2 Books Published by Kindred Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Camille Collins has a voice like water. There is lush music in her debut novel—each word flows with purpose and beauty. In the big sea of young adult literature, The Exene Chronicles casts a powerful net and takes us in—heart and all.” —Kwame Alexander, Newbery medalist and New York Times bestselling author of Rebound

Lia is fourteen and losing her best friend. When things don’t seem like they could get any worse, Ryan disappears.

Lia is one of only a handful of black kids in Coronado, her San Diego suburb. The only person she feels she can talk to is punk rock high priestess and frontwoman to a legendary LA band, Exene Cervenka. Reeling from Ryan’s disappearance, Lia writes letters and poems to Exene every day. She can relate to Exene—but if they were to ever meet, would Exene be able to relate to her? With Exene and her band’s searing soundtrack as her chief inspiration, Lia dives head-first into a dark and spiky counterculture rife with confrontation, shifting alliances, and unsettling insights into what Ryan was doing and what might have happened to her.

Set against the backdrop of the 1980s heyday of LA punk rock, The Exene Chronicles sings of the coming of a new age for all girls in America who have been disenfranchised by the spaces they identified as their own. With lyrical prose and an unrelenting moral center, Camille A. Collins liberates the punk in all of us.

“This is an extraordinary collection of stories. Debut author Kem Joy Ukwu is already a master at conveying—with admirable elegance—the small and large emotions, and the tensions, the moments of generosity, of betrayal, and of hope that define the human experience. This is sure to be the beginning of a long and important career, and I cannot wait to read what comes next.” —Robin Black, author of Life Drawing and If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

A finalist for the New American Fiction Prize, this glinting and razor-sharp collection of linked short stories draws power from Ukwu’s crystalline characterization and a voice that is as singular as a champion slam-poet’s.

Family dynamics, bad romance, first-date tension, work, and money haunt the New Yorkers in these stories as they nevertheless triumph. A sister is faced with the individual, human reality of the Nigerian diaspora; a daughter navigates her difficult mother’s wedding-day crisis; an unexpected proposal from a neighbor represents hope and resignation in equal measure.

These stories invite readers into the most private of hearts with clear, forceful, and memorable prose. Ukwu wields the constraints of the short story as if she had invented them expressly to connect us to each other.

“Kem Joy Ukwu writes of faith and families, of mercy, of birth and death. She examines the cool, dark shadows of regret and the knife of obligation, holds who and how we are supposed to be up against who we actually are. Ukwu is a jewel of a writer—graceful, sparkling.” —Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Every Kiss a War and Whiskey & Ribbons