Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Moses Ose Utomi, Nana Malone, and Charl Landvreugd.
Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Publisher: Berkeley
Date: April 8, 2025
Genre: Fiction, Historical fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Take My Hand (2022), which was awarded an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, and a Fiction award from the Black Caucus American Library Association, and was long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship, Dolen is widely considered a preeminent chronicler of American historical life.
Happy Land
Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, due to a mysterious estrangement between her mother and grandmother, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.
But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.
It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.
Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.
Children of Useyi by Moses Ose Utomi
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Date: March 25, 2025
Genre: Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Simon & Schuster
Moses Ose Utomi
Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian American fantasy writer, martial artist, and nomad currently based out of Honolulu, Hawaii. He has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and has had work published with Tor and Fantasy Magazine, among others. When he isn’t reading or writing, he’s indulging his restlessness by traveling about, making progress on his martial arts journey, or doing karaoke—with or without a backing track.
Children of Useyi
An elite female fighter and her found family of sisters battle gods and monsters for their existence in this captivating West African–inspired young adult fantasy sequel to Daughters of Oduma, perfect for fans of The Gilded Ones and Legendborn.
Eat. Dance. Fight for your life.
The girls in the Mud Fam are used to fighting hard—it’s the only way to win in their elite, all-female sport of Bowing. Thanks to her legendary performance at the last tournament, Dirt has helped their ranks swell with a bevy of new recruits. She has finally achieved her lifelong dream of restoring glory to the Mud Fam, and she’s more than ready to win the upcoming tournament. But everything changes when a man washes up on shore.
There are no adults on the Isle, not since the long-ago days when the gods walked the earth. Yet here is a mysterious man who calls himself Mister Odo and claims to come from the land of the gods. He declares a tournament to find the best Bower. Though wary of the secretive Mister Odo, Dirt is prepared to battle as a proud, fat Bower should—that is, until the competitors are attacked by monsters. The only thing that can save the girls is the gods-given magic that Dirt can channel…and even that might not be enough.
Gold Coast Dilemma Book by Nana Malone
Publisher: Gallery Books
Date: April 29, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Nana Malone, Simon & Schuster
Nana Malone
Wall Street Journal & USA Today Bestselling author, Nana Malone writes Sexy Feel-Good Romance and loves all things romance and adventure.
Gold Coast Dilemma
From USA TODAY bestselling author Nana Malone, a romance about a Ghanaian American heiress faced with the dilemma of choosing between culture and a love connection.
During an opulent publishing party, Ofosua Addo crosses paths with Cole Drake for the first time. Their flirtatiously witty exchange culminates in a kiss that etches a permanent mark on both their hearts.
But Ofosua’s identity as a Ghanaian heiress comes before Cole. She loves the vibrant traditions of Ghana’s Gold Coast, and her hand is already promised to a man that even her overbearing mother loves. Yet, when her big Ghanaian wedding transforms from a fairy tale into a spectacle, she’s thrust into a whirlwind of heartbreak and self-discovery.
In the midst of it all, Cole enters her life once again, under circumstances far different from their magical first encounter. Can Ofosua and Cole’s rediscovered spark overcome the weight of tradition?
Becoming Afro-Dutch: Hybrid Being in Black Art and Culture by Charl Landvreugd
Publisher: Punctum Books
Date: Spring 2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Punctum Books
Charl Landvreugd
Charl Landvreugd is Head of Research & Curatorial Practice at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He serves as an external tutor at various art academies, is on the supervisory board of Het Nationale Theater, and is a member of the Production/Collection Fund Commissioning Committee of the Hartwig Art Foundation. Previously, he served as Head of Research in Visual Arts & Post-Contemporary Practices at the Masters Institute of Visual Cultures, AKV | St. Joost in Den Bosch and was on the supervisory board of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and the Akademie van Kunsten. Landvreugd has held fellowhips at BAK Utrecht, Van Abbemuseum, and the Research Center for Material Culture. His writing has appeared in Open Arts Journal, Small Axe Magazine, ARC Magazine, Uprising Art, and Metropolis M, among other venues.
Becoming Afro-Dutch: Hybrid Being in Black Art and Culture
In Becoming Afro-Dutch, artist, curator, and researcher Charl Landvreugd argues that we do not yet have a language to understand Afro-Dutchness, and that it is insufficient to rely on the discourses developed in African American, Afro-British, or Caribbean cultural theory alone. This critical monograph on continental European Black art and cultural history articulates the specificity of Afro-Dutchness and the way that Blackness has been translated and (mis)understood across multiple decades of cultural policy, while also providing an incisive analysis of the Dutch state’s aim to showcase “diversity” in a way that is comfortable to the white cultural class, without ever addressing issues of racism or race.
Simultaneously, Landvreugd traces how recent generations of artists are effectively constructing a new visual language to name their Afro-Dutchness by deepening the way their being is shaped across multiple cultural identities and national histories. These time travelers and wanderers are the Wakaman: cultural workers that embrace their hybridity and multiplicity and have defined, on their own terms and through their own words, their nativity within the Dutch art scene.
Becoming Afro-Dutch is a key theoretical and art-historical work, as an introduction to both different international genealogies of Black arts and culture and to the different movements that shaped the specificity of Afro-Dutch artists in particular.
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