In celebration of Black History Month, we’ll be highlighting a diverse range of books, all written by Black American authors, all of which celebrate and prioritize Black Joy. We’ll be featuring a title every day through the month of February.
Kleaver Cruz, creator of the Black Joy project, says that “Black joy is resistance. Amplifying Black joy is not about dismissing or creating an ‘alternative’ Black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustices we experience as Black folks around the world in tension with the joy we experience in pain’s midst. It’s about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them.”
Today’s work is P. Djéli Clark’s A Master of Djinn, an magical, mythical alternate history murder mystery set in 1912 steampunk Cairo! Working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, Fatma el-Sha’arawi is out to solve the murder of a secret brotherhood, and her hunt for the killer moves quickly from the mundane… to the magical! If you like your mystery with a heavy dose of the supernatural, or if you love a well-established cast of mythical and human characters living in a wild new world, this book will take you for a ride!
Stay tuned for a new book tomorrow!
