Real talk: My native Kentucky doesn't get a lot of love in literature, so when I saw this was set in the fictional small town of Rome, Kentucky, I snapped it right up.

Without further adieu, here is my May 2023 Quick Lit compilation! Welcome to May Quick Lit Sign up here if you’d like it to arrive in your inbox. (I had previously said it would be our 9th annual Minimalist Guide, but that is wrong! The first year we called our shortened guide the 5-Book Summer Reading Guide, but whatever you call it, we have in fact been sharing an ultra-curated compact guide for ten solid years now.) You don’t need to do a thing to get that guide on the blog.

Our 10th annual Minimalist Guide will be up on the blog, in a blog post just like this one, on Thursday. Not sure which option is right for you? This page has a side-by-side comparison, sign up links, and more details. Purchase the Guide and Unboxing access a la carte.Support our What Should I Read Next Patreon.If you want your copy, there are three ways to get the full 2023 MMD Summer Reading Guide and included Unboxing access: Our Summer Reading Guide is hitting inboxes on Thursday at 8:00am EDT. And Alina Bronsky’s Barbara Isn’t Dying represents the sort of quirky work that could easily fly under your radar, but that the right reader will be THRILLED to discover this summer. I wanted to make sure we had a solid nonfiction category this year you’ll see Claire Dederer’s nonfiction work Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma below. (In today’s book list you’ll see Joshilyn Jackson’s With My Little Eye, Vanessa Walters’s The Nigerwife, and Sarah Adams’s Practice Makes Perfect.) I read a good amount of historical fiction, represented here by Jasmin Iolani Hakes’s Hula. This collection does a decent job of capturing some of the major categories of books I sought out for my guide reading: I read TONS of mysteries, thrillers, and love stories, because so many of us (definitely including me) enjoy reading those in the summertime. These releases are all from April and May 2023 because my winter and spring reading have been heavily focused on vetting summer titles for the guide, but beginning next month you can expect to see a lot more backlist in this monthly roundup of what I’ve been reading lately! The 12th annual MMD Summer Reading Guide comes out on Thursday, May 18, and so today I’m sharing six new releases that I enjoyed reading but that you won’t see in the guide. Welcome to Quick Lit, where we share short and sweet reviews of what we’ve been reading lately on the 15th of the month.

A complicated kindness review