3 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read: April 2026

Big Woods by May Cobb Leah’s 10 year old sister went missing in the 80s. Of course everyone is trying to find her, but Leah at 14 is trying the hardest. She has dreams about her sister telling her where she is. There’s a scary area just outside of town called Big Woods and she’s pretty sure her sister is in there. Over the course of making trips into Big Woods she discovers that the higher ups in town are involved in something way sinister and her sister is getting mixed up in all that. The story goes back and forth between Leah and a retired nurse who worked in a psychiatric hospital. The nurse had a patient who was trying to tell everyone about the big sinister thing that was happening in the woods. Of course nobody would believe her because she was in a psychiatric hospital. But the nurse believed her, and she ends up helping to crack open the case. 

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore This is biographical fiction that will absolutely enrage you. It's about a woman named Elizabeth Packard who was institutionalized by her husband. This is a thing that wealthy men did back in the 1850s when their wives got too outspoken. They just had them locked up. But the thing is, it’s not like a prison sentence where the women know how long they will be there. They have no idea, which is what makes them actually go mad. So she gets locked up for 3 years until she’s finally released. While she's there she meets other women who are also in her situation. They aren't insane, but the institution is making them insane. Her situation with her husband can be best described as irreconcilable differences. They loathe each other, and she knows that he is making arrangements to lock her up somewhere else. If she divorces him he gets the kids because they are his property, which was interesting. It wasn’t until like the 1920s or so that mothers were able to get custody because the children were no longer considered property of the husband. She ends up getting hers in the end, though. She writes a book about her experiences, she gets involved with lobbying government about the messed up behavior of husbands that is basically protected by the law and helps women to get more rights. 

This Is What America Looks Like by Ilhan Omar This is the memoir of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. She was a refugee from Somalia and arrived in the US when she was very young. Then when she moved to Minneapolis found a decent sized Somalian subset of the population. While being an outspoken woman is kind of frowned upon in the Somalian community her father and grandfather, who both raised her, encourage her to get an education and to speak up when she sees something that isn’t right. And now she’s in Congress and pissing off the president on the regular.