Sometimes the first time is the charm; at least it is for these authors. You can find their debut books at the Peter White Public Library in the New Fiction and New Non-fiction sections.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” Delia Owens

Within a month of its August debut, “Where the Crawdads Sing” made the top 10 of the New York Times Best-seller list. By March, it had been No. 1 for 29 weeks. And this is only Delia Owens’ first book! It is a beautiful story of loneliness, resilience, intrigue, and coming-of-age, following protagonist Kya Clark’s independent but isolated life she has cultivated in the marsh outside of town, earning her the reputation of “Marsh Girl.” The novel is filled with vivid, poetic descriptions of the Marsh, turning otherwise prosaic swamp scenes into a testament of nature’s enchantment. This imagery, far from slowing the plot, creates an atmosphere fitting for a story of solitude, resilience, and mystery.

“Cherry” Nico Walker

The name Nico Walker may ring a bell: he earned seven medals for his courageous military service in Iraq from 2005-2006. He also robbed 10 banks for over $40,000 to feed his heroin addiction. In 2012, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Cherry, Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel, is not only his first novel, but was written and published during his incarceration. While he draws on his own experiences, Walker envisaged Cherry as a novel of war, romance, and the opioid epidemic, not a memoir, so the characters are fake and the storyline modified to fit a nice, neat, plot arc. His war scenes, however, are much more personal: “I wanted to give a true account about what it was like where I was,” he explains during a Rolling Stones interview, “I didn’t want to put more drama in there to make it more interesting, glamorous, or romantic.” Overall, Cherry succeeds in depicting the gruesomeness of war, the suffering of PTSD, and the devastation of the opioid epidemic in America.

“Freshwater” Akwaeke Emezi

This debut novel by up-and-coming author Akwaeke Emezi is a startling portrayal of mental illness from a non-western perspective. Freshwater tells the story of Ada — though I hesitate to call her the main character since the novel is predominantly narrated by her multiple personalities, raising the questions: are these voices really Ada, or are they so removed from Ada they become their own characters? Indeed, the way Asughara provokes Ada to do terrible things and fights with the other voices for control over her illustrates the existential complexity and ambiguity of multiple-personal disorder. Furthermore, Emezi’s depiction of mental illness comes from an Igbo (Southcentral-eastern Nigerian ethnicity) perspective, where Emezi describes the voices in Ada’s head as “ogbanje,” the “godly parasite with many heads, roaring inside the marble room of her mind.” As New York Times columnist Tariro Mzezewa explains in her review of Freshwater: “Eating disorders, cutting, depression, suicide, manic depression — in the popular imagination, all these things are most often seen as the struggles of young, wealthy, white American women. This novel expands the universe of mental illness to include women of color and other ethnicities. Rooting Ada’s story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness and how it manifests. It causes us to question science and reason.” Freshwater is certainly a striking debut; keep an eye out for Emezi’s other upcoming releases.

“Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do” Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt (303.395 EB)

Social Psychologist Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt, a Harvard graduate and Stanford professor, has spent decades studying implicit bias–our unconscious attitudes and associations toward another person or group, often based on stereotypes. Her new book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, explores implicit bias and its everyday consequences, from school suspensions to police shootings. While Dr. Eberhardt explains numerous studies revealing the negative associations linked to people of color still ingrained in our unconsciousness, she weaves in narratives of her own encounter with police, her experience teaching inmates in California, her family’s history of leaving Jim Crow Alabama, and interviews with Charlottesville survivors. These personal stories give life, depth, and context to the copious statistics and evidence she reviews. Overall, Eberhardt does a brilliant job of making her academic expertise accessible to a wider audience by balancing scientific evidence with personal experience. More importantly, however, she exposes how much implicit bias accounts for the racial disparities in education, housing, police shootings, and criminal sentencing, and offers advice on discussing and ultimately eliminating these unconscious attitudes.

By Ali Fulsher

Reference Department