The Art of Vanishing is a book about a woman who gets a night shift janitorial job at an art museum and, upon realizing she can somehow step inside the paintings, falls in love with one of the subjects. It’s a fast read and very fun — I think it would make a GREAT beach read this summer.

Unsurprisingly after all that hype, this genre-bender not only delivers but also hits differently than anything else Okorafor has written.

This was the perfect way to kick off my 2025 reading in a year that will surely bring a great need for laughter, levity, and love. You will find all three in these pages.

Kimberly King Parsons has done it again. We Were the Universe is just as aching and poignant as Black Light, with a messy main character so fully formed she could walk off the page.

I was pretty lukewarm on Such a Fun Age, but I decided to give this one a go anyway. But ultimately, I feel pretty similarly about this one: not bad but not for me. If you really loved SaFA, I think you’ll probably like this one too, but I just don’t like train-wreck plots.

There’s something just so cozy — and yet satisfyingly literary — about an Ann Patchett novel. And the cherry on top (no pun intended)? Meryl Streep reads the audiobook. I loved it.

Family Lore was right up my alley: beautiful, heartbreaking, and crackling with life. These characters are so well written, and Acevedo’s talent as a poet shines.

Summer is a fantastic finale to this hopeful, poignant quartet about the kindness of strangers during troubling times. It tied all four books together in a fun, impactful way.

The Bandit Queens is a smart, darkly funny novel about a community of women who team up to kill their abusive husbands. It’s equal parts delightful and devastating.

All This Could Be Different is a very millennial novel (in a good way) that takes a lot of what works in many successful books today, mashes it, and adds to it to creates something that feels wholly fresh and original.

Book Lovers is a compulsively readable, super smart book that takes a common trope (small-town romance) and and subverts every single element. Reading it was very fun.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is definitely going to be one of my favorite books of 2022. Alternating between heartwarming and heartbreaking, it’s a beautiful book about friendship and the messiness (and hope) of life.

So Happy For You is an absolutely wild ride of a book. It’s an off-the-rails, near-future, almost-dystopic story that uses absurdity to intelligently comment on the state and culture of the world today.

End of the World House is a trippy literary page-turner with a great premise and an ending I’ll be thinking about for a long time. It manages to be very readable and also very smart.

All My Rage is a deeply emotional, beautiful novel that sets a whole new bar for contemporary YA. It’s sad all the way through, but resonant and meaningful.

The Sentence is a moving novel about the pandemic and the protests of June 2020, told through a formerly incarcerated bookseller’s eyes. Reading it felt like poking a fresh wound, but this book is excellent.

Our Country Friends is a wild romp of a novel; a cultural-examination-through-dramedy with a ton of voice and character. It was a little too soon for me to relive 2020, but I respect what this book did.

Abundance is a book that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to — humbling and frustrating, it’s an empathetic look inside the trap of poverty in America today. I think you should read it.

I loved Feral Creatures! It was just as funny and heartwarming and clever as Hollow Kingdom. Kira Jane Buxton is so witty and these books are exactly my kind of humor.

I liked Songbirds, although The Beekeeper of Aleppo is still my favorite of Lefteri’s. Still, I think this book does good things and will appeal to lots of different types of readers.