Home Fire is a quick but hard-hitting read about xenophobia. It’s a raw, emotional, expertly crafted novel that asks readers to examine their own morality.

I found Actress to be beautiful on a sentence level, but it felt just okay to me overall. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t feel as connected to it as I’d hoped.

Brutal, raw, and incredibly told, The Glorious Heresies will grab your heart when you’re not looking and then crack it wide open. I can see why it won so many prizes.

Kept Animals is an incredibly paced, gutting novel about growing up, fitting in, navigating class, and the reverberations of choices and trauma.

How to Be Both is a fascinating novel broken into two parts, which can be read in any order. I enjoyed it and I’m eager to read more Ali Smith.

Reading this book felt like sinking into a pile of fall leaves wrapped in a plaid blanket with candles lit and a mug of hot apple cider. I haven’t read Practical Magic, but it seems like a fantastic prequel.

Approachable but with significant depth, Transcendent Kingdom is contemporary literary fiction at its finest. I really, really enjoyed it, even though it was a tough read at times.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is devastatingly incredible, but also technically challenging and possibly the most emotionally difficult book I’ve read. But incredible.

The New Wilderness is an immersive, quietly excellent book about survival, motherhood, growing up, and the beauty of the world around us. I really liked it.

May We Be Forgiven is about a man who finds a sense of family after his brother suffers a violent mental break. It was well-written, but not quite my favorite.

Hamnet — a historical imagining about the death of William Shakespeare’s son — is so incredibly good. So beautiful, so sad, so impressive.

The Tiger’s Wife is so, so beautiful and compelling. This is storytelling at its best, and I’ll be recommending it for probably the rest of my life.

I totally loved A Song of Wraiths and Ruin. It has a fantastic tangly plot, intensely lovable characters, and a top-notch ending.

The stories in Daddy is certainly well crafted. But I think I’m in the minority in that these stories just didn’t really compel me through them.

Black Light is a really solid short story collection. Each story is compelling, well-written, and connected to something deeply human.

The Nickel Boys is not an easy read. But it is worth all the hype, and it absolutely deserved the Pulitzer it won.

The Mirror and the Light is a feat of a conclusion to the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. It feels more like Wolf Hall than Bring Up the Bodies, but the ending was really excellent.

The Lacuna is an incredible feat of a novel that weaves real people and events together with expert fictional character-building. I can see why it is so acclaimed!

Home is a beautiful, unique sequel to Gilead, and I really enjoyed it.