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.

Is Rape a Crime? is a scorching, no-holds-barred work that’s part memoir, part investigation into a society that refuses to treat rape like the felony that it is.

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.

White Tears/Brown Scars is a thoughtfully researched, convincingly argued, incredibly important book that should be required reading for white people everywhere.

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.

So You Want to Talk About Race is a solid, foundational book about antiracism with even more depth than the title implies.

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.

Reclaiming Her Time is an upbeat, vibrant biography of Maxine Waters that’s full of personality. It was a ton of fun to read, and I also learned a lot I didn’t know.

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!