All in Fiction
I learned about The Orchardist from one of our L&L Readers, Kathleen, who included it on a list of her top five books of the year that she emailed to us. (Shuggie Bain, reviewed in March 2021, was also on that list.) Thank goodness for reader recommendations or I may have missed this truly unforgettable book.
Raven Leilani writes with a brilliant blend of urgency and humor in Luster. Her protagonist Edie finds herself sexually entangled with an older male colleague, who himself is in an open marriage. Edie is a twenty-something, Black woman and the married couple is older and white. Leilani explores the dynamics of this threesome across race and class and propels Luster to a level far beyond what could sound like a soap opera trope.
Like many readers I suspect, my only Zora Neale Hurston experience was reading (and loving) Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school. Although I remember truly enjoying the book, I didn’t remember much about the author, and so was glad to find this short story collection comes with a lengthy intro. It reminded me about her rise to fame at a time when Black fiction was scarce and Black, female authors almost entirely unknown.
Yaa Gyasi has been on my radar for a while, but somehow I have never read her award-winning first novel Homegoing. (It won at least four major literary prizes.). But now that I have read her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, I cannot wait to read her first. Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama and draws on those experiences in Transcendent Kingdom. With prose so succinct and beautiful it reads like poetry, Gyasi tells the story of Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford University.
With an author as prolific as Margaret Atwood, it seems I can always find another of her books to read. I don’t remember how this 2015 novel made its way onto my reading list, but it is a fascinating story with plenty of psychological tricks and thrills, like so many of Atwood’s better-known works.
I had never heard of this book until Kathleen, a friend of a friend and a reader of L & L, wrote my editor and me an email which included her favorite recent reads. It makes me so happy to hear from readers–and to get book recommendations. Please, keep them coming!
This beautifully written novel somehow manages to feel like a meditation or poetry while simultaneously spinning out the story of two lives over a sixty-year span. Yuki Oyama is a young Japanese girl growing up in New York in the 60s. When her parents decide to return to Japan, she chooses to stay with a friend to finish her high school years in America.
The author Margot Livesay has been on the periphery of my reading consciousness for a while and yet I had never read anything she’d written until The Boy In The Field. This, her tenth novel, is beautifully written and masterfully crafted, with a haunting story that has remained with me since I finished it weeks ago. I am always thrilled to discover an author that I enjoy who has written lots of other books for me to explore!
Was there a more highly recommended book published this year than The Vanishing Half? It appears on everyone’s “Best-of 2020” reading lists and was recommended to me by friends and by my son. Naturally, I had very high expectations for the book, and it mostly came through for me. Bennett follows twin teenage sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes as they run away from their small, southern, Black community to the big city of New Orleans and a life of freedom together.
Just about one year ago, Random House put out its list of best books of the decade to celebrate entering the 2020s. Little did they know that this book about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago in the 80s would resonate so strongly as we all face a widespread and lethal epidemic in the first year of this new decade.
One of the things I have appreciated most in books this year is their ability to completely transport me to another place or time or culture. Although The Girl With The Louding Voice was not always a happy journey, I was completely absorbed and would emerge from each reading session dazed.
I take great pleasure in getting a book recommendation from a friend and finding that I love the book as much as they did. My friend, Jane and I almost always agree on books. So when she urged both my husband and me to read The River, I figured it had to be good. It is excellent. I love everything about this book.
Last month when I reviewed The Black Flamingo, I described how much I enjoyed its novel-in-verse format. By sheer coincidence shortly after writing that review, I read Clap When You Land, another novel written in verse for the young adult audience that offers plenty to adult readers too. I read this book cover-to-cover one rainy Saturday and found it an engrossing and entertaining escape.
Writers & Lovers is one of the best fiction books I have read this year. If you haven’t discovered Lily King (the author, not my co-editor), then you have a real treat awaiting you. Her previous book Euphoria was stellar and Writers & Lovers follows suit.
In Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld uses historical facts to create a novel about Hillary Rodham and how her life might have turned out had she turned down Bill Clinton’s marriage proposal to pursue her own political ambition. What a fascinating premise! Not only is the idea for the novel great, but so is the execution.
Although The Black Flamingo looks in format like a book of poetry, I would describe it as a novel in verse. And although it is marketed as young adult fiction, I can unhesitatingly recommend it to any reader who loves a good coming-of-age story.
If you’ve been an L&L reader for a while, you know that I love a good historical drama, and Conjure Women is one of the best I have read in a long time. Like many contemporary writers, Atakora jumps around in the timeline to build suspense, but she does it with expert skill that keeps you turning pages much later into the night than you probably should.
If you are looking for an epic, historical family drama, look no further. Set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in the first half of the 20th century, Fall On Your Knees weaves together the stories of the Piper family over four generations, as well as the stories of their extended families and neighbors. MacDonald expertly reveals both dark secrets and terrible mistakes her characters make at the same time ensuring you feel the same love for them that she does.
Migrations is one of those rare novels that has stayed with me long after I finished reading it. McConaghy has written a totally original and compelling adventure tale filled with memorable characters driven by the universal human emotions of love, regret, ambition and compassion.
Fifteen Dogs is one of the most entertaining books, with one of the weirdest premises, that I have ever read. Set in and around downtown Toronto, the story begins with a conversation in a bar between the gods Hermes and Apollo, who share a drink and make a wager. They debate whether the cause of human unhappiness is consciousness, and so decide to bestow human consciousness on a group of dogs so see if their lives are made happier by it.
