[00:00:00] ANNE BOGEL: I think I understand the assignment.

TYNISHA COLEMAN: This is why they pay you the big bucks, Anne.

ANNE: Or not. You know what, I get paid in books and book talk, and that works for me.

Hey readers, I’m Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that’s dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don’t get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week we’ll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.

[00:00:46] Readers, if you haven’t heard, summer reading season is officially here. We kicked off summer with our 14th annual Summer Reading Guide and Live Unboxing just a few weeks ago. But if you missed the launch, no worries, there is plenty of summer left. And actually, in today’s episode, we’re talking about a book coming out today. You can still get your copy of the digital guide and the video replay from our unboxing party.

Just like this show, our Summer Reading Guide doesn’t get bossy or tell you what you should read this summer. Instead, I share 35 titles that I’ve personally vetted for summer. And in the unboxing video, I tell you a little more about each one, including who might especially enjoy adding each title to their summer reading list. We also include lots of backlist recs because we know how many of you want books that are available from the library right now.

If that sounds like just what you’re looking for this summer, visit modernmrsdarcy.com/srg to get your copy of the guide. That’s modernmrsdarcy/srg.

[00:01:47] Today, I’m joined by Tynisha Coleman, a leadership development coach and university lecturer from New Jersey. Tynisha would love to feel more confident finding emotionally resonant books that will engage and distract her without sending her into the depths of despair. She doesn’t mind books that tackle tough plot points but need these to serve a sense of purpose in the story.

While Tynisha reads broadly, the escapism offered by sci-fi and fantasy really works for her right now, and she would love to explore these genres more fully while balancing that reading with other works she’ll enjoy. I have ideas for Tynisha, and I’m excited to explore both of her reading goals in our conversation. Let’s get to it.

Tynisha, welcome to the show.

TYNISHA: Thank you, Anne. It’s nice to be here.

ANNE: Oh, I’m delighted to talk today. Tynisha, we’d like to start by giving our readers a glimpse of who you are. Can you tell me a little about yourself?

TYNISHA: Yes. So I live in New Jersey. I’m also, I have to say, I’m going to be 40 next year, which is exciting and terrifying.

ANNE: Congratulations from the other side.

[00:02:50] TYNISHA: Thank you. But I live in New Jersey. I’ve lived here most of my life. Originally from Philadelphia, but I only spent my early childhood there. I am a mom of a 16-year-old. She just started driving about a month ago. You know, everyone I speak to, I’m like, “Give me your prayers, your positive thoughts, burn sage, whatever you do. I need all of that because it’s a little bit nerve-wracking.”

Aside from being a mom, I also am a small business owner. I left my full-time job at a university back in July 2024 to focus on my consulting firm, and I’ve been doing that since then.

Then because I can’t stay away from higher education completely, I also teach one class in women and gender studies. So I’m a part-time professor as well.

ANNE: Okay. Congrats on the new driver, as nerve-wracking as that can be, speaking from experience, and also on the upcoming business anniversary.

TYNISHA: Thank you. Thank you.

ANNE: Tynisha, tell us about your reading life.

[00:03:50] TYNISHA: Well, I have always been a reader. I have been reading a bunch since I was a kid. I would always be having my nose buried in a book. My mom was one of those moms who was like, “Go play with the kids,” and I’m like, “No, I just want to stay inside and read my book.” So I’ve been what I call a book nerd since forever.

I really enjoyed The Baby-Sitters Club when I was younger. I enjoyed Sweet Valley High when I was younger. And then apparently, I started reading mysteries in high school and I didn’t realize I wasn’t the target demographic.

So I used to get a lot of my books from my great aunt, who’s my grandmother’s sister. And I would be reading like James Patterson and like Harlan Coben and not realizing that maybe I wasn’t the target audience for that until I showed up at a book signing and realized that the age groups were much older than I was. So that was interesting and funny.

[00:04:51] I was like, “Oh, wow, apparently I read like a lot of older people.” And when you’re young, you think everybody that’s like two years older than you is really old. So that was interesting.

I would like to share one of the nerdiest moments that I had as a kid. I was in elementary school. My mom had all these friends that used to give her all sorts of things. They knew I loved books. This one friend gave her a set of encyclopedias when he replaced his. And I was like walking around in school, my chest puffed out like I was the queen because I got this set of encyclopedias, and I had a strong case of the [“Did You Know?”] and people were quite annoyed with me.

But yeah, that’s how I was as a kid. Now I read most of the time and it’s really my form of self-care. I know that things aren’t going well if I’m not reading. I typically have at least two books in rotation, something on audio, something in print, either an eBook or the hardcover book. And if I’m not doing that, then something’s wrong.

[00:06:01] Then like early college, I was mostly mystery thriller. So a lot of like Harlan Coben, a lot of the type of Jane Patterson type stuff. And I spent so many years reading exclusively mystery thrillers. And then after a while, I really figured out that it felt like I was doing too much of the same thing. So there’s always, you know, kind of this fast paced thing. And I’m like, “It’s page turnery,” and I’m like skipping to get to the end. And then there’s a twist. And then, you know, either the twist is good or bad. And then that’s the end of the book.

I really started to feel like, “Oh, I really want to do something different. I need to explore a little bit more outside of this genre.” So I started reading more sci-fi, fantasy, and then also some literary fiction. And now I will read a little bit of everything, mostly.

The genre I read less so is romance. If it’s really good and becomes highly recommended, I’ll read it. But things that I tend to gravitate towards are like sci-fi, fantasy, a little bit of literary fiction. I enjoy memoirs, things like that.

[00:07:09] I haven’t read as many mystery thrillers as I used to because I think I just kind of burned myself out on the genre. Although I did go and read God of the Woods after it was in the reading guide last time, which I really enjoyed.

ANNE: So that worked out for you?

TYNISHA: It did. It did. And I think it was because I think I remember you saying on one of the shows that it was literary-and. So I think that’s probably why it worked out. It was not just the mystery thriller, but also this literary thing. I felt a little bit atmospheric with the camp setting and all of that. It went really well for me. I really enjoyed it.

ANNE: I am happy to hear that. Tynisha, we get questions from readers all the time about literary festivals, how to find them, what it’s like to go, how to get involved. And I know you have a story here. Would you tell us about your experience volunteering for the Morristown Festival of Books?

[00:08:05] TYNISHA: Yes, I can. And I’m so excited. So I’m still volunteering this year, by the way. I’m on the committee for the Morristown Festival of Books, and I’m specifically on the author’s committee. Again, I said I live in New Jersey, and this is the largest book festival in our state.

And because the committee is filled with… it’s largely homogenous, I’ll say. There’s not a lot of people who read sci-fi fantasy on the committee. And so when I joined, they were like, “Hey, Tynisha, you read sci-fi fantasy. Can you select some authors for us and reach out?”

So I got to moderate the panel because, again, typically these things, there’s another author or someone on the committee that will moderate the panel, but they didn’t feel comfortable doing it and they didn’t have another sci-fi fantasy author. So I got to moderate a panel with Helen Phillips to talk about the book Hum, which I know definitely was in the summer reading guide. And then Seanan McGuire was also on that panel, and we were talking about title creatures. I enjoy her work as well.

[00:09:09] But it was really fun. It was like one of those things where you get to scratch your book nerd itch and chat with some authors. They both were really nice, really gracious. I remember meeting Helen Phillips just a couple of minutes before we were going on, and I introduced myself and I said, “I’m just a reader,” because I know that a lot of them are used to these panels with other authors and other people of some sort of notoriety interviewing them or leading the panel. And I said, “I’m just a reader.” She’s like, “Well, we need readers, and you guys are why we’re able to do what we do.” She’s like, “Don’t just say you’re just a reader. That’s important.” So it made me feel really, really excited and just less nervous to talk with her and Seanan McGuire.

ANNE: I’m glad to hear that. You’re going to be moderating any panels this summer?

TYNISHA: I’m not sure yet. We are wrapping up our author pool. We have all of our invitations out. Of course, half of them came back, and we’re kind of pounding the pavement to get the rest of the authors to say yay or nay, and then we’ll talk about who’s going to moderate and what the titles of the different sessions are going to be. So that’s always exciting to me trying to figure out, what can we title this given the authors that are going to be on the panel and given the titles that they’re talking about this time? So I’m excited, and I can’t wait.

[00:10:30] ANNE: I love it. I can’t wait to hear how that goes for you. Tynisha, I would love to hear what compelling question or itch that needs scratching or what you’re looking for that brings you to What Should I Read Next? right now?

TYNISHA: I am really in a space where I want to find things that are emotionally resonant. I’m not necessarily particular about what genre it is, but I really want it to be emotionally resonant, and I really want it to be something that I can escape to, but not send me into what I’m calling the depths of despair.

I’ve read a lot of books over the years that are really emotionally resonant. And part of the reason that they are is because they make you want to cry your eyes out. I don’t exactly want that feeling, but I want something to resonate really, really well emotionally. And just like I want to sink my teeth into it. I want to really get immersed in what’s happening. So if that’s the characters, if that’s the plot, I’m agnostic about that piece of it. But I really just want to get into something.

[00:11:43] You know, for many of us, I mean, especially for me, it feels like the world is just on fire in many ways, and I just want to find a way to escape, have some good emotional resonance, but not have anything gratuitously sad or gratuitously tragic, if that makes sense.

ANNE: I think so. I think so. So you’re willing to go hard places, but not for the sake of them being hard.

TYNISHA: Right.

ANNE: I’m going to have more questions. But first, can we talk about your books?

TYNISHA: Yes, we can.

ANNE: Tynisha, I know you know how this works. You’re going to tell me three books you love, one book you don’t, and what you’ve been reading lately, and we’ll get a feel for what you’re looking for and suggest three books you may enjoy reading next. First, how did you choose these today?

TYNISHA: You all said not to overthink, and that is exactly what I went and did when I saw the request for the submission. So because I do track what I read, typically in Goodreads and sometimes with Fable, I was like, “Let me go back and look at what I rated as four and five-star reads.”

[00:12:55] That was the first thing I did. The second thing I did was I thought about the book that I read the most. There’s one book that I’m going to mention that I read four times. So that was an easy pick. And then I wanted to go with something that was a little bit more recent.

So two of the books I read at least two years ago, but one of them I read at the tail end of 2024. And so I wanted to get something that was more recent, but I also wanted to get something that I read before, but that still sticks with me to this day.

ANNE: I love it. Let’s jump in. What’s the first book you love?

TYNISHA: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I heard about this many years ago on a book podcast or maybe in a newsletter and I decided to give it a shot because the cover looked really interesting. It’s, you know, the red, white and black colors. It looks really interesting.

And I read it and I realized the thing that appealed to me most about this is that people on a journey, either if it’s like a physical journey where they’re physically moving or if it’s an emotional journey or a magical journey, those are things that really draw me in.

[00:14:11] This book is set in this imagined Victorian expired London type area where there’s a circus that travels mysteriously. It appears unannounced and it disappears the same way. So no one knows when it’s coming, no one knows when it’s going away, but it just shows up and the people really enjoy it.

I really love the magic in this book. The magic was really woven into everything. It was in the tents. It was in the other people that were a part of the circus, in the relationships, in the setting.

This one centered around two characters. I mean, there’s a lot more characters, but the two that I really followed the most were Celia and Marco. These are two young magicians who’ve been placed into a mysterious competition.

Celia, her father is called Prospero and he is a magician and Marco has someone who’s more of like a mentor to him who also engages in magic.

[00:15:19] These two people, Prospero and Marco’s mentor, who is called the man in the grey suit, which I love that he’s called the man in the grey suit, by the way. Those two gentlemen have this longstanding competition and they are thrown into this competition, but they are unaware.

And so it’s around magic and they don’t even know that they’re opponents and eventually they meet and things happen. I don’t want to give anything away.

The circus cast is really, really, really nice. There’s different types of people from different walks of life that have different talents. And my favorite two people in this circus are these twins, they’re children, Poppet and Widget. Poppet is the girl, Widget is the boy. They are so adorable. They are so funny. I literally could read a whole book about them. I would read a book about them on their own.

[00:16:15] I want to say what pulled me in initially was the very first sentence. It says, “The circus arrives without warning.” That had me instantly. I was like, “Okay, I have to know where this goes. I need to know where this goes.”

So it pulled me in right away. And every time I read it again, which this is the book that I mentioned that I read four times, I read it annually for four years in a row. It became this book that I was like, “It’s time for my annual rereading of The Night Circus.” Because it had a lot of emotional resonance. It had a lot of magic. It had a thread of romance, but it wasn’t overdone. It felt so comforting to me.

And even though the stakes are really high in this competition that they have, it really felt like, you know, I had this sense of wonder. I followed this circus. It was like still this very gentle, sort of comforting read, even though the stakes were high with these two magicians in their competition. And so I really, really enjoyed it. As I was reviewing why I love this book, I was like, “I think I need to read it again.” So we’ll see if that happens in 2025.

[00:17:29] ANNE: I love that for you. Yeah, maybe you can make it the nice round five.

TYNISHA: Yeah.

ANNE: Okay. Tynisha, what’s the second book you love?

TYNISHA: This is the first in the series. It’s called The Fifth Season and it’s written by N.K. Jemisin. I don’t really remember where I came across this book, but I do remember how intensely it made me feel.

I was in a period of life back, I think it was like in 2019, where I was in this huge dystopian reading phase. I don’t think this book is technically classified as dystopian, but it kind of is to me. And this became one of the most resonant things that I had ever read.

It’s set in this broken world that is really experiencing a lot of seismic activity and natural disasters from earthquakes to tsunamis. And then there’s this extended winter that’s really catastrophic called The Fifth Season that the people in this world experience.

[00:18:28] So there’s also this sort of group of, I’m going to call them people, but I don’t quite know if that’s the way that they’re described. They’re called the orogenes, and they can control the Earth’s energy and the seismic energy that’s happened, and they are feared by, I’ll just say, the regular humans. And they are, you know, sometimes slaughtered because of that fear.

This story follows three women who are orogenes at different stages of life. Their names are Essun, Damaya, and Syenite. And each of their stories is really, really fantastic. We meet Essun when she comes home and finds that her son has been murdered by her husband. She’s pretty sure that the reason this has happened is because the husband figures out that the boy is an orogene.

And so she finds that and her husband’s missing and her daughter is also missing. You know, she’s grieving and she wants to know what’s happened. And we follow her.

[00:19:31] The other person, Damaya, we follow her at a point where her family really is trying to get rid of her because they discover that she is an orogene. And then Syenite, we meet her when she’s at this place called the Fulcrum, which is… it’s an institution that trains the orogenes on how to use their, I’m not going to call it magic, but how to use their powers. And so she’s going through this kind of… anytime something has a school in it, it reminds me of Harry Potter. This school is not like Harry Potter, but it’s the thing that comes to mind whenever there’s a school for me. So there’s this institution that she’s in preparing herself to use her powers.

This is high fantasy, really good world-building, but world-building that’s so intentional because one of the things that I struggle with as a sci-fi fantasy reader is that sometimes the world-building can feel just like an info dump. The way that N.K. Jemisin did this, it was like every piece of the world-building mattered to the characters and to the plot, and so nothing was just a throwaway. I felt like everything was intentional.

[00:20:45] I sunk my teeth into it. It really grabbed me from the beginning. And I just wanted to spend so much time in this world with these characters to figure out what was happening.

I read this book in about like five or six days, and I feel like I didn’t come up for air until after I was done. And then I probably had a book hangover for about a month where I could not read anything else because these characters, this story was just in my head for so long that it took me about a month before I picked something else up.

ANNE: Whoa, that’s quite a book hangover.

TYNISHA: Yeah.

ANNE: Okay, that says a lot about your relationship with this title. Tynisha, what’s the third book you love?

TYNISHA: Okay, so this third one is a little bit lighter than what I just mentioned. This is called Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes. A friend recommended this to me and she said, “You got to read this. This is really funny. Even though the title is called Murder Your Employer, you got to read this.” And so I picked it up from the library.

[00:21:48] The premise is so creative. We meet this guy, Cliff Iverson. He’s the main character. He is fed up with work. He’s fed up with his boss. His boss is the archetype of this corporate greed type person who will do anything to save a buck. So they’re working on a project that is having a lot of corners cut, and Cliff knows that based on these cut corners, people may die, right? Like people may be harmed. And so he’s really, really upset by this and tired of his employer.

And then his colleague dies by suicide, and it is directly linked to the supervisor and how he’s treated them and the things that he has them doing. And so Cliff decides, “That’s it. I’m going to take this guy out.” And he tries to take him out and it does not go well. He gets picked up by the cops. And he learns that these cops are actually alumni of the McMaster’s Conservatory for the Applied Arts, where they teach students the fine art of deletion because they do not say murder.

[00:22:59] It’s dark. It’s satire. It’s really, really funny. Like they take this dark subject matter and they make it funny. Because it’s a school, I told you anytime a school is involved, I think Harry Potter, right? So I feel like this is grown-up Harry Potter meets Dateline, meets whatever comedy you love. I was completely drawn in.

The characters are not all likable. Some of them are morally ambiguous. Some of them are terrible. But I still want to spend time with them and I still want to see what they’re going to do next. And I also find myself in a weird position where I’m like, “Am I rooting for this guy to kill his boss?” Which is like an interesting place to be in. It’s fiction, so I let myself off the hook morally for that.

But the school setting is bizarre. The way they train people is just really bizarre, but just really awesome. The way that they train these people for something so high stakes, it’s like we’re preparing you for, I don’t know, some type of corporate career, but this corporate career is in deletion.

[00:24:14] You know, the topic is serious, but it’s enough levity to keep it weird and funny. It’s witty and the pace is really good. It’s just a book that doesn’t take itself too seriously. So I really enjoyed how funny it was, but that the dark elements were still there because, you know, you’re talking about murder. So it has to be a little bit dark. I really enjoyed that read.

ANNE: All right. I appreciate a change of pace. Keeps things interesting.

TYNISHA: Absolutely.

ANNE: Speaking of change of pace, Tynisha, tell me about a book that was not right for you. And I’d love to hear why it didn’t hit.

TYNISHA: The book that was not for me was The Husbands by Holly Gramazio. There’s a few different reasons why it didn’t work for me. The first reason is that I think… so the concept is that there’s a woman who, and I forget the character’s name, I’m so sorry, but she has husbands coming out of her attic, and every time the door opens or the one husband goes up, a different one comes down and she doesn’t know why this is happening.

[00:25:28] I picked it up because it sounded really funny and really interesting. And it was funny. But after like, I don’t know, maybe it was like the fifth or sixth husband, maybe it was the 10th, I was like, “Okay, I’m kind of ready for this part of the book to be over,” and it just kept going.

There were some interesting things happening in there with one of the husbands she had that she was sort of trying to keep in touch with. And that was a little interesting. But it just felt like the same thing kept happening and I didn’t feel like it was going anywhere.

It felt like it would have been better as a short story for me than a full book. And I finished the whole thing. I didn’t DNF it, I finished it, but I didn’t feel like it was worth the payoff at the end.

It started off really funny, it started off interesting, and then I felt like it was spinning. I felt like it was spinning and not going anywhere for quite a long time. So that’s why it wasn’t for me.

[00:26:29] ANNE: Tynisha, I’m wondering if you got lost a little bit, not like you didn’t know what was happening, but you just didn’t care when Lauren is having all these husbands coming down from the attic over and over and we’re seeing how that plays out. What I’m thinking of is Save the Cat, where he calls this the fun and games portion, where you see how the premise plays out for your characters. But you weren’t really interested in seeing how it played out over and over again.

TYNISHA: Right, right. It was just happening a little bit too much.

ANNE: Like, what’s the point?

TYNISHA: Yeah, exactly.

ANNE: That is helpful. Okay, Tynisha, to give me a sense of what you’re willing to take a chance on in your reading life, I’d love to hear what you’re reading right now or lately.

TYNISHA: There’s two books that I read lately that have really stuck with me and have really been interesting. The first one is Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. That book I read it as a part of my book club and it is so good.

[00:27:27] It’s a book inside of a book. It’s about a disabled woman. She’s in a wheelchair and she is really interested in larger things in life. Her family doesn’t always treat her very well. They don’t always understand her. But she’s interested in larger things.

She ends up writing a book. She’s also an adjunct professor at a college. And finally, the book that she writes, which is a sci-fi fantasy book, it takes off, it does well, it gets optioned into a movie, and there’s a bunch of things that happen as a result.

The piece that was very interesting about this book to me is that you are reading the book that she has written, which was called The Rusted Robot. You’re reading that along with the other parts about her life and her experience and everything that’s happening to her. So it’s like every other chapter or every few chapters, you get a little piece of the book inside of the book.

[00:28:27] I loved it so much that I started to reread it, but just read the parts of The Rusted Robot to get the full story all at once of just the book inside of a book. It is so well done. It takes you into an interesting world when you think about the robots.

The regular world is very normal and typical, but inside of the book she wrote, it’s just an interesting, interesting thing about different groups of robots and how they show up and how they interact with one another. So that’s one that I’ve enjoyed.

Then the other book I read recently was called Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. It was so interesting and so timely. I don’t know how I keep finding myself reading books that resonate with the times that we’re living in. It really was one that drew me in because of the particular family dynamics and what was happening in society in this book. Those two books that I’ve read are really, really good.

[00:29:30] There’s one I just finished that I can’t recall the name of, so I won’t go into it. But sometimes I read books and then I forget about them.

ANNE: What? Just kidding. That happens to me too. I’d like to say it happens to everyone, but I won’t speak for everyone.

TYNISHA: Yes. My friend says, I read books, I don’t remember books. And I’m like, “Yes, sometimes that happens.” So if I remember it, that means it was really good.

ANNE: Okay. I have Nnedi Okorafor questions. Have you read her before?

TYNISHA: I have not. I actually have one of her books on my shelf that my boyfriend gifted to me. It’s called Binti, but I have not read it. This is the first time I had read any of her work.

ANNE: I was just curious because she seems like a good fit for you. I’m happy for you to know you have another book waiting on the shelf by Okorafor.

TYNISHA: Yeah. I mean, she has so much. Honestly, I don’t know that I would have picked this book up if it wasn’t suggested by the book club. I saw the advertisements about it, but I was just like, “Oh, okay. That looks pretty cool.” But it wasn’t something that I was like, “Oh, I’m going to be so into this.”

[00:30:35] But when one of the book club members suggested it and I started reading it, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. This is so good.”

ANNE: I’m glad you enjoyed it. Tynisha, what are you looking for in your reading life right now?

TYNISHA: I am looking for something that I can really dive into heart, soul, and mind. Like I really want to be in this book for a while. I want a book that goes beyond surface-level emotions. I want something that’s going to stick with me for a while.

So, earlier, I said that I had taken a break from reading a lot of mystery thrillers because those are what I… this is my language. Those are what I call popcorn books a lot of times. Which just reminds me of a blockbuster that I would see in the summertime in the movies. Like, I don’t know, The Meg or something like that. And it’s not something that means a whole lot to me, but it’s entertaining and I enjoy, you know, reading it or watching it while eating my popcorn.

[00:31:36] I want something deeper than that, but I want it to not be so gut-wrenching and traumatic and traumatic in a way that doesn’t serve a purpose. There are a couple of books that I heard that are really traumatic, heard about and I was like, “I don’t ever imagine myself reading that book.”

I want to make sure it’s not something that’s too traumatic in terms of what happens to the characters. But I’m willing to go to a certain level of depth. I’m willing to experience some hard things, but just not things that are going to leave me sobbing or pulling over in my car if I’m listening to the audiobook, which I actually had to do once. I can’t remember what I was listening to, but I was so like, “Oh my gosh, this is horrible. I need to pull over for a second to do some deep breathing.”

ANNE: Tynisha.

TYNISHA: I don’t want to go that heavy.

ANNE: Oh my gosh. Okay. You know, we all want to know which book this was.

[00:32:33] TYNISHA: I can’t recall. Oh, you know what? It might’ve been one of the books in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife series. I can’t remember which one. I turned it off and I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to listen to music for a while and I will go back to this book later because I may not make it home.”

ANNE: I’m glad you made it home. Talk to me about genre. I hear that sci-fi fantasy is one that you really enjoy. You’re looking for escapist works. We’ve also talked about mysteries. I think you mentioned in your submission, being interested in exploring different kinds of sci-fi. What are you feeling right now?

TYNISHA: I have read a lot of sci-fi fantasy that has been kind of dystopian. So, you know, talking about The Fifth Season, which I’m classifying as dystopian, maybe it’s not necessarily classified as that, and The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and a bunch of others that are just like, there’s this place and things are hard and difficult and people are trying to make do or find some way to fight against something.

[00:33:42] I want to move a little bit away from that to something else. I recently read, I believe, a couple of Becky Chambers books, which was really interesting. It had enough of the fantasy element, enough of the emotional resonance, but it wasn’t super hard stuff happening.

I also read there was the one that was called The Teller of Small Fortunes, which I think was in one of the guides you released.

ANNE: It was.

TYNISHA: That was also a really good book. Part of what was good about that is again, the journey aspect of it. I love that they were sort of traveling and, you know, at some point they’re traveling to some place at some point they’re trying to get away from another place. So that was really good.

So I don’t know if what I’m saying is helpful at all-

ANNE: Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:35] TYNISHA: I want to not be necessarily in dystopia, but perhaps in a world, realistic or not, where things happen and the things that happen are important and they resonate emotionally and they’re, you know, in their deep things that are important, but not so much that I’m pulling over and sobbing in my car.

ANNE: All right. While you never know what’s really going to connect and hit you right in the gut, I think I understand the assignment.

TYNISHA: This is why they pay you the big bucks, Anne.

ANNE: Or not. You know what? I get paid in books and book talk and that works for me.

TYNISHA: Awesome.

ANNE: We were chatting beforehand and you told me you just watched the Summer Reading Guide unboxing. So I’m starting with a book that you will have heard about there, but I want to underline it for you and share with everyone else. And that is The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King. Do you remember this from unboxing?

[00:35:40] TYNISHA: I remember the name, but not what you said about it. And I have to tell you, I’m one of those people that take notes. So I’m taking notes the entire time you’re talking, and then I have to go back and read them to make sense of what I’ve written.

ANNE: We’ll do you one better. We’ll have a transcript for you.

TYNISHA: Awesome.

ANNE: Okay. So this is a debut from author Allison King and it actually releases today, the day this podcast is airing, June 3rd. So it’s ready and waiting for you. This is a debut novel and the origin story is so interesting. It’s inspired… We’re going to talk with her in book club in July. I don’t want to put words in Allison King’s mouth, but I’m going to share a little bit of what I’ve been fascinated to hear her share in interviews and then there’s a little letter in the copy of the Advanced Review book I got.

But she says that her grandparents used to own a pencil company back in Shanghai and she always thought that was so fascinating and romantic. There was this tactile thing that she used, but they were making them decades ago in different countries. And in this book, the pencils are magic, but first more about the personal inspiration.

[00:36:42] Allison King said her grandparents didn’t talk about their history in Shanghai. And it wasn’t until they no longer had the ability to do so that she realized, “Gosh, I wish I knew more about their stories. What a loss!”

And she said in this book, she created this really sweet grandmother-granddaughter relationship. And this granddaughter in her story, the fictional one finds the satisfaction of learning her grandmother’s history that Allison King herself never got to experience.

But about these pencils, they are magic because they can be reforged. And that means, one, with the power, the inborn power, but also the knowledge can bring the memories they contain, the words that they have written back to life. Whether that something is prosaic as a grocery list, whether it’s a missive sharing state secrets, whether it’s a love letter to someone that.. well, whether it’s a secret love letter, we’ll just say that.

[00:37:40] So these pencils are powerful. And the way the secrets are extracted made me wince every time I read about it.

Something else I love about this book for you, Tynisha, is that you’ve enjoyed dabbling in various genres. I guess today we really only talked about sci-fi fantasy and history mystery, but this one is a real genre blender. So you have… I called it a blender. Don’t we usually say bender?

TYNISHA: Yeah.

ANNE: It does all these things. It’s World War II-era historical fiction, the grounded fantasy, like much of it is set very much in the real world. But these pencils, I’ve never encountered such a thing. We have family drama. We have romance. The characters are compelling and well-drawn. And they’re very sympathetic. And the emotions of what’s happening to the characters, the relationships between them really matter in this story.

King is really wrestling with some questions that matter to us today, like data privacy. What does user consent look like for technology, and what can happen if we don’t realize who we’re giving our stories to and how they might be used?

[00:38:46] And that feels like straight out of the headlines, not in a heavy-handed way, but it does feel like very deeply practically and emotionally pertinent to right now. But also we have this close look at Chinese histories, the relationships in the book, the race to keep the powerful pencils out of the wrong hands. There’s a lot here. How’s this sounding to you?

TYNISHA: It’s sounding really good. First of all, when you said keeping the pencils out of the wrong hands, I’m like, Okay. I enjoy a tale when it’s like, we have to keep these people from doing this thing or using these things.

But I also really liked the part about the grandmother-granddaughter relationship because I’ve started to realize that I appreciate those family drama stories more than I thought I would. Historically, like I said, I used to do mystery thriller all the time. So I didn’t realize that literary fiction and family drama was something that I would even be interested in.

[00:39:49] But as I’ve been following more people that talk about books and learning about different genres, I’ve read quite a few. And I really am always interested in the relationship between the women in the family, just because I come from a family with a lot of women, really, really strong women. And the dynamics between the women in the family and my family are always very interesting. So I love reading other people’s stories and how the women in other families interact because it’s always just very interesting to me.

ANNE: I’m glad to hear that. Have you read any Robin Hobb?

TYNISHA: I have not.

ANNE: Okay. So she writes high fantasy, lots of world-building. She writes long books. She could keep you busy for a really long time, or you could just read the first one and see what you think. It is called the Assassin’s Apprentice.

[00:40:45] She wrote it, Robin Hobb, in 1995, and she is still writing. She has constructed this whole world called the Realm of the Elderlings. She’s written multiple series that all fall under the same universe, the Realm of the Enderlings. We’re going to start with the Farseer trilogy. Have I lost you yet? Is that too complicated?

TYNISHA: No, it’s not.

ANNE: Okay, amazing. You can tell you belong in the fantasy genre then. We are going to start with the Farseer trilogy with her first novel in the Enderlings universe, and that is called The Assassin’s Apprentice.

And oh gosh, I find it really challenging to describe these books that have a lot of world-building, but this story is very much about the characters and about the relationships between them. Our protagonist is Fitz. He is the bastard son of a prince who was abandoned at a young age by the women in his family because they didn’t want to raise him.

[00:41:46] So when he’s very young, I want to say six or seven, he goes into the care of the royal family. And he grows up, he bops around the royal servants until he is finally apprenticed at the age of like 14, 15 to an assassin. This serves everybody well, because with this job, he’s not believed to be a threat to the line of succession, and also it’s going to keep him busy. And also because of his power that he possesses, he is well suited to this work.

Let me tell you about the setup of the book, Tynisha. Because what we hear is a whole lot of adventures that Fitz has gone on, which might make you think it’s fast-paced. It’s really more leisurely. It feels very cinematic. And the tone is a little bit wistful, brooding, melancholy.

[00:42:39] But each chapter starts with Fitz, the old man, where he’s either talking about what’s happening in his life right now, or he’s sharing a snippet from the book he’s writing about the history of the kingdom he grew up in. Which I find this really satisfying as a reader, because sometimes when you’re reading adventure stories where the character is in peril, you wonder, are they going to make it? Are they going to make it? He’s telling us his reflections from where he sits now as an old man, so you know that he is going to make it through.

But in this book, we see lots of courtly intrigue, lots of major, but also minor characters that you come to care about, and this really interesting kind of magic called the Wit and the Skill, which are very powerful, but those who wield them pay a cost for doing so.

This is the first book in a trilogy, but in this wider world of 25 books, as we watch Fitz, the outcast, grow up and find his place. All right, how does this sound to you?

[00:43:48] TYNISHA: This sounds really interesting, because I’m hearing themes of maybe a little bit coming of age in addition to everything that’s also happening. We didn’t talk about this, but I enjoy coming-of-age books as well. It doesn’t have to be YA, but when people are going through a journey.

ANNE: A journey. Oh, and I forgot to say, yes, journey is very much in mind with this story.

TYNISHA: Awesome. I love that. I’m also a sucker for an old man telling a story. And I know that’s probably hilarious, but even in movies, if there’s an old man who’s schooling somebody on something or telling a story, I’m like, “I’m there. Where’s the old man telling the story? I’m in there.” So I love that.

I also love that you said he’s reflecting on this. And so while there may be tension and like what happens, I don’t know where this is going, there’s also a little bit of safety in knowing that this is a reflection. So, you know, you hope that at least at the end of this he is okay enough to tell the story. So that makes me feel good.

[00:44:55] ANNE: I feel that myself. All right, can we do another journey tale?

TYNISHA: Absolutely.

ANNE: I’m thinking The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley. Have you read this?

TYNISHA: I haven’t.

ANNE: This is speculative fiction, which you said you’ve enjoyed, an alternate history, a time-slip tale, and there’s also a romance element. So what Pulley imagines here is, what if Napoleon conquered England in the Battle of Trafalgar? And also, what if there was a stone portal in the dangerous seas that served as a passageway between centuries?

The story begins with a man named Joe getting off a train in the city of, gosh, I hate that I’ve set myself up to try to pronounce things in French, but he’s in the city of Londra, because it’s not London, because Napoleon won and France took everything over. But it’s Londra, 1898. And he has a postcard in his pocket written in forbidden English. French is the only language that’s allowed.

[00:45:57] And the postmark is dated almost 100 years ago in 1805, though he can definitely tell that the postcard has the image on it of a lighthouse that was only recently constructed later in the 19th century. So this is pretty weird to him, because this seems impossible. And the postcard says, it’s written to him, “Dearest Joe, come home if you remember,” and it’s signed M.

I should have told you that there’s also a mystery embedded in this. Who is M? How is this impossible postcard possible, and what is Joe going to do about it? So his search sends him on a journey over the sea to the Outer Hebrides, and then back and forth many times through the stone portals on a quest to reunite with his family.

But if this is going to work, he cannot change the course of history, it will all fall apart, nor can he do anything that might erase his own existence in 1898 Londra. How does that sound to you?

[00:46:55] TYNISHA: That sounds really interesting. I can’t recall if I’ve read a lot of time travel adjacent or time slip, which is like the way that’s described books, but I definitely have watched a lot of that. And so it really sounds interesting.

I do also like alternative histories. So I read a while back, not related to sci-fi, but I read… Curtis Sittenfeld wrote it, I think. I think it was called Rodham? Like, what if, you know, Hillary Clinton chose a different path?

So I enjoy reading those types of books, where it’s like, let’s imagine, let’s play out what might have happened if this went a different way. So that sounds really interesting.

And I’m all into this mystery element of this postcard. You know, this is in his pocket, who’s M or what’s happening here? This sounds really interesting.

ANNE: I’m glad to hear it. All right. I want to leave you with one more if that’s okay.

TYNISHA: Absolutely.

[00:47:53] ANNE: We were talking Phoenix Pencil, a, for fans of title I used in the Summer Reading Guide, was Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January. I think that would also be an excellent pick for you. But she wrote these really fun, short, zany escapist books, just two of them.

There’s a pair. She calls them fractured fairy tales. And the first is called A Spindle Splintered. It’s very short. It’s in a cute little hardcover or you can get the eBook. I listened to the audio. It was great.

But when you said coming of age, this is where my brain went. And also we were already incubating the escapist idea. But in this story, we have a soon-to-be 21-year-old named Zinnia Gray. She believes this is going to be her last, I almost said her last 21st birthday, her first and last. But when she was young, she was in an industrial accident and she now has this rare condition that isn’t well understood but no one has lived past the age of 21. So she thinks this birthday is going to be the end for her.

[00:48:50] Her best friend’s name is Charm and she is determined to make this birthday special. And she’s getting the full sleeping beauty treatment. There’s a tower and a spinning wheel and the whole shebang.

But then when she pricks her finger as she does in the original fairy tale, something completely unexpected happened, and she falls through worlds and finds another sleeping beauty who also wants to escape her horrible fate.

This is fun. It’s a little bit snarky and sassy. When I think delightful escapist read, this is where my brain goes. How does that sound to you?

TYNISHA: That sounds really good. I’m really interested in this coming-of-age piece and this piece of like, you know, her life might be over and what’s going to happen for her. I love that.

ANNE: Well, I’m excited that you do. Tynisha, we talked about a lot of books today, including The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King, The Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley, and A Spindle Splintered by Alex E. Harrow. Of those books, what do you think you might read next?

[00:50:05] TYNISHA: Mm, I’m thinking I want to go with The Phoenix Pencil Company. That was it, right?

ANNE: That’s the one.

TYNISHA: I think I’m going to go with that because I’m really interested in this, first of all, the backstory of why Alison King decided to write this book. Also, because it’s a debut. But the premise just sounds really interesting. And I’m really interested in this magical element with the pencils and then the relationship between the grandma and the granddaughter. So I think I’m going to go there.

ANNE: That sounds like there’s a lot there for you. I’m excited to hear what you think.

TYNISHA: I’m excited to let you know.

ANNE: All right, Tynisha. This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for talking books with me today.

TYNISHA: Great. Thank you so much, Anne.

[00:50:56] ANNE: Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Tynisha, and I’d love to hear what you think she should read next. Find Tynisha on Instagram and at her website. We have those links, plus the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldiradnextpodcast.com.

Follow our show on Instagram @whatshouldiradnext, and be sure to tag us in your summer reading-related posts.

Make sure to follow along in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, whatever your favorite podcast platform is right now. When you follow or subscribe, you’ll get each week’s new episode automatically in your downloads, so you can listen from anywhere you may find yourself this summer. Plus, following helps us out by demonstrating to our networks that listeners like you love our show. Thank you for supporting our show in this quick and free way.

Sign up for our email list at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter for straight-to-your-inbox updates about our newest episode and the latest happenings at What Should I Read Next HQ, like our new Summer Reading Guide, seasonal merch, upcoming events, and more.

[00:51:54] Thank you to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Production. Readers, that is it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” Happy reading, everyone.