding Jamaican novelist Anthony C. Winkler, set in the tiny village of Charity Bay, Portland, faith is pitted against fate, irrationality against rationality – all amidst hilarious displays of eccentricity – as Zachariah determinedly battles the odds for survival.

Kempadoo's semi-autobiographical first novel follows bright, sensitive Lula, a girl growing up in Guyana, through her first frightening and thrilling pubescent milestones. In the early 1970s, when Guyana is beset by racial friction between the East Indian and Afro-Caribbean populations, Lula and her racially mixed family find themselves at the center of conflict in their town of Tamarind Grove. A bastion of the PNC (People's National Congress), Tamarind Grove is run by Our Comrade Linden Forbes Burnham, the leader of the Black Socialist Party, and Lula's progress unfolds as a series of vignettes set against this volatile environment. Omnipresent witness to these adventures is the Buxton Spice mango tree--a mute embodiment of wisdom and identity--whose branches hang over the family home.

Join us to read this month!

About Rebel Women Lit
Rebel Women Lit is an open book club, turned literary community, based in Jamaica. We focus on stories from women, non-binary persons, queer persons, and other voices that have been tradtionally marginalised in publishing. Yes, everything we do is political and deliberate. We have a podcast, book store, free community library, youtube channel and a few awesome projects.