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“Who would have thought Northern Europeans would rely so much on a plant so poisonous? Everything about it is toxic except for the tubers themselves. Leaves, stems, roots, seeds, all poison… any part of the plant that sees light can hurt you if you eat it. Even kill you—but only after making you puke your guts out and go crazy. The world we live in—this dominion of Northern Europeans—is the way it is because of Solanum tuberosum. If you ask me, it’s ironic that our ancestors were able to avoid poisoning themselves on the plants, and yet rose to poison the whole world with themselves.”

That’s what The Freak hears when she suddenly appears, naked, in the middle of a college lecture on solanum tuberosum- the potato plant. The Freak can do that, flicker, appearing in far-flung places, even underground, at the drop of a hat. She flickers to the apartment where The Shoveler lives with a mother who shoplifts and makes potatoes au gratin 12 different ways. She flickers to the fast-food restaurant where CanIHelpYou? is serving potato cakes as a front for her drug dealing business. The Freak flickers to a Jamaican beach, to a mountaintop, to land that used to be a potato farm.

While reading this book, you may ask yourself: What’s the deal with all the potato stuff? And why do all these characters have weird names? And who even are these bizarre people and what do they have to do with each other? And seriously what is it with the potatoes? It’s all part of the experience of reading this weird, unsettling, award-winning book. By the final page, you may love it, you may hate it, but it will be different than anything else you’ve read before, and may ever read again. As author A.S. King says in the acknowledgments, “This book is supposed to be uncomfortable. I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry.”

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Which would you choose?

a) an immigrant tale of an Iranian teen who becomes obsessed with American pop culture after moving to New York City and making friends with an aspiring fashion designer and a budding photographer.

b) a romance involving a high school student who is secretly in love with his girlfriend’s best friend and must find a way to tell them the truth without ruining the only friendships he has.

c) historical fiction about becoming an activist in the midst of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Now what if I told you that you could find all three stories within the pages of a single book, and even within the life of a single character? The book is Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian and the character is Reza, an Iranian immigrant who is discovering his sexuality in 1980’s New York, while also nurturing a growing Madonna obsession and maneuvering the complexities of a love triangle. But if you want to know how these different parts of Reza’s identity overlap and intersect to make one for one riveting novel, you’ll have to read Like a Love Story.

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What do you know about The Philippines? Maybe you know that it is a country in Southeast Asia composed of a group of tropical islands. Maybe you know that citizens of The Philippines are called Filipino or that the most common language spoken there is Tagalog. What you may not know is that in 2016 a man named Duterte was elected president there and that a drug war soon followed, in which over 12,000 Filipino citizens have been killed by police and others for being suspected of using or selling drugs.

Seventeen-year-old Jay, who came to America from The Philippines as a baby, doesn’t know this last part either. He is busy finishing up his senior year of high school in Detroit, preparing for college at U of M, and looking forward to a spring break full of video games. His main link to The Philippines used to be his cousin Jun, but they lost touch three or four years ago when Jay stopped responding to Jun’s letter. So it comes as a shock when Jay is told that Jun has been killed and that his murder has something to do with a drug war Jay knew nothing about. But the gentle, thoughtful Jun Jay knew couldn’t be addicted to, much less selling, drugs, could he? And if not, what had Jun really been up to in those years since he last wrote Jay? And if Jun had been killed by police, wouldn’t his police chief father have been able to prevent it? Or could he have had something to do with Jun’s murder? No matter how hard Jay digs online, or presses his parents, he can’t find any details about Jun’s death. So instead of spending his spring break relaxing, Jay decides to head for The Philippines for the first time since he was a kid. But will he find the answers he’s looking for, or only be left with more questions?