Hello everyone!

September starts tomorrow, and so we wanted to make sure to share the book of the month! As a reminder, September's theme is Back to Our Roots! With that said, our September book, as voted by the community, is...

WILD SEED by Octavia E. Butler!

Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex or design. He fears no one until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss and savage anyone who threatens her. She fears no one until she meets Doro. Together they weave a pattern of destiny (from Africa to the New World) unimaginable to mortals.

Make sure to get a copy of Wild Seed and join us as we read it this month! Support your local library, or you can support Feminist Book Club by purchasing it on Libro.fm or Bookshop.org.

Happy reading!

I'm just one book shy of my goal of reading 100 books this year!

I thought I might be able to finish one last book this month, but it quickly became apparent that today was not going to be that day. Last year I finished with 120 titles read but I didn't want to bump my goal up for this year because I wasn't sure how grad school would affect my reading time. It should probably be having more of a negative impact than it is, but oh well.

August was such an exciting month! I finished out Summer Reading Challenge as a BookSparks Ambassador, launched my online book club (You Can Sit with Us) on Bindery, and accidentally started a podcast (Endpapers) that now has 3 episodes!

Fantasy took the lead as far as genres this month, but my five-star reads spanned historical fiction, romance, and fantasy. I did not knock out my TBR this month, but I DID finish my @bookofthemonth pick the same month it arrives, which feels like a massive accomplishment 😂

September is already feeling incredibly chaotic! I'm have some great books in the pipeline and the new releases this month are looking phenomenal!

What was your favorite August read?

Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!

I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the October book club!

Sunny’s Book Club is a monthly book club highlighting both new releases and backlist titles we love. A virtual discussion is hosted over Zoom on the last Sunday of the month.

A new physical book will be shipped to you (or available for in store pickup) the month prior to when this month’s book club will take place. The October pick will ship the last week of September to ensure you have the entire month to read the book.

The link for sign up is not a subscription service, you opt in on a monthly basis dependent on your interest in that months chosen title. We do however have a recurring book club subscription if you are interested here.

An urgent and electrifying must-read with shades of Octavia Butler and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Library journal calls it "a modern cousin of The Handmaid's Tale."

In 2086, corporations are monitoring fertility. Abortion is illegal. And the last woman alive who can perform the procedure is in hiding.

Seven years ago, midwife Mae Bastet was arrested for infanticide in the fractious Arizona Territory for providing health care to women in need. She was torn from her sons and sent to Buzzard--an experimental private prison deep in the Sonoran Desert, run by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan.

Desperate to reunite her family, Mae tries to keep her head down, swallow her prison-issued hormone supplements, and do her job as a glorified school nurse to Obsityan's army of teenage drone pilots. But when mysterious, improbable pregnancies begin cropping up in her charges, she uncovers a web of secrets that has the power to destroy Obsityan. Mae must choose: stay complicit in Obsityan's crimes or hold fast to her midwife principles and risk never seeing her sons again.

Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian debut that traces the possible trajectory of our current political and technological reality--and the power of our deepest human bonds.

A disquieting, atmospheric debut horror novel about a young woman investigating her mother’s disappearance at an abandoned Nevada observatory, for fans of Jeff VanderMeer and Mariana Enriquez

On a scorched summer day, Renata Scarborough comes home to find the contents of her estranged mother Corinne’s life on her doorstep. Her aunt and cousin seem eager to conclude that the troublesome Corinne is dead. Renata isn’t convinced and begins poring over her mother’s journals for answers. Among descriptions of Corinne’s work at the McNairy Observatory, Renata unearths a hidden obsession with an early twentieth-century surveyor whose encounters with a mysterious entity bear a startling resemblance to her mother’s reports. Compelled beyond reason, Renata journeys to that now-abandoned outpost in the Nevada wilderness to search for the truth.

But in McNairy, a thorny, decades-long clash between science and the desert only complicates Renata’s questions. The town’s scarred and suspicious residents refuse to discuss the observatory’s closure, leaving Renata to wonder if Corinne’s version of events reflects reality. As she ascends the peak that looms over McNairy, Renata witnesses unnerving phenomena she can’t explain and feels a creeping dread that what is waiting for her isn’t her mother at all.

Haunting, darkly comic, and captivating, Observer reveals the pure cosmic terror of the desert, a place of wonder and menace, asking what happens when we look out at nature and find something inhuman looking back.

A BBC must-read book of 2026—"Sharp, dark and humorous, it's a real nail-biter."

Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.

A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for. 

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all. 

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.  A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

The Love Witch meets Monstrilio in Bruja's Nest, where a young woman's abuse history and ambition erupt into body horror, class war, and monstrous motherhood.

Raised amidst poverty, alcoholism, and sexual abuse, Yolanda is determined to seize control of her future. When she starts work as an indentured servant on the Fernández De la Rosa estate, she realizes she can secure a place as the lady of the house: with a spell from the local bruja, she can trick their naive son into getting her pregnant.

But the fertility ritual--piercing her flesh, tucking a rooster's heart inside herself--begets more than she expected. Yolanda's body swells and seethes with infection, her few allies dwindle, and she delivers a massive egg under the watchful eye of Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint of death. The hacienda where she's been promised a permanent home is full of blasphemies, secrets, and bodies, and the family she's tied herself to is loyal only to wealth and power.

But Yolanda will do anything to protect her child, who deserves the love and safety she never had. Even if everyone insists he's a monster.

Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading Switzy by Emma Cline in September. Today is the last day to sign up on our website. You never have to buy the book from Sunny's to pariticpate in book club, we just love it when you do.

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