The Best Book Club Books Out in May

This queer coming-of-age is funny, moving, and very very extra. It follows Luciana, the youngest in a large Colombian American family, who suddenly finds herself at the center of family mess, which is largely to do with the family’s eccentric matriarch, granny Abue. It’s Abue who refuses to evacuate once South Florida residents are ordered to leave before a hurricane hits, and it’s Abue who receives a damning medical diagnosis. Abue and Luciana bond once the older lady moves into her granddaughter’s room and Luciana starts serving as an interpreter at doctor’s visits. The still glamorous Abue is a handful, but some of her eccentricities start to make sense once she starts spilling the tea on why she doesn’t speak to a lot of family in Colombia.

I like a “busy” novel, and The Ministry of Time, with its promises of time-traveling romance, slice-of-life comedy, and spy thriller, sounds plenty busy. A little ways into the future, a civil servant is offered beaucoup bucks, but the new project that comes with this increase in salary is a little…weird. It involves her working as a “bridge” to a time “expat” — someone from another time in history. Her expat is Commander Graham Gore, a man from 1847 who was supposed to have died during an Arctic expedition. As he lives with the civil-servant-turned-bridge and adjusts to things like washing machines, music apps, and women’s constantly exposed calves, he falls in love. A zany cast of secondary characters — which include everything from a 17th-century film (and Tinder) lover to a former spy and a WWI captain — round out this everywhere kind of story.

I just got a finished copy of this book in the mail, and I am so excited to start it. It seems to have all the inventiveness that makes similarly genre-blended memoirs so appealing. In these essays, award-winning poet Villarreal looks 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.

Following up on the smash hit and cultural moment that was Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan is back with another decadently funny romance with bougie boos. Rufus Leung Gresham is in a pickle. Despite being the future Duke of Greshambury and having a former supermodel for a mother, his future is up in the air. The Gresham Trust that should have provided for him has been emptied and replaced with massive debt. His mom, though, is full of schemes and proposes he finds a rich woman to marry at his sister’s luxury wedding, where the who’s-who of the world will be. Thing is, even with a French hotel heiress and a venture capitalist extraordinaire as possibilities, Rufus really only has eyes for his neighbor Eden Tong, the daughter of a doctor. All these machinations surrounding his future nuptials get put on a temporary hold, though, when a volcanic eruption interrupts his sister’s wedding plans, and some family secrets get revealed.