Ordinary People
Ordinary People is poetic yet scathing, showing us the messy sides of love, parenthood, partnership, and self.
Author: Diana Evans
Publisher: Liveright
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Cover Description
Diana Evans, author of the prize-winning 26a, returns with an intimate portrait of London, an exploration of modern relationships and black identity, and that mid-life moment when a gap emerges between who we think we are and who we are becoming.
Melissa and Michael, a couple of thirteen years, have taken up residence in a crooked house in the south of the city, a new baby making them a family of four. Feeling defined solely by motherhood, Melissa's need to reclaim her identity is spilling into resentment at her partner and a growing fear that something unnatural is living in their home. Her solace in her Nigerian mother's stews and spells only infuriates Michael, who desperately misses the excitement of their lives before children.
Further south, in the suburbs, Damian and Stephanie enter a year of marital disquiet. Damian's Trinidadian political activist father has died, and he finds himself adrift and hungering for the city--just as his admiration for Stephanie's wholesome aspirations and white middle class upbringing begin to feel more like a trap than an escape. With the election of Barack Obama posing a distant perfection to which modern couples might aspire, these two ordinary partnerships collide and conjoin in a building chaos born from their extraordinary desires.
Ordinary People is an intimate, immersive study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and aging, and the fragile architecture of love. With its distinctive prose and addictive soundtrack, it is the story of our lives, and those moments that threaten to unravel us.
TL;DR Review
Ordinary People is poetic yet scathing, showing us the messy sides of love, parenthood, partnership, and self.
For you if: You like multi-character, character-driven literary fiction.
Full Review
“The arms of their coats were touching, which didn’t seem a thing. They blew up at the sky, the skeletal aerials and the silhouettes of the chimneys. Long clouds lay out, some moving and pink and slipping away, and at one end, to the south, the mood slid full, round and golden into a case of silver wisps, until it was swallowed, whole, and all that was moving was a fading glow like a sun reduced to a common star. A bay tree, blackened in the darkness, stood up above the fences, watching over them with its still, black leaves.”
Ordinary People was my last read from the 2019 Women’s Prize shortlist, and I wasn’t disappointed! This book has mixed reviews on Goodreads, and I can understand why it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — it’s pretty literary and very character-driven (rather than plot-driven). But the prose was outstanding, and if you like books like that, you’ll like this one.
This is a book about two sets of parents, all friends. Both live (or recently lived) in London, both have two children, and both have seen the flame in their relationship go out. Both of them are navigating around one another, together with one another, and fiercely independently as themselves in order to try to figure out a) where their real selves lie underneath the lives they built, and b) whether they can find their way back to what they once had as a couple. It’s a tumultuous journey, to say the least.
I do have to admit that until the ending, I thought this book was going to fall into a “pretty good” category for me. I was enjoying it, chugging along, but not blown away. But there’s a chapter near the end that was particularly outstanding and brought everything together in a way that tipped it into the “veryyyy good” category.
Diana Evans does such a good job bringing these people to life. They were all round, flawed characters that I rooted hard for. And the thing was, they were rooting for each other too — they just couldn’t quite get there. Which I think is much, much more interesting that characters pitted against one another. She really makes you think about identity, independence, communication, and the need to be open enough to see the other person clearly, too, if a relationship is going to survive forever.
This book felt like what I really wanted out of An American Marriage. I liked that book fine, but Ordinary People just had so many more elements of what I love about literary fiction. If you usually gravitate more toward contemporary fiction, though, you’d probably prefer An American Marriage. But both are very good.
CONTENT Warnings
Infidelity
Pregnancy / childbirth
Gang violence / murder of a child
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Frankissstein: A Love Story
Frankissstein — a modern-day retelling of Frankenstein mixed with some historical ficion — is absolutely fantastic. Jeanette Winterson is a literary legend for a reason.
Author:
Publisher:
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as "one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love story that weaves together disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love.
Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead... but waiting to return to life.
What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself.
TL;DR Review
Frankissstein — a modern-day retelling of Frankenstein mixed with some historical ficion — is absolutely fantastic. Jeanette Winterson is a literary legend for a reason.
For you if: You are here for queer stories with incredible prose.
Full Review
“I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.”
OK, people. Frankissstein blew me AWAY. It’s an incredible melding and meeting of two stories — one story? three stories? — between a present-day retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and historical fiction (I would almost even call it fan fiction) featuring Mary Shelley herself. Nobody is like Jeanette Winterson. This book is a work of true raw talent.
In the 1816s, Mary Shelley is in a wet countryside cabin with her husband, Shelley; his poet friend, Lord Byron; Claire, Mary’s step sister and Byron’s mistress; and a physician, Polidori. The story of Frankenstein grips her and pours out onto the page. Flash forward to today, we have a Ry, a non-binary person who used to be called Mary. They are in love and sleeping with a doctor named Victor Frankenstein, who is trying to create eternal life through artificial intelligence. Their friends Ron Lord (seller of sex bots) and Claire are also featured.
I don’t think I can do this book justice in a review. The number of times my jaw dropped because of the connections I’d suddenly realized JW had made between the three stories … is a lot. The weird dynamic of having Ry be in love with Victor, and how that showed Mary’s obsession with her creature. Once you make something, you can’t un-make it. It exists now. Humanity’s obsession with destroying itself through preservation — or is it preserving itself through destruction? The way Ry’s trans and non-binary identity glued everything together. The way I am now OBSESSED with Mary Shelley IRL?
READ THIS.
“I have never been like you! answered the man. My madness is that I am trapped here. Outside waits one whose fiendish, pitiless cunning will instruct others to experiment as I did — without any care for the human race.
Mary Shelley said, If you are not of the human race, why should you care for it?
For the love of it that you bear, he answered. Love that you have taught me. Shall I quote our book? ‘My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy.’
She said, Those words are spoken not by Victor Frankenstein, but by his creature.
We are the same, the same, answered Frankenstein.”
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault / rape
Transphobia and trans misogyny
Animal cruelty or animal death
Pregnancy or childbirth
Miscarriages / Death of children
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Milkman
I appreciated Milkman more than I enjoyed it (it’s dense), but its impressiveness as a work of literary fiction can’t be denied.
Author: Anna Burns
Publisher: Graywolf Press
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Cover Description
In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary named Milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes "interesting," the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister's attempts to avoid him — and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend — rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.
TL;DR Review
Milkman is a story that takes place during the political conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it (it’s dense), but its impressiveness as a work of literary fiction can’t be denied.
For you if: You like literary historical fiction and don’t mind a quasi-stream-of-consciousness narrative style.
Full Review
I was too buzzy to read, thinking of teacher, of her manner of saying there were sunsets every day, that we weren’t meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go of the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we’ve kept hidden, what we think we might have lost.
Milkman has been on my list for a while as I’ve made my way through the 2019 Women’s Prize shortlist. It also won the Booker Prize in 2018. So I had really high expectations!
In some ways, it met those expectations, it being an impressive work of literature and storytelling that transports and illuminates. The opening line blew me away and will make my list for all-time favorite first sentences. I read it over so many times I can recite it from memory:
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.
The story takes place in an unnamed time and place that we come to understand is based on Belfast, Ireland during the height of the political conflict known as The Troubles in the 1970s. The community is fiercely divided between the state and the renouncers, where even going to the hospital is dangerous because the police might question you so the renouncers will think you’re a spy and kill you. No one is trusted, nothing foreign is allowed, no cracks in anyone’s facade can show.
The narrator of the story is middle sister, who does everything she can to mentally distance herself from the political situation. She reads while walking, she conveniently forgets inconvenient experiences, and she is genuinely never curious about anything because she does not wish to change her world.
Then a man known as the milkman (who isn’t a milkman but really a paramilitary man who’s feared and respected among the renouncers) notices her and stops to chat. A rumor that she’s his mistress absolutely flies off the rails until it might as well be true for the way her life is altered. And her refusal to defend herself as she keeps her head down doesn’t help anything.
The book dances around a lot of big themes, like violence against women, gender roles, the danger of staying silent, and the fear of allowing yourself to be happy (because what if it’s then lost).
Ultimately, I appreciated this one more than I enjoyed it; I just think I wasn’t in the right headspace for the dense, meandering narrative style. But at the same time, I can see how and why that exact style won this book its awards. Middle sister takes pages to say one paragraph’s worth, in a sort of stream of consciousness style. It took a lot of concentration and energy to move through the book, which made it a slow movement forward.
I would have been interested to read this book as a short story, actually. I could see her starting with the same opening line, detailing the opening encounters with the milkman, and then concluding with the scene in the bathroom that the opening foreshadows. All in all, though, I’m really glad I read this one. It feels like a modern classic.
Trigger Warnings
Stalking / dating violence
Animal cruelty / animal death
Suicide
Body hatred
Mental illness
Homophobia and heterosexism
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Abhorsen (Abhorsen Trilogy/Old Kingdom, #3)
Abhorsen is the conclusion of the epic story started in Sabriel. It was one of the best endings I’ve read in a while, resonating with all the things people love about with classic fantasy.
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: HarperCollins Children’s Books
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
***Description is spoiler for Sabriel and Lirael, books 1 and 2 in the series***
When the ninth gate calls, who can resist its summons?
An old evil has arisen — freed from its subterranean prison and seeking to escape the binding silver hemispheres which prevent it from finally unleashing its terrible powers.
Lirael, newly come into her inheritance as the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, knows that the fate of the world is in her hands. With only a vision from the Clayr to guide her, and the uncertain help of her companions — Sam, the Disreputable Dog, and Mogget — Lirael sets out on her perilous mission.
Then answer must be found somewhere in Life or Death — but can a former Second Assistant Librarian possibly discover the means to defeat the Destroyer ... before it is too late?
TL;DR Review
Abhorsen is the conclusion of the epic story started in Sabriel. It was one of the best endings I’ve read in a while, resonating with all the things people love about with classic fantasy. I’m so glad I read this trilogy!
For you if: You’re looking for the feeling of epic fantasy but without having to read like six 800-page books, lol.
Full Review
“For everyone and everything, there is a time to die. Some do not know it, or would delay it, but its truth cannot be denied. Not when you look into the stars of the ninth gate.”
After finishing this trilogy, I still can’t believe that I’d never read it before. This is classic fantasy at its best, and Abhorsen is the ultimate conclusion. The trilogy is divided up interestingly — Sabriel could almost be a standalone, and then Lirael and Abhorsen feel like parts one and two of the follow-up story.
It’s been awhile since I read an epic ending like this one. It was an exciting final confrontation that got your heart pounding without feeling drawn out. There was a twist / reveal that had been building over the past three books. You were never sure exactly how it was all going to work out until it was over. It was just such good writing.
I’m in love with all of these characters. Sam, oh Sam. My heart. Lirael, you brave girl. Mogget, the Disreputable Dog, Sabriel, Touchstone — I love them all.
If you’re looking for a fantasy trilogy that gives you all the classic fantasy feels, this is a great place to look.
“I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than nothing, even if the cost is great.”
Trigger Warnings
Death / grief
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
These Ghosts Are Family
Author: Maisy Card
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A transporting debut novel that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it’s about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend.
And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.
These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the house boy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.
These Ghosts Are Family explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is an engrossing portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret. This electric and luminous family saga announces the arrival of a new American talent.
TL;DR Review
These Ghosts Are Family is an incredible debut about the ghosts — figurative and perhaps literal — that follow a family tree through time. It’s family saga, ghost story, and historical fiction all rolled into one.
For you if: You’re intrigued by the secrets of family history, want to read diversely, and don’t mind bouncing around between time periods, settings, and narrators.
Full Review
BIG thanks to Simon & Schuster for sending me an early copy of this book! It will be published March 3rd, and you can pre-order it here.
These Ghosts Are Family is the kind of debut that will leave your jaw on the floor. Maisy Card has woven an incredible tapestry across generations and geography. The author herself grew up in a family built on a mountain of secrets never revealed, which inspired her to write this story. And wow.
The premise starts thus: A man (now) named Stanford Solomon decides to reveal his true identity to his remaining family. He was born in Jamaica as Abel Paisley before faking his death and assuming a new identity to escape his previous life and start another. We get an intro to a few of his family members. Then the next chapter jumps backward in time to before he left Jamaica, and then we spring forward and back and forward and back, from the 1800s to 2020, learning a little bit more about this family’s history and secrets with every turn of the page.
Almost every chapter has a bit of a different format, as the author uses timing, perspective, and point of view to pull the story’s strings. And what starts feeling like a character study on Abel/Stanford and the people closest to him turns into a giant puzzle as we, the readers, attempt to figure out how all these people from across time fit together.
The book is also a love story to Jamaica — its beauty and its pain. All the dialogue is written in Jamaican Patois. We dive deep into the ugliness of slavery on the island and feel its lasting effects. And, of course, there are the ghosts. (Don’t finish this book in the middle of the night, as I did.) By the end, I was reading faster and faster, and my heart was racing.
If you find yourself getting lost or disconnected when a story bounces between characters, timeframes, and settings — especially when it doesn’t move linearly — then this might be tough for you. But if you stick it out, I think it will be very worth it.
Maisy Card’s heart and skill ring throughout the novel. Her use of language is pristine. Her ability as a storyteller is gripping. And her characters will stay with me for a long time.
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault / rape
Physical abuse
Drug abuse
Kidnapping and abduction
Abortion
Racism and racial slurs
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Real Life
Real Life is an aching, bruising story about a young Black gay man struggling to wade through his circumstances that will leave you gutted. And the way Brandon Taylor uses words is incredible.
Author: Brandon Taylor
Publisher: Riverhead
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.
Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.
TL;DR Review
Real Life is an aching, bruising story about a young Black gay man struggling to wade through his circumstances that will leave you gutted. And the way Brandon Taylor uses words is incredible.
For you if: You like emotional, character-driven literary fiction with lyrical prose.
Full Review
Wallace puts his elbows on the table, which rocks sharply, dangerously. The tea shifts. Miller’s eyes widen just so, and Wallace holds his breath until the table and the cup and the whole world steady themselves.
Real Life describes itself as “a novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy.” Those are good words to describe this story, but they aren’t enough. The writing is just gorgeous, gutting. Every chapter leaves you feeling something unnameable that feels almost like sadness, a tiny bit like emptiness, and sort of like passion, too.
The story takes place over a single weekend, Friday evening to the early hours of Monday. The main character is Wallace, a Black and gay doctorate student studying biology. He came to the university to escape the South and the family he left behind, and he has struggled against prejudice and privilege the whole time. As he’s normally closed off and introspective, it’s unusual for him to join his friends on a Friday night (or, at all), but this week, he does.
That kicks off a domino effect that tears at the walls he’s put up around himself and forces him to look hard at himself and his relationship with the world. He and a few others crash into each other, bounce apart, hold, tear, hurt, soothe, and leave behind the precarious normalcy they’d built before.
I think what was most fascinating to me was the way Brandon Taylor zooms in and out of detail. When the characters are talking to each other, there is very little detail — the dialogue stands on its own, bounces back and forth like a tennis ball. But in moments of description, he zooms so far in that I can’t even believe how many details are included. Every tiny movement, every sound, every instance is documented. The result feels resonant and deeply emotional.
Roxanne Gay said in her Goodreads review: “The way Taylor writes about bodies in the physical world is one of the highlights in a novel full of highlights. Truly, this is stunning work from a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.”
This book will not be for people who need a fast-paced plot, because that’s not the point of this novel. It’s all about ache and heart and gut and body and mind and emotion and life. In the small moments. In every moment.
Trigger Warnings
Child rape
Physical abuse during sex
Racism
Homophobia
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Amnesty
Amnesty is an in-depth look at the world from an illegal immigrant’s perspective that leaves a ringing, lasting impression.
Author: Aravind Adiga
Publisher: Scribner
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A riveting, suspenseful, and exuberant novel from the bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day about a young illegal immigrant who must decide whether to report crucial information about a murder — and thereby risk deportation.
Danny — formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam — is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life.
But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients — a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.
Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.
TL;DR Review
Amnesty is an in-depth look at the world from an illegal immigrant’s perspective that leaves a ringing, lasting impression.
For you if: You don’t mind books that ask a little extra from you because they are more literary / cerebral.
Full Review
Nothing is simple for a man like this one. Not even being helpless. Or harmless. Life is a battle, and though unevenly so, everyone is armed.
Amnesty was a really unique book, at least for me, and so it also moved me in a unique way. Told over the course of one single day, it follows an illegal immigrant living in Sydney, Australia, named Danny.
Danny has been in Sydney for four years. He originally traveled there on a student visa and then applied for asylum, but was denied. So he stayed illegally. Now he has a girlfriend he loves and a steady stream of clients whose houses he cleans, so life is pretty good. But then one of them is murdered, and Danny thinks another one of his clients may have killed her. In fact, Danny is probably the only person who knows about the connection between them. But if he tells the police, he’ll be deported. He spends the day agonizing over the decision, which is not helped by the fact that the potential killer keeps calling him and harassing him.
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book told in one day before. At certain times, it made me feel a little impatient for the plot to move along. But at other times, I was hit by the way the author could slow so far down and use an exacting level of detail to leave an impression. And the spiraling nature of Danny’s internal struggle hammered home the trauma he’d lived and was currently living.
This book lost me sometimes. It wavered between first person and third person and here and there and then and now, all in a way that was occasionally hard to follow. But I always found my way back. The result is a book that feels very literary and cerebral (I’m not surprised to see that Adiga previously won the Booker Prize, as nominated books tend to feel that way). So it takes a little more work, but it turned out to be worth it to me in the end.
It’s not too hard to find stories about illegal immigrants during their journey, or right after. I have read far fewer stories about their daily lives once they arrive. The way they are hunted, haunted, afraid, empowered and disempowered, surrounded by both comrades and foes. This book painted a portrait of an exhausting life that is still yet worth living. And for that, I’m grateful.
Trigger Warnings
Violence / murder
Racism and racial slurs
Islamophobia
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
I Know You Know Who I Am
Author: Peter Kispert
Publisher: Penguin Books
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Cover Description
Throughout this striking debut collection we meet characters who have lied, who have sometimes created elaborate falsehoods, and who now must cope with the way that those deceptions eat at the very fabric of their lives and relationships. In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less lonely, after his boyfriend catches on to his compulsion for lying and demands to know this friend is real; in "Aim for the Heart", a man's lies about a hunting habit leave him with an unexpected deer carcass and the need to parse unsettling high school memories; in "Rorschach", a theater producer runs a show in which death row inmates are crucified in an on-stage rendering of the New Testament, while being haunted daily by an unrequited love and nightly by ghosts of his own creation.
In I Know You Know Who I Am, Kispert deftly explores deception and performance, the uneasiness of reconciling a queer identity with the wider world, and creates a sympathetic, often darkly humorous, portrait of characters searching for paths to intimacy, desperate for connection.
TL;DR Review
I Know You Know Who I Am is a gripping collection of short stories about gay men who cannot stop lying. It will draw you in, churn you up, and spit you out in the best way.
For you if: You are looking for a fantastic set of queer short stories that won’t leave you scratching your head, just feeling deeply.
Full Review
I read a fair number of short story collections, often ones filled with stories that end weirdly or require some interpretation. I like that kind of story a lot, but I Know You Know Who I Am is (refreshingly for me this time) not like that. Each story is about realistic people in (for the most part) realistic conundrums of their own making.
There are 21 stories of varying length in this 220-page book, some of which are only a single page long. It’s incredible what Kispert has managed to do in so few words, story after story.
Each features a gay man protagonist, usually grappling with the consequences of a lie (or many lies) that he told. Some of these men are chronic liars, some have accidentally let the situation get out of control, some are just budding into early adulthood and trying to find their way, some lie out of survival or necessity. But every single one of them is fascinating and relatable.
I’m not usually a fan of plots in the form of train wrecks you can’t look away from (they stress me out, lol), but in this case, I was constantly surprised by how invested I was in each story — no matter its length. That Kispert could create such a rich world in a (very) short story is, to me, the most impressive part about this book. And I was rooting for every single protagonist, even when their true colors were … less than great. I didn’t want it to end!
“How to Live Your Best Life” is probably the story from this collection that will stick with me longest (please message me if you have read it lol I need to talk), but it’s impossible to pick favorites here. Peter Kispert will probably become an auto-buy author for me, just so I can learn from his craft.
Trigger Warnings
Death / grief
Self-harm and suicide
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
All the Stars and Teeth (All the Stars and Teeth, #1)
This is a fast-paced, easy to read, exciting YA fantasy novel. I liked it!
Author: Adalyn Grace
Publisher: Imprint
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
She will reign.
As princess of the island kingdom Visidia, Amora Montara has spent her entire life training to be High Animancer—the master of souls. The rest of the realm can choose their magic, but for Amora, it’s never been a choice. To secure her place as heir to the throne, she must prove her mastery of the monarchy’s dangerous soul magic.
When her demonstration goes awry, Amora is forced to flee. She strikes a deal with Bastian, a mysterious pirate: he’ll help her prove she’s fit to rule, if she’ll help him reclaim his stolen magic.
But sailing the kingdom holds more wonder — and more peril — than Amora anticipated. A destructive new magic is on the rise, and if Amora is to conquer it, she’ll need to face legendary monsters, cross paths with vengeful mermaids, and deal with a stow-away she never expected… or risk the fate of Visidia and lose the crown forever.
I am the right choice. The only choice. And I will protect my kingdom.
TL;DR Review
This is a fast-paced, easy to read, exciting YA fantasy novel. I liked it!
For you if: You like YA fantasy, strong female leads, pirates, and adventure.
Full Review
Thank you to Imprint and the Macmillan team, plus NetGalley, for the advanced review copy of this book. It will be published February 4, 2020.
All the Stars and Teeth is a fun, fast, exciting YA fantasy novel that I liked very much! I will be keeping an eye out for the sequel.
The main character is Amora, the princess of the kingdom of Visidia. Visidia is made up of several large islands, each one populated by people who practice a different type of magic. But only the royal family practice the dangerous soul magic, and the book opens with Amora on the eve of her birthday, preparing to demonstrate her mastery of soul magic in front of all her people and to claim her place as official heir.
As you can imagine (since it’s at the very beginning of the story), that doesn’t exactly go according to plan, and a debonair pirate saves her and convinces her to go on an adventure across Visidia to save their people from a growing threat that her father, the king, has been ignoring — and hiding from her.
In the beginning of this book (and a little bit throughout), Amora is kind of a brat. She’s full of herself and feels entitled to everything she has. But then Bastian comes into the picture, and I loved him right away. I also grew a huge soft spot for Ferrick, Amora’s betrothed (by family/royal arrangement). And, as you’d expect, Amora grows a lot throughout the book. I also expect that she’ll continue down that path of growth in future books of the series.
The magic system in this world is really creative and fascinating! Amora thought she had her magic all figured out, but now it seems like there is soooo much more that’s going to be revealed. And we barely got a look at other types of magic in the kingdom. But I can tell that we will soon!
One nice thing — especially since book one is barely published yet, much less the sequel — was that this book didn’t end on a huge cliffhanger. The characters’ arcs are obviously not wrapped up completely, but this particular story wasn’t left totally in the lurch. I do want to read the next one!
Trigger Warnings
Violence/gore
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Girl, Woman, Other
Girl, Woman, Other is a beautifully written, raw, and real look at women from all walks of life, today and in days past. I devoured every word.
Author: Bernadine Evaristo
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From one of Britain’s most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women. Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.
Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
TL;DR Review
Girl, Woman, Other is a beautifully written, raw, and real look at women from all walks of life, today and in days past. I devoured every word.
For you if: You are open to reading a hybrid between prose and poetry and don’t mind keeping track of many characters.
Full Review
“For the sisters & the sistas & the sistahs & the sistren & the women & the womxn & the wimmin & the womyn & our brethren & our bredrin & our brothers & our bruvs & our men & our mandem & the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.”
— the novel’s dedication
Girl, Woman, Other won the 2019 Booker Prize, and so I had very high expectations. They were not disappointed. This book is everything I love about literary fiction: raw and gutting language, a strong connection to humanity, joy and sorrow together, shared and unique experiences.
The format of the book is gloriously uncommon — somewhere between prose and poetry. Each paragraph is at most a sentence (and so they are often quite short), but there are no periods until the end of the section. Commas are used on purpose rather than according to “rules.” There is a cadence, a rhythm, and lines are often split strategically. I devoured it!
For example:
“she slipped free crusty pies filled with apple-flavoured lumps of sugar to the runway rent boys she befriended who operated around the station
with no idea that in years to come she’d be attending their funerals
they didn’t realize unprotected sex meant a dance with death
nobody did”
Each mini-chapter is told through the eyes of a different character, around 12 in all. They are different ages, races (although mostly Black), sexualities, and gender identities (although mostly cis). Their chapters are grouped into sets of three, with the three women connected to one another somehow. (For example, woman-daughter-best friend.) By the end, as you might expect, many of them end up loosely connected in some way.
But all of them have a unique experience that connects them to the broader shared experience of womanhood, whether they bulk of their story is happening today or happened long in the past. This is what won the Booker Prize; this is what makes this book worthy of your time.
How lucky are we to live in a time when books like this a) exist, b) are widely available, and c) win major literary prizes?
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault/rape
Domestic/relationship abuse
Child abuse/pedophilia/incest
Pregnancy/childbirth
Miscarriage
Racism and racial slurs
Transphobia and trans misogyny
Homophobia and heterosexism
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Written on the Body
Written on the Body is a scorching, poetic, desperate novel about desire. It’s told through the eyes of a gender-ambiguous narrator having an affair with a married woman.
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Johnathan Cape / Vintage International
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
TL;DR Review
Written on the Body is a scorching, poetic, desperate novel about desire. It’s told through the eyes of a gender-ambiguous narrator having an affair with a married woman.
For you if: You like poetic prose, and you can stop yourself from blushing when you read about sex in public.
Full Review
I met Jeanette Winterson in person at her launch event for Booker-prize-nominated Frankissstein at the Strand. It was, by far, the best and most unique book event I have ever attended. So when Shannon Pufahl (author of On Swift Horses) named Winterson’s Written on the Body as an example of queer literature that affected her most, I knew I had to read it.
This book is short, coming in just under 200 pages. It’s written in the first person of a narrator whose gender is never revealed — in fact, it’s written in a way that this person could be any gender, with hints in many different directions. (They also talk about former girlfriends and boyfriends.) What is clear, though, is that the narrator is desperately in love and lust with a woman named Louise, who is unhappily married.
The narrator takes us through the story of their affair, starting before it began and hinting at a desperate, heart-wrenching ending (?). It’s explicit and scorching, but different from what I had expected. Rather than narrating their time in bed together, the main character is more apt to describe the details of Louise’s body with desperate, sweeping language. It’s a lot of emotion and waxing poetic.
There is a section toward the end when the narrator is particularly devastated that just yanked out my gut. They are reading about anatomy, and as they move through different parts (skin, skeleton, nerve endings, senses, etc), they launch into pseudo-letters to Louise that are over the top and delicious and gorgeously written.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that this was different from what I’d expected going in but not a disappointment. I don’t think Jeanette Winterson could ever be a disappointment. This is must-read classic queer literature (is that a thing?). Read it.
Trigger Warnings
Miscarriage
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
The Priory of the Orange Tree
The Priory of the Orange Tree is an epic standalone fantasy novel that brings together excellent world-building, diversity, action, and beautiful storytelling. Read it.
Author: Samantha Shannon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A world divided.
A queendom without an heir.
An ancient enemy awakens.
The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction—but assassins are getting closer to her door.
Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.
Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.
Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.
TL;DR Review
The Priory of the Orange Tree is an epic standalone fantasy novel that brings together excellent world-building, diversity, action, and beautiful storytelling. Read it.
For you if: You like excellent fantasy novels and are looking for one that brings diversity to the genre.
Full Review
“You wear so much armour by daylight that, by night, you can carry it no longer. By night, you are only flesh. And even the flesh of a queen is prone to fear.
“In darkness, we are naked. Our truest selves. Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it. It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed — but never think that you are the night.”
I had very high expectations for The Priory of the Orange Tree. A lot of people whose opinion I trust very much said that it was excellent. In a genre filled with either trilogies or sweeping multi-book sagas, the idea of a standalone was refreshing. And I’d heard that the four main characters were round, complex, and diverse.
All of this proved true. I (a person who usually sleeps from 9:30pm to 5am) stayed up until 2am to finish this — on a weeknight. And even though this book is 800 pages long, I am not ready to leave this world behind. That’s a sign of a great world, a great cast of characters, and a great story.
The Priory of the Orange Tree follows four main characters across two vast continents. Tané, who aspires to become a revered dragon rider in the East; Niclays, an alchemist from the West who was exiled to the East; Ead, serving as lady-in-waiting to the Queen (with a secret agenda) in one of the most powerful Western countries; and Loth, friend of Ead and the Queen who has been exiled to a wyrm- and plague-infested country of the South.
In the East, dragons come from water and are friendly, god-like beings. In the West, they have wyrms, which come from fire and seek to destroy. This is the primary reason why the two sides of the world don’t get along; the Westerners think those from the East are wyrm-lovers, and the Easterners hate those from the West for scorning their gods. But there’s a big ole threat called The Nameless One, whose 1,000-year entrapment is coming to a close, and who will destroy the world if it can’t work together.
This world is ridiculously well-built. There are various religions, each with different beliefs about a long and complex history. There are varying forms of magic, each with a purpose and role to play. There are two (plus) seriously badass women leading societies that do not fall prey to what we know as traditional gender roles. There is a forbidden sapphic romance. There is just so freaking much.
The first section of this book (~250 pages) is a little slow — it’s focused on world-building and plot-setting and character-creating. Then the you-know-what hits the fan, and we’re off. Around page 300 I was utterly hooked. So stick around for the beginning, because I promise it will pay off.
Some have criticized this book for having a relatively short final confrontation. Personally, I think it was well done; I don’t really enjoy battle for battle’s sake, and this book was already so long. I would gladly have read through a longer conclusion, but I didn’t feel like it was lacking.
I was excited for this to be a standalone. Now I’m sad that it is — give me more. Give me prequels to this. Give me the battles of Glorian Berethnet and Cleolind’s slay of The Nameless One and short stories about Niclays’ romance. I’d eat it all up.
Trigger Warnings
Domestic abuse
Suicidal thoughts
Pregnancy
Miscarriage
Homophobia and heterosexism
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
The Greatest Guy in the World
The Greatest Guy in the World is a quick-hitting novella about what it means to be good, why we are good (or not), and who our people are. If you’re looking for a quick read with an impact, look no further.
Author: Ian K
Publisher: Self-published
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This book is self-published by the author. Click here to buy it and support his work.
Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
You help people, and they complain. They didn't ask for your help. You don't help people, and they complain. Where were you when they needed you? Everything hurts and life is ugly. What are you going to do now?
Excelsior is the world's greatest and oldest superhero leading the Group of Good, training the Junior League of Law, and of course, saving the world from the Phalanx of Fear. But when the world changes, will he be able to change with it?
TL;DR Review
The Greatest Guy in the World is a fun yet hard-hitting little novella that will squeeze your heart and make you think about what it means to be good.
For you if: You’re looking for a quick, impactful read. Also, you like super heroes.
Full Review
A hundred thanks to my friend Ian, the author of this big-hearted novella, for sending it my way. It brought me smiles, tugged at my heart, and made me think.
The Greatest Guy in the World is the story of super hero Excelsior, the last remaining member of the Group of Good. In their heyday, they were revered by the public as they defended the world from known and unknown dangers, including their nemeses, the Phalanx of Fear. They were good for good’s sake, because being the good guys is the right thing to do.
But now, with his friends gone or retired, it seems Excelsior can do no good. When he helps, the public tells him to butt out. When he doesn’t, they say where were you? Alone, depressed, and questioning his place in the universe, his therapist attempts to help him find his true reason for being.
This novella was SO much fun. The first chapter feels like the opening scene of The Incredibles, with villains and a bank robbery and a super hero and everything. We get some of that peppered throughout in flashbacks, too. The writing is very witty! It made me grin.
But it also packs a punch. What does it mean to be good? Can someone be good for good’s sake? Should they? Can people change? What do we do when our values shift? Who are our people, and what if they … aren’t anymore? Who does that make us?
This novella gives us so much to think about in so few words. I’m so glad to have read it.
Trigger Warnings
Suicidal thoughts / attempts
Mental illness
Heart of Junk
Heart of Junk is a laugh-inducing, refreshing little story that will tug at your heart strings harder than you expect. Every character is weird a lovable and well-written. I loved it.
Author: Luke Geddes
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
The city of Wichita, Kansas, is wracked with panic over the abduction of toddler pageant princess Lindy Bobo. However, the dealers at The Heart of America Antique Mall are too preoccupied by their own neurotic compulsions to take much notice. Postcards, perfume bottles, Barbies, vinyl records, kitschy neon beer signs—they collect and sell it all.
Rather than focus on Lindy, this colorful cast of characters is consumed by another drama: the impending arrival of Mark and Grant from the famed antiques television show Pickin’ Fortunes, who are planning to film an episode at The Heart of America and secretly may be the last best hope of saving the mall from bankruptcy. Yet the mall and the missing beauty queen have more to do with each other than these vendors might think, and before long, the group sets in motion a series of events that lead to surprising revelations about Lindy’s whereabouts. As the mall becomes implicated in her disappearance, will Mark and Grant be scared away from all of the drama or will they arrive in time to save The Heart of America from going under?
Equally comical and suspenseful, Heart of Junk is also a biting commentary on our current Marie Kondo era. It examines why certain objects resonate with us so deeply, rebukes Kondo’s philosophy of wholesale purging, and argues that “junk” can have great value — connecting us not only to our personal pasts but to our shared human history. As author Luke Geddes writes: “A collection was a record of a life lived, maybe not well or happily but at least with attention and passion. It was autobiography made whole.”
TL;DR Review
Heart of Junk is a laugh-inducing, refreshing little story that will tug at your heart strings harder than you expect. Every character is weird a lovable and well-written. I loved it.
For you if: You’re looking for a good giggle, and maybe to have your heart cracked open a little bit.
Full Review
Big thank you to the folks over at Simon & Schuster for sending me an advanced review copy of this book! You were right, this was right up my alley, and I’m so glad to have read it. It comes out January 21st.
Me at the end of chapter 1: “Oh my gosh, this book is going to be hilarious.”
Me at the end of chapter 3: “Oh my gosh, this book is going to break my heart.”
Heart of Junk is a story about a dying antique market told through the eyes of several characters — the market’s owner, his daughter, and several of the booth renters. Each one of them is super quirky and unique, and although it’s written in third person, Geddes brings each of their voices out loud and clear in each chapter’s narration. It’s funny and moving at the same time.
The premise is this: There’s a big TV show coming to tape an episode about the Heart of America, their sprawling and struggling antique market in Wichita, KS. Many of our characters have convinced themselves that the filming could solve the most pressing of their problems, but there’s a snag: A local little girl is missing, and it might keep the show from filming after all. One of our characters knows what happened to her, though.
Told in the span of five days, we wonder — will she be found? Will the show come to town after all? How on earth might this story wrap up on a hopeful note? Will Margaret admit the thing she’s denying? Will Lee and Seymour be okay? Will Kieth get some relief? etc etc etc
I expected to laugh with this one, but I didn’t expect to get walloped in the heart so many times! Geddes dives into and out of the seriousness of the situation, hooking you and bringing you to the brink of emotional release, only to drop in with perfectly timed comedic relief and show you that yes, these characters’ struggles are serious and worthy of your heart space, but also, let’s laugh because why not?
This was a great story to start the year with — light enough to be oodles of fun, but serious enough to feel like more than pure entertainment. I highly recommend.
Trigger Warnings
Body hatred and fat phobia
Kidnapping and abduction
Homophobia and heterosexism
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Lirael (Abhorsen Trilogy/Old Kingdom, #2)
Lirael is a great sequel to Sabriel. It had two lovable characters, an intriguing mystery, and (bonus!) another amazing pet.
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: HarperCollins
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
In this sequel to the critically acclaimed Sabriel, Garth Nix draws readers deeper into the magical landscape of the Old Kingdom.
Lirael has never felt like a true daughter of the Clayr. Abandoned by her mother, ignorant of her father's identity, Lirael resembles no one else in her large extended family living in the Clayr's glacier. She doesn't even have the Sight—the ability to see into possible futures—that is the very birthright of the Clayr. Nevertheless she must undertake a desperate mission under the growing shadow of an ancient evil—one that opposes the Royal Family, blocks the Sight of the Clayr, and threatens to break the very boundary between Life and Death itself. With only her faithful companion, the Disreputable Dog, to help her, Lirael must find the courage to seek her own hidden destiny.
TL;DR Review
Lirael is a great sequel to Sabriel. It had two lovable characters, an intriguing mystery, and (bonus!) another amazing pet.
For you if: You like adult fantasy novels told in a classic style.
Full Review
First of all, I know it’s sort of a crime that I’ve gotten this far in life without having read Garth Nix. But I am now! You can check out my review of the first book, Sabriel, here.
Sabriel itself is an unexpected first book in that there’s no cliffhanger at the end. It could easily have been a standalone novel. So I wasn’t sure where Lirael was going to pick up or how it was going to connect. Turns out we have a whole new cast of characters, with the old ones in the background of the story. This book broke the mold again though, ending more like a typical book two that needs a book three to finish off the plot.
I’m not going to say too much here because I’ll have lots of thoughts on the whole trilogy when I finish Abhorsen, but I did love Lirael (despite her slight whininess in the beginning, which I can forgive her for), I was rooting for Sam the whole time, and I am completely in love with the Disreputable Dog. The fact that each of these books so far has had a snarky magical pet is THE BEST.
Trigger Warnings
Suicidal thoughts
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.
Redwood and Ponytail
This is a book about two 12-year-old girls who “fall in like” with one another, told entirely in poetry. If that’s not all you need to know to know that this book is EVERYTHING, what are you looking for?
Told in verse in two voices, with a chorus of fellow students, this is a story of two girls, opposites in many ways, who are drawn to each other; Kate appears to be a stereotypical cheerleader with a sleek ponytail and a perfectly polished persona, Tam is tall, athletic and frequently mistaken for a boy, but their deepening friendship inevitably changes and reveals them in ways they did not anticipate.
Author: K.A. Holt | Publisher: Chronicle Books
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Rating: 5 / 5
Big thanks to the team at Chronicle Books for sending me a finished copy of this beautiful little novel in exchange for an honest review!
Here is pretty much everything you need to know about this book in order to know how great it is: Redwood and Ponytail is a novel about two 12-year-old girls who “fall in like” with one another and then work their way through all the joys and difficulties that come with that — and it’s written entirely in poetry. That’s it, that’s the review.
No, just kidding. But if that doesn’t make you go “YES I NEED THAT,” then I’m not sure what else you’re looking for. This book will help so many young people (and doubtless many older people, too) and is so transparent and sweet. I read it in one sitting, and my little heart practically exploded.
Everyone knows Kate, and Tam knows everyone. Kate (who always wears a perfect ponytail) is on track to become captain of the cheerleading squad, just like her mother always wanted. Tam (who is tall, like a redwood) is the star of the volleyball team and high-fives all her classmates in the hallways. But the day 7th grade starts, they’re drawn to each other in a way they can’t explain — yet.
I really, really loved the way K.A. Holt used echoes, flip-flopping the same lines in two perspectives. That was really beautiful and effective at bringing the experiences Tam and Kate were simultaneously having to life. It showed how similar and different they were to one another, and it called forward the common experience of our shared humanity.
Normal People
Much has been written about the literary genius that is Sally Rooney. This was actually my first of her books, but it won’t be the last. Normal People was just as wonderful as everyone says it is.
At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers — one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.
Author: Sally Rooney | Publisher: Hogarth Press
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Rating: 5 / 5
“Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”
Much has been written about the literary genius that is Sally Rooney. Her ability to use words to cut, soothe, emote, build, break, etc etc etc is incredible, and it’s no wonder she’s become a modern classic in and of herself. This was actually my first of her books, but it won’t be the last. Normal People was just as wonderful as everyone says it is.
The story follows two main characters from high school through college and into young adulthood. Marianne, in high school, is a free-thinking, severely introverted outcast with a wealthy but toxic family. Connell is a well-liked but somewhat reserved athlete whose mother is Marianne’s family’s house cleaner. They are drawn together magnetically, but (to be frank, and excuse my expletive) Connell really fucks it all up. At college, surrounded by wealthy, privileged students, the tables turn and it is Marianne who is well-liked and Connell who is socially alone.
They continue to crash into and away from one another as the years go by. Throughout, we learn about their deepest hearts. And it’s hard to explain beyond that — just, their deepest hearts. Their wounds, their trauma, their desperation, and their humanity. And tbh, I may never recover. I kind of hope I don’t.
Sally Rooney, with one book, has become an auto-buy author for me. She’s that good.
Long Bright River
This book is very good. Despite its length at over 450 pages, I read it in only a few sittings. The chapters are short and the narration moves quickly, and it pulls you all the way through to the end.
In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.
Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit — and her sister — before it's too late.
Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.
Author: Liz Moore | Publisher: Riverhead
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Rating: 4.5 / 5
Long Bright River is another highly anticipated early-2020 release. It will be published January 7th, but it was a December 2019 Book of the Month option, so a lot of people have had the chance to read it early. These early reviews are positive, and mine is no different — this book is very good. Despite its length at over 450 pages, I read it in only a few sittings. The chapters are short and the narration moves quickly, and it pulls you all the way through to the end.
The main character and narrator is Mickey, a single mother and police officer in Philadelphia. Her neighborhood is Kensington, which was once a bustling manufacturing hub but is now home to a lot of people down on their luck, including a lot of people with substance abuse problems. One of those people is Mickey’s little sister, Kacey. Then a string of murders begins in Kensington at the same time Kacey goes missing, and Mickey is yanked into both mysteries with force, with a couple of well-placed twists along the way.
I wouldn’t characterize this book as a thriller, but more as a slow-burn mystery with family drama thrown in. The plot is there, yes, and it picks up the closer you get to the end of the book, and eventually you are really turning pages. But this one is just as much about sisterhood, and class, and privilege, and family, and belonging, and parenthood. It’s a sort of love letter to the city of Philadelphia and Kensington in particular.
Liz Moore is an exacting and insightful writer. Mickey’s character is impressive, especially considering her reserved nature, her unwillingness to supply information, to emote — and it’s told in the first person. To be able to provide such a rich picture of her and stay true to her nature in the narration? So, so effective.
This is sure to be a big hit in the early months of 2020!
Ducks, Newburyport
Ducks, Newburport is, without a doubt, the most creative and interesting book I have read in a very long time, perhaps ever. I’m not surprised it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I am, however, shocked that it did not win.
Peeling apple after apple for the tartes tatin she bakes for local restaurants, an Ohio mother wonders how to exist in a world of distraction and fake facts, besieged by a tweet-happy president and trigger-happy neighbors, and all of them oblivious to what Dupont has dumped into the rivers and what’s happening at the factory farm down the interstate ― not to mention what was done to the land’s first inhabitants. A torrent of consciousness, narrated in a single sentence by a woman whose wandering thoughts are as comfortably familiar as they are heart-rending in their honesty, Ducks, Newburyport is a fearless indictment of our contemporary moment.
Author: Lucy Ellmann | Publisher: Biblioasis
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Rating: 5 / 5
“Chuck, my shoebox full of Chuck’s letters in the attic, Malone, Molly Malone, the fact that the Ohio State Fair has piglet racing, piglet racing, Piglet, boarlets, a hundred billion chickens, Chiclets, “Buck up”, the fact that after Chuck, I still believed in people getting together, but after Frank, not so much, the fact that Leo cured me, the fact that Leo makes me feel better about everything, Paris, hummingbirds, baguettes, symbiosis, osmosis, two-car garage, the fact that it takes guts to love somebody and I just lost my courage there for a while, panthers, pearl tea, bubble tea, the fact that Stacy used to like them when she was younger, tea bubbles, not panthers,”
Ducks, Newburport is, without a doubt, the most creative and interesting book I have read in a very long time, perhaps ever. The premise of the book — 1,000 pages written in one sentence — sounds like it would be obnoxious, but it’s absolutely not. It’s surprising, and engrossing, and heartbreaking, and emotional, and genius. And I enjoyed literally every page. I’m not surprised it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I am, however, shocked that it did not win.
The style of the quote I included above is how nearly the whole book is written: a single stream of thoughts and word associations, written as a single run-on sentence, broken up by commas and “the fact that.” Through this monologue, we learn more and more about our narrator and her life. Her stream of consciousness is broken up every once in a while (perhaps every 50-75 pages, although it’s not uniform) by short bursts of narration (this time written in short, declarative, powerful, punchy sentences) about a nearby mountain lion and her cubs.
The reader spends all 1,000 pages rooting for the narrator, wanting desperately to hug her, cheering her on, wondering how the mountain lion comes into all of this. And by the last page, the reader is reeling, bursting, applauding, and feeling just all the emotions.
The narrator is very socially conscious, dwelling on climate change and gun violence and animal abuse and all sorts of things about society today. And she doesn’t have a lot of self-esteem, but through all this we come to know her as a fierce, loving, protective mother who deserves a lot more credit than she gives herself. I read an interview with Lucy Ellmann once where she basically said, yes, I am trying to shock you with all this stuff, and no, I don’t care if it’s uncomfortable. Lucy, you succeeded, and you are a genius.
I read 15 pages of this book a day over several months, and that format worked pretty well for me. I highly recommend it to absolutely anyone who appreciates creativity in writing, who is looking to be moved, or who is looking for a literary challenge in 2020. Ducks will ask a lot of you, but it will reward you for your time and effort, I promise.
Such a Fun Age
Such a Fun Age is compulsively readable, with social issues that are very deserving of our attention and a plot that just won’t let you look away. I read it in just one evening + the following morning.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living showing other women how to do the same. A mother to two small girls, she started out as a blogger and has quickly built herself into a confidence-driven brand. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night. Seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, a security guard at their local high-end supermarket accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make it right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family,” the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
Author: Kiley Reid | Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
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Rating: 4 / 5
Such a Fun Age is perhaps the first highly anticipated book of 2020 (or is it the last highly anticipated book of 2019, since it's technically going to be published on 12/31/19?). It’s compulsively readable, with social issues that are very deserving of our attention and a plot that just won’t let you look away. I read it in just one evening + the following morning.
The story opens when Emira, a 25-year-old Black woman living in Philadelphia, is called away from her friend’s birthday party to emergency babysit (an egg was thrown through their window, and mother Alix wanted to get 3-year-old Briar out of the house before the police came to make a report). Emira takes Briar to the grocery store down the street, and a middle-aged white woman alerts a security guard. The two confront Emira, thinking she kidnapped Briar. A man records the incident on his phone.
Everything is cleared up quickly, but the incident sends the book’s plot spiraling forward from there. Along the way, we see inside Alix’s desire to win Emira over, become close with her, turn her into a sort of project. We see Emira’s desire to move her life forward and stay in Briar’s life, which she knows conflict with one another. And we see the effect a third person from Alix’s past has on their relationship, for better or worse.
This book is a well-written story of contemporary fiction, acting as both entertainment and lens of difficult truths. Kiley Reid has launched an impressive debut that many, many people are going to love very much. This one will make the rounds at book clubs and remain on bookshelf tables for many months to come.
I personally gave it 4 stars because this kind of story is not my favorite to read — the contemporary story with a bit of soap-opera-type drama. I don’t love to spiral through conflict, seeing the inevitable train wreck ahead the whole time. But I do know a lot of people love books like this, and I think this will be no different! So if that sounds like your thing, definitely pick this one up.