Paper Girl by Beth Macy

Geraldine Brooks (Horse and Memorial Days) says, “If you want to know why our nation is so divided read Beth Macy's PAPER GIRL.” This new text is subtitled “A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America.” As such, it is extremely relevant today and while being very informative, is also a difficult read emotionally. Best-selling and award-winning author Macy (Dopesick) returned to Urbana, Ohio where she grew up and attended high school in order to document the changes in the past forty years. Macy returns to familiar themes about drug addiction, decline of unions (“One in three full-time workers carried union cards when I was coming of age, but now that number is one in ten”), and the lack of local journalism. Readers will empathize with a promising student who is motivated to overcome a dysfunctional family situation, but who struggles to attend college on a scholarship which doesn’t cover transport, room or board. Macy is a gifted writer who shares information about her community and her family in a straightforward, insightful manner. She asks, for example, how communities lose faith in their schools; pointing out “the more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.” There is so much to consider that I read this book over several months. Macy writes, “The more time I spent back in my hometown, the more I recognized the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place.” Still, like Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett in Upswing, Macy is hopeful in this recent text (and in real life where she is running for Congress in the 2026 midterms). PAPER GIRL received a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“a welcome salve for a festering social wound. It’s a sobering journey into America’s splintered heartland”), is a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2025. 

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett is an #OwnVoices work that explores the idea of colorism while telling the story of twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, and their children, Jude and Kennedy, across the decades since the mid-twentieth century. This coming of age story is set in a rural area of Louisiana called Mallard, originally founded in 1848 on the sugarcane fields a former slave had inherited from his white father. Bennett describes it as a town for those “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” She does an excellent job of conveying the oppressive small town atmosphere and “everyone’s obsession with lightness.”

As sixteen year-olds, the twins (one practical, one impulsive) run away in 1954, moving to New Orleans where one eventually deserts the other, later musing, “Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be? Remaining what you were or becoming something new, it was all a choice, any way you looked at it.” That decision leads to estrangement, anger, and loneliness. Secrets and lies abound, especially after the cousins Jude and Kennedy meet by chance while college students themselves. Yet, there are also elements of acceptance (both in the mother-daughter pairs and in various romantic relationships) and hard lessons to be learned: “There are many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.” Like Bennett’s debut novel (The Mothers), THE VANISHING HALF is likely to be an award-winner; it received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus and is a LibraryReads selection for June. For interested book groups, Penguin has published a Reader’s Guide. Definitely recommended.