A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All in Contemporary Fiction
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) is a gut-punch of YA novel. Starr, the novel’s high school protagonist, exists between two worlds. She lives in the poor, predominately Black, neighborhood of Garden Heights; she attends high school in an upper-middle class, predominately white suburb.
Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, A Place for Us (2018) is a touching a family drama punctuated on modern American issues, particularly those of immigrant families.
Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and the New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem). From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day.
Max Porter does something both unique and disquieting in his novel Lanny (2019). Set in a sleepy English village (within commuting distance of London) in modern time, Lanny is family drama set amidst the cacophony of villager voices as overheard by mystical, other-worldly Dead Papa Toothwort.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s debut novel The Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018) is a powerful articulation of life in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s and is a wonderful example of Own Voices narrative. Told predominately from young Chula’s perspective as she looks back on her comfortable life in a gated community in Bogotá, from the refugee life she comes to inhabit in LA, this story shines light on the traumas many immigrant families veil in silence once they arrive on American soil.
In Alka Joshi’s debut, historical fiction novel, The Henna Artist (2020), Lakshmi Shastri, the henna artist premier in 1950s Jaipur, recounts her story.
Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings (2020) presents a beautiful, and at times raw, look at the life of women in first century Israel and Egypt. Ana, from whose first-person perspective the story unfolds, is the daughter of the local regent’s head scribe. She comes of age in a world of strict social and class roles, rigid along gender lines, in Sepphoris of Galilee in the early years of Common Era.
Through the intimate voice a sister writing her closest living brother, as well as the thoughts in her Marriage Diary, The Wright Sister (2020) describes and unpacks the most private of life’s details, but in succinct, often poetic or humorous, terms. The novel progresses through Katharine’s letters to Orv and her marriage diary entries from fall of 1926 to spring of 1929 when she faces her first truly solo flight.
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) includes some of the most moving fictional explorations of courtship and childbirth, maternity and pandemic, grief and loss, that I have read of late. Ultimately, this novel grapples with the ways that parents can move on after the unthinkable happens and they lose a child to illness; a part of that story, O’Farrell’s novel argues, as literary critics before her have, is William Shakespeare’s penning of his famous tragedy Hamlet, an act that may provide healing for both himself and his relationship with Agnes.
Told from the first-person perspective of young Patroclus, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012) reanimates the classical story of famous Achilles for today’s reader.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep that has carries many more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa massacre of migration out of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future.
One of José Saramago’s famous novels, Blindness (1995, English translation in 1997), explores the brutal fall-out of a world beset by a pandemic of blindness.
After reading it slowly over the course of nearly six months, I realized that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is in many ways a book that defies categorization. It is so novel in its craft and so touching in its humanity. The Overstory challenges its human reader to look beyond the human and greet all the living.
Set predominately in the far northern town of Vardø, in Finnmark, Norway from 1617-1621, this is a novel punctuated by the harshness of both the natural world and human viciousness. The Mercies fictionalizes historical events. A devastating storm on Christmas Eve of 1617 killed nearly all of the town’s men; Hargrave begins her novel on that day. In the pages that follow she weaves two women’s stories together and The Mercies builds toward brutal witch trials in the years after the great storm.
From its dedication page on, it is clear that Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop (2013) addresses grief and mortality. Yet themes of love, human connection and self-healing percolate as the adventures of George’s protagonist bookseller, middle-aged Jean Perdu, develop.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) is a beautiful novel about two Nigerian kids who fall in love but whom life separates as young adults. Adichie’s novel follows the young adult lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, as they grow up in Nigeria, study at Nigerian university, and ultimately find ways to leave Nigeria in the hope of making a better life. Their love story, coupled with their individual experiences maneuvering new cultures and countries, make this novel compelling and illuminating.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a story about the complicated nature of mother-daughter relations, compounded by the unshared, unknown, unspoken backgrounds of the immigrant mothers. The novel takes the reader through all eight women’s perspectives, from late 20th century San Francisco to China many years prior.
Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel The Far Field (2019) transports its reader to modern day India. This novel is a confession by thirty-year-old Shalini. She self-consciously tells her story as she leaves her native Bangalore in search of one man from Kashmir who touched her childhood. Her journey is a sort of coming-of-age even though she is in her mid-twenties when she sets off. Intertwined with her travels, Shalini reflects on her childhood and the lives of her mother and father. Ultimately her trip leads Shalini to the poverty, community, and brutality found in conflict-rife Kashmir.
Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012) brings a Russian fairytale amidst the Alaskan wilderness. The novel begins in the 1920s when Mabel and Jack, recently transplanted from their native Pennsylvania, face their second winter on their Alaskan homestead.
Book review of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ debut novel The Water Dancer (2019). From its first sentence—the rambling, fluid 100-word sentence/paragraph—Coates establishes The Water Dancer (both in diction and style) as a story about memory and one closely tied to water. This novel eloquently re-frames the Underground Railroad story, placing it in the intimate and profoundly personal experience of his protagonist, Hiram Walker.
