Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.
Today’s book recommendation is a newer release by the author of Riot Baby, which was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award. His latest is a book that combines two great flavors that taste great together: violence and comedy. The very first line made me guffaw and then within a couple of pages, I was on the edge of my seat and already feeling fully involved with the characters and story.
Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi
Harmattan Season has been described as hard-boiled fantasy noir, which I really like the ring of and is wonderfully accurate. It takes place in post-colonial West Africa, in an area occupied by the French. One of the things I like about the storytelling in this book is that some cultural things are presented without explanation. There were words I didn’t understand, and sometimes they were slang, and they didn’t necessarily show up when I looked them up either; however, I had to go with the flow, and I liked it. I know it can be a turnoff for some readers and feel like there are gaps in understanding the story, but it helped me feel grounded in the place of the tale.
Our main character and narrator, Boubacar, is a veteran and a private eye who has very little business and lots of bad luck. The action starts right away: Bouba is asleep and there is an unexpected knock at the door. He answers the door and there is a woman who is bleeding and clutching her stomach. She starts to say something, but then it sounds like there may be more trouble downstairs, so she begs him to hide her. He does, and the cop at the door is looking for her. The cop also happens to be Bouba’s friend.
As misfortune would have it, Bouba is in the middle of something he really does not need to be in the middle of and yet, he is too curious. The mystery is just too good and well, he is quite a good private eye who has a lot of time on his hands lately, so he figures maybe he’ll just snoop a little. This is how our story begins.
One of the unexpected things that this book really made me realize, and maybe it’s just me, is how colonization and gentrification are pretty much the same guy in a different outfit. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one. Harmattan Season is full of surprises and I never knew what was going to happen next. It’s an incredibly fun read!
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That’s it for now, book-lovers!
Patricia
Find me on Book Riot, the All the Books podcast, Bluesky, and Instagram.
English (US) · 