Spend Your Summer with Genre Fiction

Emma Shacochis // Blog Assistant

Whether you’ll be interning, returning to work, or completing summer classes over the next few months, it’s undeniable that you’ll have at least a bit more time in your schedule for pleasure reading. There’s nothing wrong with carving out time to reread an old favorite or starting a work of literary fiction that’s been lurking on the bestseller lists. But summer’s open calendar is a great time to dig into the fantastic, and often underrated, works of genre fiction that will capture your attention and imagination. Here are a few suggestions for novels of a wide variety of genres that have been or soon will be released in 2021, all for your reading pleasure.

If you find yourself missing the stress of being an active student (to each their own!), you can dive into any number of thrillers, mysteries, or crime novels. Newcomers and returning authors work to craft entertaining, page-turning twists that span locations, points of view, and tones. Get lost in the workplace thriller Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut novel, The Other Black Girl (out in June), which explores sinister presences within a publishing house that range from microaggressive coworkers to anonymous warnings. Representative Stacey Abrams will release her first suspense novel written under her own name (look up works by Selena Montgomery for the rest of her work) in May, the Supreme Court-set While Justice Sleeps. Laurie Elizabeth Flynn’s The Girls Are All So Nice Here makes dreaded class reunions even more terrifying than they are in concept. All kinds of global cuisine will make the mouth water in Arsenic and Adobo, Mia P. Manansala’s first book in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries series (coming this May). It’s not all doom and gloom: you can find mysteries that mix heart and humor among homicides and hitmen in Dial A for Aunties (by Jesse Q. Sutanto, coming later this April) or Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan is Killing It.

But maybe you want something as scary as real life to pore over, in which case you’ll find that the horror genre is thriving and well. Fans of the supernaturally monstrous will enjoy being haunted by Nicole Willson’s Tidepool (coming in August), an exploration of a town determined to keep their deadly secrets, or Rose Szabo’s What Big Teeth, the story of a young woman forced to return home to her vicious family of monsters. Those looking for more contemporary slashers will enjoy the ruthless terror of high school pranks in Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club (out in early April), or Grady Hendrix’s take on what it’s like to be the sole survivor of a horror movie in The Final Girl Support Group (due in July).

If you’re not sold on stressing out or scaring yourself any more than necessary this summer, genre fiction isn’t limited to thrillers and horror. Maybe you’re looking to learn about the past through historical fiction: this year has already had its share of solid releases, including Kirstin Hannah’s The Four Winds (a take on surviving both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl); Wild Women and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce (a past-and-future perspective of Chicago’s black-and-tan clubs during the Jazz Age); and Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev (a fictional oral history of a revolutionary Afro-punk duo).

Genre fiction staples like fantasy and sci-fi have their share of exciting upcoming works. The Dead and the Dark by Courtney Gould (out in August) lets the paranormal run wild through a small town, while Hannah Whitten’s For the Wolf (coming in June) is a dark and fantastical tale of a sacrificial victim turned magical savior. Nghi Vo weaves a story of immigration—and magic—into the ritzy classic of The Great Gatsby in The Chosen and the Beautiful (also due in June). For an unconventional take on the superhero origin story, Mike Chen’s We Could Be Heroes features amnesiac best friends with very different ideas on what their superpowers ought to be used for. If looking for romance alongside fantasy, June marks the release of Casey McQuiston’s sophomore novel, One Last Stop, wherein a subway commuter falls head over heels for an alluring fellow passenger…from the 1970s. Married couple David and Nicola Yoon (the latter of whom is an Emerson alumna!) have their own sci-fi and fantasy-related romances dropping in May and June, respectively. Version Zero centers on a pair of crushes working to take down a Silicon Valley giant, while Instructions for Dancing is the tale of a young woman who begins to fall for her dancing instructor as her psychic visions of others’ relationships become more frequent.

And should your preferred genre be solely romance, there’s plenty of it to go around. Fans of Red, White & Royal Blue may find themselves equally enamored with Paul Rudnick’s May release, Playing the Palace, centered around an event planner who finds himself falling for a British prince. A number of highlights include clever uses of tropes. Morgan Rogers’s Honey Girl is a sapphic take on the married-a-stranger-in-Vegas scenario, while Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, coming in May, examines the complexities of being friends to lovers—or subverts them. India Holton’s The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels (out in June) introduces a group of proper Victorian-era ladies…who happen to be a group of thieves at war with pirates.

Any of these titles—and more, if you care to do more research—will pair perfectly with free time found this summer.

Photo credits: Goodreads.

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