The Best New Book Releases Out February 11, 2025

The idea of self-betterment through education has been a part of America’s alleged meritocracy since forever, but here, Ewing lays out here how it’s also always been a lie. For Black and Native students, it’s been a way to erase culture and “civilize.” It’s also been a way to send these students through a pipeline to menial labor and perpetuate white superiority. It’s high time, according to Ewing, we reevaluate who schools are for and how they function.

This new YA fantasy by the bestselling Ibi Zoboi follows 15-year-old Marisol, the daughter of a soucouyant. If you, like me, have never heard of a soucouyant, it’s a certain kind of witch from Caribbean folklore who appears as a woman during the day, then turns into a fireball at night.

And that’s exactly what our girl Marisol does–except her fireballing happens every new moon, specifically. She sheds her skin, changes into a fireball witch, and flies through the night for people to sip from in order to sustain herself.

Now that she’s moved to Brooklyn with her mother, and thinks her old ways died in the islands, but her mother has other plans.

Then there’s Genevieve, the daughter of a college professor and a new sister to twins. Genevieve’s skin condition and recent insomnia have her acting strangely and developing new…appetites. Once a new nanny shows up to help with the twins, we find out that her and Marisol have an interesting connection.

In this darkly funny memoir-in-essays, Gomez shows how he and his working-class queer Latine friends used Florida wisdom to pull themselves out of poverty—which is to say that they zig-zagged here and there, doing this scheme and picking up that job, just to make it.

This is being described as The Haunting of Bly Manor and Starling House, and follows a young woman who’s made to live with ghosts in a mansion frozen in time. Elegy keeps up her family’s Gilded Age mansion by using ancient folk songs to keep its roaming spirits under control. But then a wild child spirit causes chaos and Elegy has to call the family’s preservationist to restore the manor. Luckily, his son tags along, which brings some vibrancy into Elegy’s life and makes her consider what life would be like if she wasn’t weighed down by all her family’s trappings. Now, will she follow her heart, or stay mired in the past?

Anonymous author J. R. Alastor hires up-and-coming writer Mila del Angél to host a thriller writers’ retreat, which she happily accepts, but ole girl has some dark motives. There’s someone on the guest list who she has beef with, and the week full of games, riddles, and activities she and Alastor plan for the retreat may give her the perfect chance to plan a murder. But then another murder happens, and it’s not the one Mila had in mind. And now, with the storm cutting off the Maine coast island, the body count is rising, and she’ll have to outmaneuver a killer who writes about murders for a living.

In this memoir, Benjamin examines the emotional gap that’s always existed between his mother and him, and the ties it has to their family history. When his mother was a kid, she grew up in Haiti as the privileged daughter of a schoolteacher and a labor leader who eventually became the president in 1957. But then a coup carried out by the Eisenhower administration results in her family being smuggled out of the country at gunpoint and brought to New York. It’s in New York that she becomes an erratic adult and a mother to a son—Benjamin—who struggled with a blood disease and his sexuality. Benjamin finally learns of his family’s history, but also of the human cost that America has incurred worldwide.