 Hi and welcome to Bookbuzz and to my dogs. I'm Susan. I work at the Billy Jean King Made Library. Bookbuzz is our monthly feature that highlights new and interesting books aimed at an adult audience. My goal is to recommend books that will go equally well with a morning cup of coffee or an evening cocktail. Since we're celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, I'm going to start by highlighting a few titles by Latinx authors as part of our Vida Latina series which runs through October. Hopefully you've heard of Vida Latina and hopefully even attended a program or two. But if you haven't, it's okay. There's still time. Go ahead and visit the library's events calendar on our website. With that said, let's just jump right into things. The first title I wanted to bring to your attention is called Children of the Land and that's a memoir by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Castillo was born in Mexico and he immigrated to California with his family at age of five. He's a poet and teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and he also teaches at an MFA program at Ashland University. He's a founding member of a group called the Undocu Poets. So that's a group of undocumented poets who support other undocumented poets and they've campaigned very heavily to petition against citizenship requirements in various book prizes. So Children of the Land is a memoir about growing up undocumented in the United States. When Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary stress-induced blindness. He did recover but this theme of sight and being able to see and having to remain unseen and you know having to kind of hide an in-plane sight as as an undocumented family really runs throughout the entire book. And throughout the the memoir he you know he has memories of you know the hours he spent making a fake social security card, the encounters that he and his family had with ICE officers, his father's deportation back to Mexico in the years that he spent trying to get back into the United States and then you know the heartbreaking decision that his mother made to leave her children so that she could be reunited with her husband. The next book that I wanted to talk briefly about is called More Than Ready and that's by Cecilia Munoz. So Cecilia was born in Detroit Michigan but her family came from Bolivia so that her father who was an automotive engineer could attend the university in Michigan. So Cecilia served for eight years on President Obama's senior staff. She was first the director of Intergovernmental Affairs and then became the director of the Domestic Policy Council. So this is her book. This book is is her advice and inspiration for women of color who are seeking you know new heights of influence, they want to become more visible and powerful in their current positions, really you know blaze new paths for future generations. As the first Latin acts to direct national domestic policy issues, Munoz knows you know the difficulties of getting ahead without any role models or exemplars to follow. So in this book she offers lessons from you know the challenges that she's faced and also celebrates the victories that she was able to achieve. Okay the next book I'm very excited about it's called Mexican Gothic and it's by Sylvia Moreno Garcia and I have to confess that I have not read this book but I have read lots of reviews about it and I'm super excited to pick it up. Sylvia Moreno Garcia, she's a Mexican-Canadian, she's also a best-selling author of several several speculative novels. So this is her latest book and the book jacket summarizes the story as an isolated mansion, a chillingly charismatic aristocrat, and a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets. Kirk's reviews called it a terrifying twist on classic gothic horror set in glamorous 1950s Mexico and The Guardian offered kind of my favorite description of the book ever. It described it as lovecraft meets the Brontes in Latin America. So this book is also in development as a Hulu original limited series and the story is summarized like this. Knowing Noemi Taboda, she receives a frantic letter from a newlywed cousin begging for her to come save her from a mysterious doom. So she heads out to high place which is a distant house in the Mexican countryside. So she has no idea what she's going to find there. Her cousin's husband who's a handsome Englishman, he's a complete stranger. So Noemi knows nothing about him, nothing about the region, she has no idea what she's getting into. But it is, you know, it's a wonderful gothic story so there'll be lots of, you know, troubling potentially frightening secrets that are all going to be exposed. I'm really looking forward to picking this book out. The next book I wanted to talk about is Trejo's Tacos. So this is recipes and stories from LA by Danny Trejo with Hugh Garvey and photographs by Ed Anderson. And the reason that I wanted to talk about this book I was reminded of it I was watching an episode the other day of Muppets Now which is a new Muppet Show on Disney Plus. And I think there's a new Muppet Show on Apple TV too, sort of the competing Muppets shows. But this was the one on Disney Plus. And so Danny Trejo came as a guest on the Muppet Show to go to a head-to-head, you know, taco battle with the Swedish chef. So it's this epic battle where, you know, they have to make the best tacos ever. And I don't want to, you know, I don't want to spoil it for you because I'm also recommending that you check out that show too. But the tacos that Danny delivered did look delicious and it reminded me that he had this new book out. So Danny Trejo is probably very familiar to you from his acting career. He was in Desperado, he was in Heat, he was in From Dusk Till Dawn, and of course the classic Machete. So he's a Los Angeles native and he began building a restaurant empire, I think back in like 2015 or 2016. He opened Trejo's Tacos and then he's followed that up with Trejo's Cantina and Trejo's Coffee and Donuts. So I think he has six restaurants now and even a food truck. And in this book, Danny shares his favorite recipes for bold Mexican food by way of Los Angeles. So he includes stories about his lifelong love of food and how he bonded with his mother over cooking food and dreaming, you know, dreaming about opening a restaurant together. He includes a map of his favorite restaurants and hangouts in Los Angeles. And he also talks about how the time that he spent in prison really led to his acting career and to, you know, eventually opening up his own restaurant. This is just a really vibrant Los Angeles story. The next book I wanted to talk about is also kind of a food memoir. It's an intimate account of really the making of a great chef. So this is Eat A Peach by David Chang. And really the book is a lot about, you know, how success can sometimes be so much harder to understand than failure. Chang grew up the youngest son in a deeply religious Korean family. He graduated college. He was aimless. He was depressed. You know, he felt like everything he did, he was failing at. So he ends up going to Japan and he's teaching English in a small village. And there he experiences his first full blown manic episode. So fast forward to 2004, he opens up a Momofuko noodle bar in New York City with some friends with kind of the idea that like, what if you could take, you know, the underground and make it mainstream? You know, is that something that you could really do? And it doesn't sound like they believe that they that it would be successful or that they could do it. But of course, we all know that it was it was wildly successful. He has opened, you know, numerous restaurants. He's a celebrity chef. Now he has, you know, a TV show on Netflix, Ugly Delicious. And so this is his story. And in it, we get a glimpse of, you know, the restaurant industry. But we also it's also a personal narrative. So Chang, you know, talks about his struggles with feelings of otherness and an adequacy. And again, always, you know, feeling like a failure. And I think those are, you know, those are things that everyone can relate to. It's a really candid memoir, but it's also filled with a lot of humor, too. The next book is called Wandering in Strange Lands. And this is by Morgan Jerkins. So she's a cultural critic. And the bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing. So Wandering in Strange Lands is the story of her journey to understand her family's northern and southern roots, the Great Migration and the displacement of Black people across America. So between 1916 and 1970, over 6 million Black Americans, they left the rural south to head, you know, to cities in the north, the Midwest, and eventually the west for jobs. And so this is this movement is called the Great Migration. And it really transformed the complexion of America. So certainly, you know, it provided Black people with new economic opportunities in the cities, but it also served to really disconnect them from their roots, their land and their sense of identity. So in this book, this is really Jerkins' personal exploration of her family. You know, she, she recreates the journeys that her ancestors took from, you know, from the south, from Georgia and South Carolina into Louisiana, into Oklahoma, and then eventually to California. So through interviews and just hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins, you know, connects the threads of her own, of her own family's journey through oral histories and tracing back over 300 years. Okay, so that is going to wrap up Bookbuzz for September. I've gone ahead and tagged each of these recommended books in the library's catalog with the tag Bookbuzz920. So they're all available in print. Most of them are also available as ebooks. Some are audio books and even downloadable audio. And even though our buildings are close to the public, we do have our LBPL to-go service that we're offering at seven locations. So you can just go into the library's catalog, place holds for the books that you want. And when they become available, we let you know. And then you give us a call and you schedule an appointment to come pick them up. And it really is as easy as that. So with that, I just want to say take care and we will see you next month.