Top Five Wednesday/ Hispanic Rep

I really want to blog, but my hands are on fire, and anything I do takes double the time. Luckily, I’m stubborn, which is a gift right now since it’s the only thing that is keeping me going. On another note, I just remembered that I still need to do my TBR for Trick or Treatathon, but I’m sure you are for the books not to hear me moan, so let’s get into it. Top Five Wednesday is currently being hosted by Stephanie at Books Less Travelled, and I’m co-hosting with her this month.

24th September: Find books with a topic or community you want to learn or share more about
Life is an ongoing lesson, and you know as much as you know, you never know enough. So what’s that topic that might be dominating your TBR or you more of? Examples include the Indigenous community, foster care, mental health, and animal shelters/rescues. I have to give this one to Goodreads, where they posted a list of books that explore Hispanic culture and representation. Here are the five I picked from there.

Goodreads Blurb:

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

Goodreads Blurb:

Cambridge, 2018. Ana and Luis’s relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador during the war. In her search for answers, and against her best judgement, Ana uses The Defractor, an experimental device that allows users to peek into alternate versions of their lives. What she sees leads her and Luis on a quest through Havana and San Salvador to uncover the family histories they are desperate to know, eager to learn if what might have been could fix what is.

Havana, 1978. The Salvadoran war is brewing, and Neto, a young revolutionary with a knack for forging government papers, meets Rafael at a meeting for the People’s Revolutionary Army. The two form an intense and forbidden love, shedding their fake names and revealing themselves to each other inside the covert world of their activism. When their work separates them, they begin to exchange weekly letters, but soon, as the devastating war rages on, forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever.

Goodreads Blurb:

he old keeper of the keys is dead, and the creature who ate her is the volatile Lady of the Capricious House⁠―Anatema, an enormous humanoid spider with a taste for laudanum and human brides.

Dália, the old keeper’s protégée, must take up her duties, locking and unlocking the little drawers in which Anatema keeps her memories. And if she can unravel the crime that led to her predecessor’s death, Dália might just be able to survive long enough to grow into her new role.

But there’s a gaping hole in Dália’s plan that she refuses to see: Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman, and she eventually devours every single bride that crosses her path.

Goodreads Blurb:

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon reveals the rawness of infatuation while reimagining what relationships, marriage, and family life can look like. Alejandro Varela boldly probes the corners of society in desperate need of change—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on the tangled dynamics that shape our lives. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

Goodreads Blurb:

In the span of a year, Dolores Moore has become a thirty-five-year-old orphan. After the funeral of the last living member of her family, Dorrie has never felt more lost and alone. That is, except for a Greek chorus of deceased relatives whose voices follow her around giving unsolicited advice and opinions. And they’re only amplifying Dorrie’s doubts about keeping the deathbed promise she made to return to her birthplace in Colombia.

Fresh off a breakup with her long-term boyfriend, laid off from her job as a cartographer, and facing a daunting inheritance of her mothers’ aging Minneapolis Victorian and two orange tabbies, how can she possibly leave the country now? But when an old flame offers to housesit, the chorus agrees that there’s no room for excuses. Armed with only a scrap of a handdrawn map, Dorrie sets off to find out where—and who—she came from.

Alex