Tombolo Books

Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria

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Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria
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I have never had such a sexy book hurt my feelings so much. As a Latina woman, Alexis Daria writes the most relatable characters, and it makes me love her stories even more. Ava is one of the best characters I have ever read. She is beautiful and wonderfully flawed that I knew from the beginning that she was my favorite prima. And Roman….. This man is 10/10 , the best, green flags all around, top tier. Heart-wrenching, relatable, and absolutely delicious, this was one of my favorite reads of the year.

Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria, (List Price: $18.99, Avon, 9780062960009, May 2025)

Reviewed by Mekhala Villegas-Rogers, Tombolo Books in St Petersburg, Florida

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Audition by Katie Kitamura

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Audition by Katie Kitamura
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A middle-aged actress, preparing for a challenging part, meets a younger man who asks her a question that changes the nature of roles they each play, on-stage and off. Halfway through, this book changes its own rules, morphing into a bewildering and beautiful sleight of hand. Katie Kitamura’s sparse, intricate, and always confident prose pushes this from a simple story into something way more beguiling. Auditionexplores performance, expectation, and how hard choices can shape the story of a life. This is my favorite kind of book – one that leaves me eager to talk to other readers about its many layers.

Audition by Katie Kitamura, (List Price: $28, Riverhead Books, 9780593852323, April 2025)

Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in Savannah, Florida

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Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky

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Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky
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Marcy Dermansky is that girl!!! Hot Air is, well, a breath of fresh air. This is a comedy of errors, a mother-daughter love story, a Rashomon-style cast of unreliable narrators, and the best portrayal of the horrors of Universal Studios I’ve seen in print. I love a book that makes me learn how to read it, and Dermansky’s prose is wry, funny, and laser-sharp. I loved Hurricane Girl, her last novel, and Hot Air delivered on its weird, loving promise. Stunner!

Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky, (List Price: $27, Knopf, 9780593320907, March 2025)

Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Storm: Dawn of a Goddess by Tiffany D. Jackson

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Storm: Dawn of a Goddess by Tiffany D. Jackson
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Goddess Divine, this book was amazing! A new take on one of my favorite X-Men, Ororo, aka Storm. Giving her story new life with some of the core qualities we know and love about Storm, Tiffany Jackson did a fantastic job. With characters we also know and love sprinkled throughout the book, this will be an automatic pickup for any X-Men fans!

Storm: Dawn of a Goddess by Tiffany D. Jackson, (List Price: $20.99, Random House Books for Young Readers, 9780593308851, June 2024)

Reviewed by Mekhala Villegas-Rogers, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

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All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky
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One of my favorites from the Tombolo Books Book Club this year! Ruth Madievsky’s debut is a buzzing bar sign of a book, telling the story of a young woman and her toxic relationship with her older sister Debbie in Los Angeles. After Debbie goes missing, our narrator has to decide whether to let her go and become her own person – or to stay mired in their fraught dynamic and the substances that kept them bound together. This book just felt like (cruel) summer to me – a hot, hazy fog of a book that I still think about.

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky, (List Price: $17.95, Catapult, 9781646222254, July 2024)

Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
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Yasmin Zaher’s stellar debut never lets the reader get quite comfortable in its prose, and it is in that discomfort The Coin finds its brilliance. New York feels, at times, surreal through the eyes of the narrator, who slips further and further into what I can only describe as a justifiable madness. As the narrator stumbles through a life forced upon her in America, she becomes increasingly more untethered to her life. Her homeland, Palestine, is out of reach, and in flashbacks to her childhood, we can glimpse the parts of herself she left there. Zaher ruminates on statelessness, nature, opulence, and beauty in the narrator’s slow spiral. The Coin is an incredible debut!

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, (List Price: $27, Catapult, 9781646222100, July 2024)

Reviewed by Kelsey Jagneaux, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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A Good Life by Virginie Grimaldi

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A Good Life by Virginie Grimaldi
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Virginie Grimaldi’s A Good Life was just what I needed at the beginning of the year. At first glance, you might think that this book won’t rip your heart out, but I can tell you that it absolutely does! Themes of grief, mental health, sisterhood, and family converge in gorgeous prose to create a story that feels familiar. Emma and Agathe’s deep love for each other will tug at the heartstrings of any girl who grew up with a sister. It is often time the everyday intricacies and complexities of life that can move us. These two ordinary women become extraordinary through their bond. Fans of Valerie Perrin here in the States are going to LOVE this novel!

A Good Life by Virginie Grimaldi, (List Price: $28, Europa Editions, 9798889660248, June 2024)

Reviewed by Kelsey Jagneaux, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Monsters by Claire Dederer

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Monsters by Claire Dederer
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What do we do with the work of monstrous artists? Can we separate it from their reprehensible actions and the suffering they cause? Claire Dederer doesn’t have an exact answer, but boy, was it thrilling to see her try to work it out on the page, using figures like Roman Polanski, JK Rowling, Woody Allen, Pablo Picasso, and others as her sparring partners. My favorite kind of nonfiction: thoughtful writing about tough stuff through the lens of the personal. More, please!

Monsters by Claire Dederer, (List Price: $17, Vintage, 9780525564188, April 2024)

Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Exhibit by R. O. Kwon

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Exhibit by R. O. Kwon
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Sexy sentences, startling images, and complicated and unexpected characters flesh out Kwon’s impressionistic peek inside the art world and the people who inhabit it. I kept finding myself picking up this book and flipping back to sections, re-reading them, and feeling like they were perfect little arias. Two women, with different art forms, brush up against one another at just the right time and form something larger than the sum of their parts. Not for those who need fast-paced, plot heavy action – but this book 100% rewards the lover of graceful language and intricate interiority. Loved, loved, loved.

Exhibit by R. O. Kwon, (List Price: $28, Riverhead Books, 9780593190029, May 2024)

Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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James by Percival Everett

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James by Percival Everett
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Thoughtful and entertaining, the pages were flying! Jamesis both a thrilling ride up the Mississippi with Jim and Huck and a meditation on identity and language. Lots of laughs at the enslavers’ expense, playful inter-text, white knuckle tension, and gasps of relief. A contender for Best Book of the Year and propelled me into a Percival Everett deep dive.

James by Percival Everett, (List Price: $28, Doubleday, 9780385550369, March 2024)

Reviewed by Jackie Carlson, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
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This book is beautiful. An epic tale of everything good in fantasy. Magic, pirates , bombs and demons. This book has it all. But the best part of this book is the way the main character handles her own identity as a woman , mother and badass.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, (List Price: $19.99, Harper Voyager, 9780062963512, March 2024)

Reviewed by Mekhala Villegas-Rogers, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Bride by Ali Hazelwood

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Bride by Ali Hazelwood
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The “couldn’t put down”-ness with this book was unreal. A new vampire, werewolf romance that had me enthralled from page one. The relationship dynamic between the two main characters had a wonderful progression of tense unknown to familiar like. This book will be for all the “romantasy” readers who have been missing vampires and werewolves in their reading piles. But don’t worry we only have one team to root for and it is the RIGHT team.

Bride by Ali Hazelwood, (List Price: $19, Penguin Publishing Group, 9780593550403, February 2024)

Reviewed by Mekhala Villegas-Rogers, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

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The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
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n immersive trip through Southern Gothic Early America. The narrative follows a lone girl down the Potomac River, from Jamestown and into the unknown. Nameless or many-named like a barn-cat drifter, Girl wields caution, imagination and a blade to survive the crystalline forests of Virginia and Maryland. She drafts off a peloton of memories–as the British orphan, the mistress’s servant, Bess’s friend, the glassblower’s lover—that pull her forward to eat dirt and vibe with a bear in the present. It’s all about the stories that keep us alive. Groff’s easy and percussive writing, along with her use of time, space and inner dialogue, create an immediacy that had me trying to locate Girl’s coordinates on a map so I wouldn’t lose her. Captivating. Awesome. Great.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, (List Price: $28, Riverhead Books, 9780593418390, September 2023)

Reviewed by Jackie Carlson, Tombolo Books in St Petersburg, Florida

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The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec

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The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec
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Genevieve Gornichec is ready to become the historical fantasy queen. This book was everything I wanted and more. Fantasy elements that were easy to follow and that felt so authentic to the story. Romance that made me giddy with relationships that broke my heart. A tale of sisterhood and how our fate can intertwine with others in unexpecting ways made for a fantastic read.

The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec, (List Price: 27, Ace, 9780593438244, July 2023)

Reviewed by Alsace Walentine, Tombolo Books in St Petersburg, Florida

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Fight Night by Miriam Toews

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Fight Night by Miriam Toews
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A Fall Read This Next! Selection

Fight Night brings it. Every corner of human emotion is nudged, awakened, revealed. Nine year old Swiv and her Grandma are comrades and confidantes. While Swiv’s pregnant mother hustles back and forth between home and her faltering acting career, Grandma helps Swiv make sense of the world and their place in it, through vivid, sometimes bawdy, sometimes heartbreaking stories of her past. This novel is a reminder of the full potential of a book to connect us to our humanity and to inspire us to fight another day.

Fight Night by Miriam Toews, (List Price: $24, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781635578171, October 2021)

Reviewed by Candice Anderson from Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, FL

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