I love movie math. I love microrationalizing macroabsurdities, laser-focusing on hyperspecific justifications. 13 Going on 30 is a perfect proof. Once upon a time, it’s Jennifer Garner’s (Jenna’s) thirteenth birthday. She wishes she were thirty, she claims to her mom, having read a Poise magazine article touting the thirties as the prime of one’s life. “You’ll be thirty soon enough,” says her mother—and indeed, if Mom had known the film’s title, she might have clocked just how prescient she was. Jenna’s invited the popular clique, the Six Chicks, over for her birthday, despite the truth bomb from the boy next door, Matty, that “there can’t be a seventh sixth chick. It’s mathematically impossible.” The Chicks trick Jenna into “seven minutes in heaven,” that is, waiting blindfolded in a closet for a kiss (that never comes). When she realizes she’s been duped, she desperately chants the mantra she learned from Poise: “Thirty, flirty, and thriving.” By law of rhyme and the rule of threes, exactly thirteen minutes in, counting the opening credits, Jenna falls out of bed in her sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment.  

At thirteen, Jenna’s too early for everything: a retainer around her top teeth, tissue paper stuffed down her shirt to make breasts. At thirty, she’s already running late. Jenna tumbles into a waiting car; ten minutes later, she’s in a meeting for the editorial job she didn’t know she had thirty seconds earlier. The boss, with chin hair plucked into a devil goatee, pins up fourteen nearly identical magazine covers: Poise and its rival Sparkle are side by side. June’s Poise features Jennifer Lopez’s ten secrets; Sparkle’s got her eleventh. 

Math goes on. Manhattan-Matty and Jenna reunite, only for Jenna to discover that she’s been shitty to Matty in the seventeen-year blackout interim. There’s impossible real estate math: they live blocks away from each other, he in the Village with a sunken living room and a backyard, she near Union Square with a walk-in shoe closet. Even for 2004, the salaries don’t add up to a down payment on a fourth of one of them.

Time, like movie math, is bouncy: business day, lunar month, fiscal year. (I recently got into an argument about the existence of a “business week.” I argued pro: fourteen business days equals two business weeks.) I first watched 13 Going on 30 on a plane, flying backward in time. Now, I’m thirty-four going on seventeen. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching at the university where I did my undergraduate degree, but this is my last month there for the foreseeable future. It’s spring, so campus is getting ready for reunions. It’s a reunion off-cycle year for me—year thirteen—but Princeton’s reunions are famously a cosmic wormhole; even those of us who don’t believe in anything go into a New Jersey fugue state for a weekend that’s actually three days but one night. But in movie math, this all totally tracks: micro-obsessing over minutes lets you leap out of the frog-march of linear progression. 

It’s Big Sam’s coronation weekend! Today, Jules, Jim, Andy and Pete have gathered to celebrate not one but two coronations, as Napoli’s party boat officially set sail last night after winning their first Scudetto in 33 years.

Elsewhere, Pete fears for the fish, as there was a party in another seaside location after Brighton’s late winner against Man United last night. Plus, we asked whether Jack Grealish (aka DJ Grealo) is about to bring back Madchester, and we take a moment to enjoy the prospect of Neymar partying in the Bigg Market next season. There are parties everywhere you look...

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There are dozens of censorship bills under consideration across the country. You can keep tabs on them and their status over at EveryLibrary, who have been diligently tracking them and getting people to write and show up to put an end to them. It will shock absolutely no one to see how many of those book ban bills overlap with 533 bills proposed this year targeting trans people.

But writing about the not good stuff doesn’t always seem to garner the same kind of fervor or action that writing about the (minimal) good stuff does. So this week, let’s look at the four bills underway that are doing the opposite: they’re proposing legislation to protect the right to read and the ability for librarians and educators to provide a diverse array of materials to patrons of all ages.

In other words, these bills will let professionals keep doing the jobs they’re educated and trained to do.

How is the happy ending in a romance “earned?” What sort of redemption arc or emotional growth does a main character need to go through to “deserve” love? What mistakes are “unforgivable” for romance characters to make? These kinds of questions trouble me as a romance reader because they can require the genre to provide moral justification for its existence. Not being deep in the discourse for other genres, I couldn’t say if other literature is similarly scrutinized. But I can say that I often find myself wishing people would hand in their romance police badges.

On the one hand, I understand people’s nature to be defensive of romance against all the naysayers. Romance lovers want to hold up shining examples of the genre. There are absolutely romances that show the redeeming or improving power of love. There are romances that demonstrate healthy ways to navigate rough spots in relationships. That doesn’t mean they all need to! There are also romances between people who are really messed up and choose each other in a cruel and uncaring world. Just because a romance can’t be staged as a morality play doesn’t make it bad, or not a part of the genre.

On one hand, everyone is allowed their preferences and boundaries. If you don’t want to read about a character having unprotected sex for whatever reason, you certainly don’t have to. And of course it’s valid for something like unprotected sex to be potentially triggering to a reader; that’s not what I’m talking about.

Also, pointing out stereotypes and tropes in books that prop up racism, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, etc. is worth doing. It takes work for people to recognize and unlearn these elements that have been baked into storytelling for too long. That’s different from passing judgment on characters behaving “badly.” So I invite readers who simply found Feyi offputting to consider their assumptions about this character’s actions.

What is literary fiction? I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I’m stumped. (Let me just say this up front: this essay is about 750 words, and I absolutely do not give a definitive definition anywhere in those words.) Like any genre or age category, “literary fiction” is a designation that is primarily a marketing tool, an idea of where to find a book in a bookstore…but genre is also supposed to give readers an idea of what to expect, at least in very broad terms, and I don’t think literary fiction does that.

A genre like mystery or romance tells us there will be a central [mystery/romance] plot with expected tropes, familiar structure, and a satisfactory ending where the main character(s) [solve the crime/live happily ever after]. There are always books that break the mold when it comes to tropes and structure, but they conform to the central plot and ending rules almost without exception. Likewise, a science fiction book will in some way involve fictional science, a fantasy book will explore the fantastical, and a suspense book will keep the reader in suspense. Historical fiction takes place in the past, crime novels concern themselves with, well, crime (but not necessarily the solving of it), etc.

But what about literary fiction? What can I expect from the genre? The best definition I can find is that it will have “literary merit.” Well, so do all of the other genres I just mentioned. Next!

After the undefinable “literary merit,” I most often hear that literary fiction has “beautiful writing,” that it is character-focused, and that it is not genre. Hmmm. I can think of books in every genre with beautiful writing, so that can’t possibly be a serious definition. As for character-focused, I suppose it might be true in broad strokes that genre books are plot-forward and literary books are character-forward, but there is simply no way that’s true across the board, or even close to it. Which leaves the idea that literary fiction is not genre fiction.

Well, what does “genre” mean here? Simply, it encompasses the genres like science fiction and fantasy, crime and mystery, romance and women’s fiction (another “genre” that seems to be undefinable and probably nonsense). So, according to this rule, literary fiction is always realistic and never focused on a romance or mystery plot. Again, I say: Hmmm.

There are not enough books about exercise for all bodies. I realized this while reading an amazing romance novel about a woman who falls for her fitness coach. I was intrigued by the fact that I could read it through Audible and I really loved the cover art. However, I felt nervous once I hit the synopsis. This was a book about a fat woman (yes please) using a fitness app (oh dear) with trigger warnings about discussions of weight loss and disordered eating (oh yikes). I was so torn because romances with fat main characters are my catnip, but I didn’t know if I could handle it if she became thinner and subsequently got her love, never mind the diet culture bullshit that might rear its head. I took a chance.

I’m so glad I did.

While reading this book (I promise I will tell you more below) I realized that there is a lot out there about loving your body and renouncing diet culture, but much less about how to embrace things that diet culture has ruined. Most people have felt some pressure to eat differently and exercise more to shrink, and since that rarely works, we see these tasks as punishing and broken things. But what if our society talked about exercise as something that feels good no matter how your body looks? There is movement in this direction, but it’s still rare for young people to be raised with this relationship to fitness.

Below, I’ve gathered books about exercise for all bodies. My hope is that we continue to move towards a discussion about bodies that is much more about how to feel good in them than how to shrink and shape them to meet a societal standard.

Happy May, YA fans! It’s finally getting warm enough that we are in one of my favorite seasons: hammock reading season. I hope that you’re well prepared for the warm weather ahead with the perfect comfy outdoor spot, all the drinks and snacks you need, some sun protection, and — of course — a healthy stack of good books. May is going to be incredibly kind to us and shower us with some amazing new releases!

While I’m sure you already have some of this month’s biggest titles on your radar — such as the new Becky Albertalli (Imogen, Obviously), Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls, the hotly anticipated follow up to Angeline Boulley’s first book, Warrior Girl Unearthed — I am going to be highlighting some other great reads that might not be on your radar already. From engaging YA stories that offer some incisive social commentary to swoony romcoms to horror, there’s a lot going on in May, and it was really difficult to narrow it down to just ten, especially as we have five weeks of Tuesday new releases! But all of these YA books absolutely deserve a place on your TBR.

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

Fantasy has always intimidated me. New worlds. Complex societies. Classes of magic I don’t understand. Unfamiliar, extravagant names making up a cast of characters I can’t possibly keep track of.

Forget it. I’ll stick to horror.

But then I read a book last year that I later realized was classified as dark fantasy, and I sort of liked it. And another one that was apparently historical fantasy. Also fun. And some works of magical realism. I really liked those, too. Had I just been wrong about an entire genre for 42 years?

It turns out that the fantasy I have trouble getting into is known as high — or epic — fantasy. High fantasy is usually set in a fictional world, one that typically has magical elements. These books have high page counts, high character counts, and high stakes. Oftentimes, there is an epic quest.

Meanwhile, the books I’ve been drawn to as of late are apparently low fantasy. Some elements of magic intrude into the otherwise normal world we’re most familiar with. These types of fantasy can also often overlap with other genres.

Each season brings its own vibe to a good murder mystery. Autumn is full of anticipation and sharpened school supplies, while winter serves bone-chilling dread with the help of long nights and brutal winds. Spring promises to unearth buried secrets after the snow thaws. Summer, though, is all about possibility. The long days and balmy evenings mean beaches and pool parties, backyard barbecues and sleep away camps, and that’s just a few of the promising settings for a page-turning murder. As sultry backdrops for people behaving badly, the summer months of June, July, and August bring the heat for crimes of passion in summer mystery books. Whether the characters are watching steam come off the sidewalk in the city or listening to waves crash on a deserted beach, a sweltering summer leads to tension higher than the temperatures. 

So put on your sunglasses and SPF and get ready to lose track of time getting caught up in murder and mayhem. Here are eight summer mystery books that offer exotic vacations, fatal wellness retreats, foreboding resorts, and plenty of sweating suspects to keep you turning pages in the sun.