Melissa A Watkins

Melissa A. Watkins recommends Where We Go at Night for fans of messy and morally ambiguous fae stories.

(Buy this book at Bookshop, please.) Read time: 3 minutes If it weren’t for religious devotion–specifically, deep study of the Quran while growing up South Asian in an Arab country and …

(This book is available at the Equal Opportunity Bookshop) Read time: 3 minutes They don’t all have to be deep, but sometimes they unexpectedly are. If “just keep going” was a per…

If you liked Marie N’Diaye’s novella The Witch or Samantha Mill’s short story collection Rabbit Test, you’ll probably like Black Arts as well.

Melissa A. Watkins suggests revisiting the Y2K era with this unique, multimodal tale of a lost twin.

My foot is hidden under a pile of fallen leaves in a ditch near the highway. My hand, a mile or so away, buried under a shallow layer of dirt in what will be someone’s tulip bed next spring. My head—I don’t know where it is. Strange. Surely it’s

(Lovecraft enthusiasts can buy this book here.) 3 minutes read time Mu-Young plans a relaxing beach town getaway with her niece Hyun. At first it’s a welcome respite from her controlling sist…

(Buy this book ethically at Bookshop!) About 3 minutes read time A hostess on the Middle Passage gives grim travel instructions. A Vietnam vet recounts how he helped his fellow soldiers reconcile w…

Black people can’t be hobbits, but white vampires just want to dance.

Melissa A. Watkins recommends The Winter Folk for fans of Charles De Lint’s Newford novels or Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series.

(You can purchase this book ethically here.) 2 minutes read time In the 1970s, a handful of Indian scientists signed contracts for good jobs at West Virginian chemical plants. As people do, they se…

Melissa A Watkins recommends Goldenborn for fans of LaDarrion Williams’s Blood at the Root, Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, or Wole Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon.

(This book is available on Bookshop.) Read time: 4 minutes Tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills seems to have it all. She shows off her successful organic farm, cheerful children, home-cooked r…

(Buy this book here.) 25-year old me would think that 45-year old me is ballin. 45-year old me thinks that I work too hard not to be. Both of us are pissed off. Somehow, the steady rise of my incom…

Melissa A Watkins recommends The Republic of Memory, a SF novel full of twists and turns and detailed world-building.

Read time: about 4 minutes Hello, fellow readers. I don’t seem to have the time to post bookish news updates on social media anymore, so here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting…

Everyone knows the Walls around the cities fell. What some people don’t remember is that the first one fell because of a laugh. It sounded like a ringing bell. Not like it came out of a baby at all. That was the first thing I told the scholar boy.

(Buy this book here.) Read time: about 3 minutes Back in the day, I used to attend poetry performances almost as often as church. (And I went to church a lot!) Unsurprisingly, I was especially draw…

(Buy this book here!) Read time: 2 minutes After her father’s death and her brother’s disgraced exile, Judith Worth is tasked with caring for her three younger siblings and keeping the …