From Agatha and Edgar Award nominated author Valerie Burns, influencer-turned-bakery-owner Maddy Montgomery has sold plenty of wedding cakes before, but before she turns one out for her and her fiancé’s wedding, she’ll have to solve a little case of murder first…

Aunt Octavia would be so proud! Maddy has turned Baby Cakes Bakery—named for her 250-pound English Mastiff, Baby—into a runaway success, and she’s marrying the love of her life, veterinarian Michael Portman. #DreamWedding! Plus the timing couldn’t be better: the country’s biggest bridal expo has come to New Bison, Michigan, and Maddy has secured a spot for Baby Cakes to showcase their cakes. She’s also entered a contest for an all-expenses-paid wedding extravaganza offered by world-renowned wedding planner Serafina.

Unfortunately, supremely nasty Serafina truly takes the cake—she makes the worst bridezilla seem like a shy flower girl. But there’s one thing the wedding planner didn’t plan on—being impaled by one of the skewers Baby Cakes uses on their tiered wedding cakes.

While Maid of Honor Sheriff April Johnson rounds up suspects at the expo, Maddy and her aunt’s friends, the Baker Street Irregulars, and even Baby join forces to unveil a killer hiding in plain sight . . . before wedding bells start to chime.

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Ronke wants happily ever after and 2.2. kids. She’s dating Kayode and wants him to be “the one” (perfect, like her dead father). Her friends think he’s just another in a long line of dodgy Nigerian boyfriends.

Boo has everything Ronke wants—a kind husband, gorgeous child. But she’s frustrated, unfulfilled, plagued by guilt, and desperate to remember who she used to be.

Simi is the golden one with the perfect lifestyle. No one knows she’s crippled by impostor syndrome and tempted to pack it all in each time her boss mentions her “urban vibe.” Her husband thinks they’re trying for a baby. She’s not.

When the high-flying, charismatic Isobel explodes into the group, it seems at first she’s bringing out the best in each woman. (She gets Simi an interview in Shanghai! Goes jogging with Boo!) But the more Isobel intervenes, the more chaos she sows, and Ronke, Simi, and Boo’s close friendship begins to crack.

A sharp, modern take on friendship, ambition, culture, and betrayal, Wahala (trouble) is an unforgettable novel from a brilliant new voice.

A stunning cultural biography of De La Soul, the era-defining hip-hop trio that touched millions of lives and changed rap forever.

De La Soul burst onto the scene with the release of their groundbreaking 1989 album 3 Feet High & Rising, an “anything goes” hip-hop masterpiece hailed as a new masterwork from a bygone era of Black experimentation.

Formed in Long Island in 1988 by Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, De La Soul rebuked classification and appealed to the Black alternative. Their music was positive and psychedelic, their imagery full of flowers and peace signs. It was rap with a broad sonic palette which set the blueprint for an entire generation of artists who followed. But as quickly as De La ascended, they were faced with the pressures of a changing industry and bitter legal battles.

Completed in the wake of Dave’s passing and the group’s arrival on streaming platforms after years in digital purgatory, High and Rising tells the story of one of the most influential rap groups of all time. In the process, acclaimed music journalist Marcus J. Moore braids in a deeply personal coming-of-age story about his journey through life with De La as a backdrop.

The first book about De La Soul, High and Rising shows that De La Soul is Black history, American history, world history, our history. This is a tale about staying the course, and how holding true to your virtue can lead to dynamic results.

Join us for a montly children's storytime at Kindred Stories. Each Story time will celebrate a special book and be read by a wondertful community mementer. IT also includes a story time. 

Featured Book: Daisy Helps With The Dress 

Featured Reader: Antonia Adams 

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, September 26 @ 11 AM CST 

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St. Houston, TX 77004)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your spot and let us know you are coming.

ABOUT DAISY HELPS WITH THE DRESS 

When Daisy tries to help with her cousin’s wedding, her misguided assists almost ruin the big day, until she finds a way to pull the dress—and her family—together in this charming picture book by award-winning author Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich.

Daisy loves helping her family and she knows the best kind of helpers never wait to be asked. That’s why she doesn’t ask before adding finishing touches to her family’s special reused, re-tried, remixed things, like a leftover broccoli topping for Auntie Fontie’s cakes or a good bath for Nana DJ’s “back-in-the-day, rusty, dusty” vintage albums—much to their chagrin.

But what Daisy wants most is to help give her cousin Simone’s recycled wedding dress a little razzle dazzle. She knows just what the vintage dress needs: a little glitter here, a few stickers there to give the dress some flair.

But Daisy’s cousin Simone and the rest of the family are not so happy with her decorations. Can Daisy make things right and help find Simone a new re-lived, re-loved wedding dress?

*ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

Set at a luxe, aspirational boarding school inspired by the author's beloved alma mater Spelman College, this debut is a captivating celebration of the friends we choose, the family we protect, and the love we owe ourselves.

It's fourteen-year-old Avielle "Avi" LeBeau's turn to do what everyone in her family has done: leave home to attend Briarcliff Prep—a Historically Black Boarding School (HBBS). And as scared as she is to say goodbye to her parents and move to Georgia, she knows her fearless big sister Belle will be there to show her the ropes.

Before long, Avi settles into life at Briarcliff. New friends (and foes), challenging classes (at times too challenging), and maybe a cute tutor-turned-something-more (if her brothers don't get in the way). Meanwhile, Belle does what she always does: she runs the campus's social scene, especially now that she's dating Logan, the pride and joy of Briarcliff's sibling school Preston Academy.

But something about Logan doesn't sit well with Avi, no matter how many times Belle reassures her Logan is a good guy. And when Avi stumbles across the truth, her relationship with Belle is put to the test. If Avi reveals what she knows, their sisterhood might never recover. But if she doesn't, she might lose Belle forever.

Debut author Brianna Peppins deftly balances a celebration of sisterhood, self-discovery, and Black joy with an empathetic exploration of teen dating violence in this novel that is, at its heart, a love letter to Black girls.

*ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

From one of fashion's most important changemakers, a memoir of breaking barriers

When Edward Enninful became the first Black editor in chief of British Vogue, few in the world of fashion wanted to confront how it failed to represent the world we live in. But Edward, a champion of inclusion throughout his life, rapidly changed that.
 
Edward grew up in Ghana in a world of beauty, riotous color, and strong Black women. Nurtured by his mother, a dressmaker whose West African designs had a flair for drama, he learned in her atelier what it meant for a woman to see herself as truly beautiful. But the threat of violence emerged for his family and they fled the country, becoming refugees in central London. There, Edward faced a more insidious and institutionalized kind of danger: a culture where his opportunities would be diminished because of his accent and the color of his skin.
 
A Visible Man traces an astonishing journey through one of the world’s most exclusive industries. With heart and humor, Edward candidly shares how as a Black, gay, working-class refugee, he found in fashion not only a home, but the freedom to share the world as he saw it, with Black women often at the center. Determined to reflect the times, through the course of his career he has championed those who have been pushed to the margins, placing first responders, octogenarians, and civil rights activists on the cover of Vogue. He has inspired people with new ways to dream and an exhilarating vision of what is possible, here and now.
 
Written with style, grace, and emotion, A Visible Man shines a spotlight on the career of one of the greatest creative forces of our times. It is the story of a visionary who changed not only an industry, but how we understand beauty.

A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Melndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today.

In this masterful work of scholarship, Melndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511-led by the powerful chieftain Ageyban II-to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States.

Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly.

Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta

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A wildly original, incendiary story about race, redemption, the dangerous imbalances that continue to destabilize society, and speaking out for what’s right.

One could argue the story begins the night Allegra Douglass is awarded Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at her top-tier university in New York—the same night her grandmother dies—or before that: the day Allie left Birmingham and never looked back. Or even before that: the day her mother disappeared. But for our purposes Allie’s story begins at the end, when she is finally ready to tell her version of what happened with a white supremacist named Matthew Strong.
        From the beginning, Allie had the clues: in a spate of possibly connected disappearances of other young Black women; in a series of recently restored plantation homes; in letters outlining an uprising; in maps of slave trade routes and old estates; in hidden caves and buried tunnels; and finally, in a confessional that should never have existed. They just have to make a case strong enough for the FBI and police to listen. This is when Allie herself disappears.
        Allie is a survivor. She survived the newly post-Jim Crow south, she survived cancer, and she will survive being stalked and kidnapped by Matthew Strong, who seeks to ignite a revolution. The surprise in this doesn’t lie in the question of will she be taken; it lies in how she and her community outsmart a tactical madman.

Perfect for fans of The Shadows Between Us and Powerless, this high stakes romantasy follows a vengeful teen who cons her way into an elite society of tyrannical witches. But her warring feelings for two people—an enemy prince and her childhood friend—could ruin everything.

Caya was once the ward of Coventry’s royal family…until they were killed by the three witch Houses that now rule the peninsula.
 
Now eighteen, Caya plans to infiltrate the witches' glittering world to enact justice. With the help of a mysterious benefactor, she adopts the persona of Marisol Vinyet, a disarmingly beautiful aristocrat. As Marisol, she'll attend the annual Coronet, a cutthroat social season during which witches increase their power by binding new members to their Houses. The Coronet will draw even the prince of neighboring Domingo—Tómas Castellan—to the peninsula just in time for “Marisol” to kill him. After all, his family set the witches upon Coventry in the first place.
 
But Tómas is more charming than Caya ever anticipated. Worse, her estranged childhood friend, Bas Arroyo, is the prince’s protector, and she struggles to control her complicated feelings for him.
 
To take down the witches from within, Caya will have to keep both her identity and her desperate heart under wraps: Although she’s made herself a weapon, she might be the one to bleed.

The first book in a brand-new series, Hunt the Red Hood, from TikTok sensation B.B. Reid, a dark romantic retelling of Red Riding Hood.

"Guard your heart, foolish girl. The wolves will come to steal it."

In a quiet French town steeped in old folklore, Nyx has always believed in logic―not legends. So discovering she's descended from a line of Red Hood witches feels more like a mistake than destiny. But some stories refuse to stay buried.

The Volkovs have been cursed for generations, and time is running out. The only way to break it? A Red Hood witch must fall in love with one of them. Mikhail Volkov is desperate to save someone he loves―and ending the curse is his last hope. Getting close to Nyx was supposed to be a means to an end… until it becomes something far more dangerous.

Gray, the watchful hunter who seems to linger on the edges of every secret, is thrust into Nyx's life next. Protective, intense, and impossible to ignore, he draws Nyx deeper into a world she doesn't understand―and can't escape.

Caught between wolf and hunter, instinct and reason, Nyx must decide who to trust―and what she's willing to risk.