Under the Radar BIPOC Books You May Have Missed

In these essays, award-winning poet Villarreal bends genres to look at her personal experiences—like a difficult childhood and divorce—colonial consequences, and migration, and analyzes them through a pop culture lens. In one piece, she’s looking at gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena, and in the next, the racial implications of Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow. She also looks at fantasy and considers collective imagination and how magic and ancestral teachings become invalidated through colonialism.

Johnson’s Invisible Son, with its ode to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, was one of my favorite YA releases last year. Here, she returns to the biting social commentary of her previous works but sets it against the backdrop of 1955. Calvin’s Black family decides to pass as white when they move to a “Whites Only” town. But having to constantly hide your true self is exhausting, and between the crush Calvin has on a girl he met on the Black side of town, and the dark secrets he learns of his new, white town, he starts to think his and his family’s current situation is not only untenable but outright dangerous.

This thriller shines a light on Hong Kong’s political environment. In it, two secondary school teachers, Wai and Ling, are told to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin or be fired. They’re both about their money—and decidedly not about politics—and acquiesce, but in different ways. Ling is savvy and takes it easy, but Wai’s obsessive approach to learning Mandarin culminates in her dying by suicide. Tongueless, with its dark humor, highlights what’s at risk of being lost in a unique city.

This is a nonfiction account of an Indigenous Mexican family’s displacement due to climate change. But, it’s not just relocating that they have to figure out—leaving the land they’ve lived on for generations leaves their culture at risk of being erased. Martina, Luis, and their kids leave the Sierra Madre mountains for Chihuahua City after their home is ravaged by drought and food shortages. Using two years of oral history collection and fieldwork, Blanco shows both the cost of climate destruction and the power and resilience of Indigenous communities.

In this middle grade graphic novel, Indu and his adoptive mother leave their spaceship home to live on earth with their new, blended family, but he doesn’t feel like he belongs. His classmates think he’s weird, he has a crush that may not be reciprocated, and his home life is awkward. This leads him to call out to the moon, where he’s from, with the hopes of it taking him back. It agrees to, but as the day of his return approaches, he finds friendship and maybe even belonging in unexpected places. Suddenly, he’s not sure he wants to go back.

In Cameroon, where queer people can be legally punished, two young women find each other. Bessem first sees the mesmerizing Fatima in all her athletic glory one day when she’s playing soccer. When Fatima throws a suggestive wink at her, it’s the start of a damned relationship. Though the two women find joy in each other, things quickly turn sour once Fatima’s older brother finds out and assaults them. Following the assault—and the subsequent raid of the only queer bar—Fatima goes missing. Thirteen years later, though Bessem has settled into a relatively quiet life as a professor who occasionally secretly dates women, a chance encounter with an old friend sends her searching for the girl she loved all those years ago.