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All in Recommendations
Demon Copperhead is a smart, hard-hitting modern retelling of David Copperfield that hits all the right notes. I’m not surprised it’s winning so many awards.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a fast-paced, well-written, bookish standalone fantasy that I absolutely adored. It’s been a long time since a book made me want to text live updates to someone who’d already read it!
Chain-Gang All-Stars is a searing, extremely smart, and compulsively readable novel about incarceration, the use of Black lives as entertainment, and so much more. You gotta read it.
Emily Henry does it again! Happy Place is not only a fun read with a fun combination of tropes, it’s also deeply felt with a realistic, heartbreaking central conflict.
Take What You Need is a quick but heartbreaking read about an estranged stepmother and stepdaughter with geographic, class, and political divides. The character and conflict work is just incredible.
White Cat, Black Dog is a delightfully weird little collection of stories inspired by fairy tales and folklore. It’s funny and layered and excellent.
Running While Black is the perfect blend of memoir and hard-hitting social commentary. Desir’s focus on the running world is both narrow (making it feel particularly fascinating) and broad (illustrating its necessity.
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is an unconventional, heartbreaking, extremely beautiful book about a woman dying of cancer. It’s part poetry, part narrative, and unlike anything else.
I absolutely loved What We Fed to the Manticore. It’s a collection of beautifully rendered short stories, all from the perspective of animals, ruminating on grief, hope, war, and climate change. Please read it.
Dyscalculia is a hard-hitting, strikingly original little book about a messy breakup amid the author’s lifelong struggle with trauma and mental illness. It’s a very quick read that will definitely make for a strong reread.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is an adventurous, swashbuckling, gloriously fun time with an incredible cast of characters. It’s the start of a series (but feels like a standalone) and I can’t wait for more in this world!
A Day of Fallen Night is a fantastically rendered standalone fantasy novel. It has everything you could want: dragons, queendoms, mystery, battles, politics, and multiple POVs spanning four continents.
In Springtime is a narrative book of poetry that meditates on caregiving, identity, grief, and nature. It’s a quick but moving read, and I enjoyed it very much.
Stone Blind is another tragic, polyphonic work of art from Natalie Haynes — this time focused on one storyline (Medusa’s). Fans of A Thousand Ships will like this!
A Monster Calls is a magical and deeply moving early-YA novel about grief in the wake of a parent’s death and the range of very human emotions that come with it. I sobbed, dear reader. Sobbed!
Brotherless Night is a beautiful and heartbreaking and powerful novel about one girl’s coming-of-age during the Sri Lankan civil war. I absolutely loved it.
The Bandit Queens is a smart, darkly funny novel about a community of women who team up to kill their abusive husbands. It’s equal parts delightful and devastating.
The New Life is a well-written and deeply emotional novel about experiences of queerness in late-1800s London. I loved it.
The Good Life is one of those rare “self-help” books that actually uses all its pages well. I really appreciated the way it not only presented the research but also provided helpful, actionable tools to carry to its advice in real life.
Elizabeth Strout has done it again. Anything Is Possible is a beautiful and tender of a portrait of a community told through the eyes of its people, one story at a time.
