I make this list with the caveat that there’s ten days left in this year and it’s theoretically possible that I could find a book that would knock another off of this list. However, I don’t see it as being likely, so here we go:
10. The Good Sister – Sally Hepworth Why it makes top 10: This was one of the most intense thrillers I’ve ever read, because the characters felt so realistic. I knew something was off from pretty early on (and knowing that this wasn’t just a book about two happy sisters was an obvious clue) but I had no idea how much the revelation would knock me off my feet. If nothing else, it’s one of the BEST examples of an unreliable narrator I’ve ever read.
9. Six of Crows – Leigh Bardugo Why it makes top 10: This one took me a little while to get into. When I listened to it on Audible, I hadn’t read anything else in the Grishaverse, which put me at a disadvantage. But once I got my bearings, it became an incredibly fun fantasy heist novel. Bardugo builds some very compelling characters, and you’re rooting for them even when they’re working against one another.
8. Hour of the Witch – Chris Bohjalian Why it makes top 10:Hour of the Witch punched me in the gut several times. It has some intense spousal abuse and gaslighting. But through it all, I was rooting for the main character like none other. The story had me guessing which way it was going to turn out until the very end, and it was a very I MUST FIND OUT HOW THIS ENDS read.
7. The People We Keep – Allison Larkin Why it makes top 10: Simply put, one of the best “found family” books I’ve read. Even when the main character is making absurdly frustrating decisions, your love for the supporting cast will keep you rooting for her.
6. For The Wolf – Hannah Whitten Why it makes top 10: I read this book in less than 48 hours. Unless it’s a very tiny book (and this wasn’t), that deserves some recognition. It’s a wonderfully twisted fairy tale that takes Little Red Riding Hood and fleshes it out into a super interesting mythos. Never did I think I would be wanting Red to get together with the Wolf, but this book made that happen. I CANNOT WAIT for the sequel.
Pull up a chair, maybe grab a notebook. I’ve found a book worth dissecting. I need to do this more often – think about books from their bones and sinews, rather than just how much I enjoy them. But alas, I am a devourer of books first (and one on a tight reading deadline), so I don’t always take the time to think about how a book worked.
Or in this case, how it didn’t.
It’s not that this book was particularly bad or unenjoyable. I suspect that, if you’re someone who can throw themselves into a story without thinking about any of the mechanics, you would like this book a lot more than I did. But I know a little too much about writing, and I read a little too much not to feel like I saw behind the curtain the whole time. With that said, let’s dive in.
Italian Moon is about a family in Italy primarily in the space between the world wars, but touching on a little of both at the bookends of the story. There are a couple of things to note from the tag line on the cover: one, that it’s inspired by a true story, and two, it covers the rise of fascism. The author, as it turns out, is the direct descendant of the family, which makes me both a little more sympathetic and also helps me understand why this book doesn’t work for me. Let me be up front about this – I completely understand why the author would want to write this story. The bones of it are fascinating, and if it were my family, I would want to write it too. But I believe she’s a little too close to the story to do it well, and it should have been more heavily edited or left to a ghost writer.
I’ve read quite a bit of historical fiction inspired by true events, and it can be done very well. In particular, I’d recommend Lauren Willig’s Band of Sisters – while I’m partial to Willig, she does a phenomenal job of taking a mostly true story and making it sparkle. But Italian Moon suffers from leaning too heavily on what I believe to be the facts of the story. When writing about her great grandparents falling in love, the story feels very stiff, as though the author either felt awkward writing about her family, or didn’t feel like she could take liberties. If I were writing about my family, I would tension in trying to embellish – afraid that an aunt would chase me down to scold me about how my grandmother never would have said or did such a thing. The result is that early on in the book, when we should be connecting with our characters and preparing to ride out their plight with them, we’re left at arm’s length.
That brings me to the cardinal sin of this book: it does a lot of telling, and not nearly enough showing. If you’ve ever written a novel, or taken writing classes, you know exactly what I mean. There’s a huge difference between “Vizzi walked to the top of the stairs, afraid that he would be caught.” and “Vizzi tip toed up the wooden stairs, the pounding of his heart threatening to give him away.” Your language doesn’t have to be overly flowery, and certainly there is a time to get to the point, but you need to have enough description to make your reader feel connected to your plot and characters. If they might as well be reading a history textbook, you’ve done it wrong.
In comparison to the above, my other quibbles with the book feel minor, but I’m still going to note some of them. For a book that is labeled as being about the rise of fascism, something that would set it apart from most other WWII books, it feels like a minor footnote to the story. I would have liked to see a lot more of it woven into the plot, more so than “so and so had a bad feeling about that Mussolini guy”. While there is some tension in the family as some of the members support Mussolini and others do not, there’s no real consequences for it, and doesn’t do much for the overall story. Meanwhile, in one particularly dramatic section, our heroine’s husband is gravely injured, and since he is an ocean away, we’re left wondering if he will survive. A letter arrives in the hometown, but is intercepted by our heroine’s sister, who is not a very nice person. She tosses the letter aside, and our main character is left to wonder about her husband’s fate for the next ten years. However, there is no real closure on this issue. The treachery is never dealt with – I’m not entirely sure the sister is even really mentioned again in the story. Even if this is historically accurate, in a fictional story, loose threads like this don’t make for a satisfying story.
So all that to say, while I understand why the author would want to write this story, I wish she’d sacrificed more of the accuracy in order to make a satisfying novel. While it’s a quick read, I can’t really recommend this book, sadly, though as of this posting, it is still free with Kindle Unlimited if you want to check it out. Despite my criticism, I hope the author continues to write and evolve. I think she is capable of telling some interesting stories – they just need a little more finesse in order to really shine.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
This book is perfection, and it should be required reading. I’d say that’s all you need to know, but it would make for one very short post.
If you’ve somehow managed to miss out on this book, it’s non-fiction. Though the book is largely about race, it also covers class and gender – the other ways we tend to label people without knowing them. The book goes through the ways that having a caste system affects, permeates and damages societies, looking at India, America and nazi Germany.
What makes this book a phenomenal read is the stories it contains. It’s one thing to read facts about lynching, but it’s another to read about a boy being shoved off a cliff into a river to drown while his father was held and forced to watch because the boy sent a valentine to a white classmate. Or that Germany actually took notes on how America managed to oppress citizens so well without public uprising and used these tactics in the 1930’s and 40’s.
Nothing I write can do this book justice. It’s a heavy read, for sure, but a worthy one. The fact is, until we take a hard look at the history of our country and how we’ve treated each other, until we really grapple with how that affects us, and until we actively take steps to do better, we won’t have any lasting change. We can’t walk towards the light unless we admit that we’re in the darkness. We can do better, but will we?
You will be challenged, you will be brokenhearted, and you will be angry. But let it change the way you see the world, and the systemic problems that keep people oppressed. But first read the book, and then pass it on.
