21 great reads from small presses 📚

Quinn Ryan fell in love hard and fast with her best friend, Jaimie, and the two had an incredible relationship... until they didn’t. In Girl Crushed, Katie Heaney perfectly captures the pain and confusion of heartbreak, especially for teenagers — but with a breakup that happens off the page, Girl Crushed follows the aftermath, exploring how a teen copes with the loss of first love. Though there are several bouts of crying to Celine Dion and awkward moments at the lunch table, Quinn grows in a way that she didn’t think possible and didn’t know she needed. For example, she pursues a relationship with the coolest girl in school, not out of revenge, but as an opportunity to take a risk and see herself through someone else’s eyes.

The book is so refreshing because unlike several queer stories, the focus doesn’t fall on the discovery of the character’s sexual identity, or their coming out experience. Although being a lesbian is central to her identity, and queer culture is prominently explored throughout, Quinn knows herself from the start, and is accepted and loved for who she is by everyone around her, freeing up the story to focus on characters so well-defined and real that they jump off the page. Heaney’s writing is fun, witty, and honest in a way that will transplant you right back to your own high school days. Girl Crushed is a story of first love, expectations, and bittersweet endings that will leave you feeling hopeful for the characters, but also yourself. Get your copy now. —Shyla Watson

How'd I Miss This Book?

A series about catching up on older reads.

Credit: hazydazyreading

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I knew of Donna Tartt — her alleged reclusiveness, her immaculately tailored men’s suits and elegant bob — but I must confess that I had never read any of her novels before finally deciding to rectify this error during lockdown. A former colleague recently tweeted that 1992’s The Secret History (published when Tartt was just 28) was the “perfect” Donna Tartt novel, and since the New York Public Library has a robust digital collection, I was able to check it out within minutes and greedily read it on my Kindle in the span of a few days.

I was hooked from the opening line: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

What follows is an immersive, slow-boiling elegant thriller set in fictional Hampden College, based on the famously hedonistic Bennington College of the early ‘80s, which Tartt attended alongside the writers Bret Easton Ellis (the book is dedicated to him) and Jonathan Lethem. (I highly recommend reading this oral history about their time there when you’re done with the book).

The book’s narrator, Richard Papen, is a lower middle class California transplant to Hampden who finds himself enamored with an enigmatic group of five students who take advanced Greek classes with a mysterious, charismatic teacher named Julian Morrow. The group comprises a pair of gorgeous blond twins, Charles and Camilla; Francis, a closeted heir with an alcoholic mother; the aforementioned Bunny; and the highly intelligent, obtuse Henry.

How Bunny ends up dead — and why — is the suspense that drives the novel, but the pleasure of this book really lies in Tartt’s gorgeous, evocative writing. Her prose is immaculate and the world she depicts — of rural New England and an isolated, privileged campus, of these highly intelligent but deeply cruel students who drink booze like water, smoke incessantly and spend money with wild abandon — is utterly riveting.

Richard is the Nick Carraway figure of the novel, first enamored and then repelled by this rarefied setting. (The book also carries a bit of the compelling melancholy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). When I finished The Secret History, I immediately wanted to read it again to see how she pulled it off. This time though, I’ll be buying it. Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro

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