2020 Faves
I don’t know if anyone is dying for a reprise of my favorite books of 2020. Since I am such an eclectic reader, I don’t always read the new stuff, or the popular stuff. Sometimes I discover something popular three years after everyone else already read it, as I did The Hate U Give this past January (it was released in 2017). Sometimes I find things that no one else has read that are unbelievably good, and I feel vindicated by my weird reading patterns when I am able to share it on my blog. But mostly I just read whatever takes my fancy, whenever it comes up and from whatever source, and readers of the blog have to put up with it.
Anyway, I thought I would do a short summary here of my favorite reads for the year, and since they are somewhat evenly populated between Young Adult and Adult books, I will divvy them up
that way.
YOUNG ADULT DISCOVERIES
Fantasy dominated here, as it commonly does, both because fantasy is big in YA and because I am a big fantasy fan. I discovered a stand-alone and two duologies this year, which was a nice break from the usual trilogy and I think worked better for the authors as well (so often the middle book is weak and the last book is rushed in those cases).
The first was The Hazel Wood and The Night Country, by Melissa Albert, and although I characterized them as fantasy, they are truthfully much closer to fairy tale. I say that advisedly with the caveat that this is not the determinedly nice Disney fairy tale, but a real, slightly horrifying portal story to a place that you may not, in the end, wish to visit! Both the story and the language are fantastic, in all senses of the word.
The stand-alone was Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik. The book borrows a couple of basic concepts from “Rumpelstiltskin,” turns them completely on their heads, and goes on with a story nothing like that mean little tale. There are actual faerie in this book, but they have more to do with the fey creatures of Celtic lore than with any prosaic fairy godmother. It is a beautifully complex, character-driven story about agency, empathy, self-determination, and family that held my attention from beginning to end.
The second duology was The Merciful Crow and The Faithless Hawk, by Margaret Owen, and these were true fantasy, with complex world-building (formal castes in society, each of which has its own magical properties), and a protagonist from the bottom-most caste. It’s a compelling adventure featuring good against evil, hunters and hunted, choices, chance, and character. Don’t let the fact that it’s billed as YA stop you from reading it—anyone who likes a good saga should do so!
I also discovered a bunch of YA mainstream/realistic fiction written by an author I previously knew only for her fantasy. Brigid Kemmerer has published three books based on the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” (and they are well done), but the books of hers I fell for this year were about typical teenagers with problems that needed to be solved and love lives that needed to be resolved. My favorite of the four was Letters to the Lost, but I also greatly enjoyed More Than We Can Tell, Thicker Than Water, and Call it What You Want.
These were my five-star Young Adult books for 2020.
ADULT FICTION
As YA selections were dominated by a particular genre, so were my books in Adult fiction, almost all of them falling in the mystery section. But before I give you that list, I will finish up with fairy tale by lauding an original adult story that engaged me from the first page and has stuck with me all year: Once Upon A River, by Diane Setterfield. The fairy tale quality is palpable but the archetypal nature of fairy tales doesn’t dominate the story, which is individual and unique. It is the story of three children and the impact of their disappearances (and possible reappearance) on the people close to them, as well as on the inhabitants of one small town beside the river Thames who are caught up by chance in the events that restore a child to life. But the story encompasses more than her fate: It gives extraordinary insight into the issues of life and death—how much they are worth, how they arrive, how they depart, and what is the best way to pursue them.
Another book I encountered in 2020 that didn’t fall into the mystery genre or belong to a series was the fascinating She Rides Shotgun, by Jordan Harper. This was a short, powerful book by a first-time author, a coming of age story set down in the middle of a dark thriller that bowled me over with its contradictory combination of evil deeds and poignant moments.
And the last stand-alone mainstream fiction novel I enjoyed enough to bestow five stars was Just Life, by Neil Abramson. The story showcases the eternal battle between fear and compassion, and involves a deadly virus and a dog shelter in a fast-paced, gripping narrative that takes over the lives of four people. It made me cry, three times.
Most of the mysteries I enjoyed this year came from a “stable” of staple authors I have developed over the decades and upon whom I rely for at least one good read per year. The first is Louise Penny, whose offering All the Devils Are Here in the ongoing Armand Gamache series is nuanced, perplexing, and utterly enjoyable, all the more so for being extracted from the usual Three Pines venue and transported to the magical city of Paris.
Sharon J. Bolton is a reliable source of both mystery and suspense, and she didn’t disappoint with The Split, a quirky story that takes place over the course of six weeks, in stuffy Cambridge, England, and remote Antarctica. Its main character, a glaciologist (she studies glaciers, and yes, it’s a thing) is in peril, and will go to the ends of the earth to escape it…but so, too, will her stalker, it seems. The Split is a twisty thriller abounding in misdirection, and definitely lives up to Bolton’s previous offerings.
Troubled Blood, by “Robert Galbraith,” aka J. K. Rowling, is my most recent favorite read, and is #5 in that author’s series about London private detective Cormoran Strike and his business partner, Robin Ellacott. It’s a police procedural with a lot of detail in service of both the mystery and the protagonists’ private lives, it’s 944 pages long, and I enjoyed every page.
Finally, this year i discovered two series that are new to me, completely different from one another but equally enjoyable.
The first is the Detective Constable Cat Kinsella series by Caz Frear, which currently encompasses three books. I read the first two earlier in the year and promptly put in a reserve at the library on the third (which had yet to be published at the time), and Shed No Tears just hit my Kindle a couple of days ago. They remind me a bit of Tana French, although not with the plethora of detail, and a bit of the abovementioned Sharon Bolton’s mystery series starring Lacey Flint. Cat is a nicely conflicted police officer who comes from a dodgy background and has to work hard to keep her personal and professional lives from impinging one upon the other, particularly when details of a case threaten to overlap the two. I anticipate continuing with this series of novels as quickly as Frear can turn them out.
The second, which is a mash-up of several genres, is Charlaine Harris’s new offering starring the body-guard/assassin Gunnie Rose. I read the first two books—An Easy Death and A Longer Fall—this year, and am eagerly anticipating #3, coming sometime in 2021 but not soon enough. The best description I can make of this series is a dystopian alternate history mystery with magic. If this leads you to want to know more, read my review, here.
These are the adult books I awarded five stars during 2020.
I hope you have enjoyed this survey of my year’s worth of best books. I am always happy to hear from any of you, and would love to know what you found most compelling this year. I think we all did a little extra reading as a result of more isolation than usual, and what better than to share our bounty with others?
Please comment, here or on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/thebookadept. Thanks for following my blog this year.
Enchanting
Did I mention that I can’t resist a book with ravens, crows, or other corvids? Or a book that features an artist or painter? I found one that incorporates both, and bought it mostly based on its title and cover: An Enchantment of Ravens, by Margaret Rogerson.
The story in brief: Isobel is a portrait painter who lives in Whimsy, a town outside of time (it’s always summer there, the seasons never change) because it is adjacent to Faerie and the “fair folk” like to wander the town in their avid pursuit of what they call “Craft,” which is anything creative made by human hands. Faerie don’t “do” Craft—in fact, if they take up a pen, a brush, a sewing needle, they crumble to dust. So they are eternally fascinated by its expression, and will pay in valuable enchantments.
Although she has made many portraits of and for the fair folk, Isobel’s most esteemed patron is Gadfly, who seems particularly smitten with himself and for whom she has painted multiple pictures. One day Gadfly tells her he has recommended her to Rook, the autumn king, who wishes a portrait. This flusters Isobel, because of his rank and because he hasn’t been seen in a hundred years. But he turns out not to be so intimidating (although definitely self-regarding), and while painting him, Isobel and he develop an affinity for one another, although it is far stronger on Rook’s part than it is on Isobel’s. She knows better than to fall in love with a member of the fair folk—that would be to break the “Good Law,” and there are two choices after the law is broken: Death to both faerie and human, or the human drinks from the Green Well and becomes a faerie herself. Since she desires neither, she protects her heart and remains wary.
As she paints Rook’s portrait, however, she struggles for the first time with a likeness, and when she finally solves the problem, she has inadvertently painted human sorrow in the eyes of the autumn king. He is so incensed by this that he drags her off to his court to stand trial for this crime, and that’s the beginning of their adventure together.
I enjoyed reading the first part of this story quite a bit: The details of the painting were realistically rendered, and the banter between Isobel and her clients was entertaining, as were her behind-the-scenes thoughts and her back story. I gave a big sigh as I continued, however, because I thought to myself, This is going to turn into a typical mushy YA romance—they will probably fall in love and it will end disappointingly.
I was pleased and relieved to discover myself mistaken: Isobel has a lot more to her than do most YA heroines, and she sees her adventure with Rook as a task to endure and complete with the goal of getting back to her foster mother, Emma, and her twin “sisters,” March and May (they were formerly goat kids, turned into girls by a drunken fair one and adopted by Emma and Isabel). It is her stubborn resolution that saves her (and sometimes Rook) from misadventure for a good part of the book.
I won’t reveal more of the story; I will only say that while parts were predictable fairy tale trope, most of it is fresh and not typical. See for yourself—it’s not a long read, and I found it entertaining.
If you like it, you might also enjoy The Bride’s Farewell, by Meg Rosoff; Far, Far Away, by Tom McNeal; or Reckless, by Cornelia Funke, all of which are different from one another but share the quality of quirky original fairy tale with An Enchantment of Ravens.
Faerie tale magic
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novic, is so exquisite, both in the writing and in the telling, that after having spent three days reading at breakfast, lunch, and bedtime, I stayed up from 2:00 until 4:00 a.m. this morning to finish it; and when I got up at 9:00 and made my breakfast, rather than starting a new book I opened Spinning Silver
to page one and began reading again, to remind myself of all the reasons why.
I purposely used the alternate spelling of “fairy” in the title because, although this book is billed as a fairy tale retelling, it is light years away from most of those. It borrows a couple of basic concepts from “Rumpelstiltskin,” turns them completely on their heads, and goes on with a story nothing like that mean little tale. There are actual faerie in this book, but they have more to do with the fey creatures of Celtic lore than with any relatively prosaic fairy godmother from the Grimms’ tales.
This is, above all, a character-driven story, and so you have to be patient as a reader for the first little while until you are sufficiently acquainted with the three protagonists. As a readers’ advisor, I am always one to tell a reader that if they aren’t enjoying a book in the early chapters, by all means drop it and find another. I’m not saying that this book isn’t good from page one—it is. And things begin happening from fairly early in the story; but it takes about 120 pages (which is a pretty big commitment out of 480) to complete your introduction to the pivotal characters and provide some action that really moves their joint story forward in a significant way.
As a person who loves character development, that didn’t matter to me in the least, because I was so fascinated with the way the first protagonist, Miryem, morphs from a cold, hungry, desperate girl into a tough, confident one who, once she decides that she is the one who will have to take care of her family, shows no hesitation.
Miryem and her parents, the Mandelstams, are Jews living on the outskirts of their little village near the forest. Miryem’s mother’s father is a moneylender in the larger town of Vysnia, and a hugely successful one; but Miryem’s father, who decided to take up the same profession based on the dowry from his wife, is too gentle to make a living the same way. When he attempts to collect on the money he has lent, his customers jeer at him, shout racial epithets, and chase him from their doorsteps, or else make excuses that they know will touch his soft heart and cause him to give way. All around the Mandelstams, the other people in the village are benefiting from the money they have borrowed, with their investments in more livestock, better farm tools, warm clothing, and fields of crops, while the Mandelstams starve. Finally, with her mother ill and her father helpless and discouraged, Miryem decides that she will have to be the moneylender of the family and, taking up her basket, she treks from door to door insisting on her just desserts. Soon there is a new thatched roof, warm clothing, and meat in the pot, but her parents weep that she has become cold inside from this “unladylike” profession.
Meanwhile, six miles away, Wanda lives with her Da and her brothers, Sergey and Stepon. Her mother is dead, buried in the yard under a white-blossoming tree with her six miscarried baby boys, and her father is a drunkard and a wastrel who has borrowed six gold kopeks from the moneylender, more than he will ever be able to repay. When Miryem comes calling asking for payment on the debt, he reviles her and tries to drive her away. She knows that if she lets him win she will confront the same problem at every turn, so she tells him that his daughter, Wanda, may pay off his debt a half cent a day by working for her and her parents. Although Miryem believes this will be a hardship, Wanda is secretly delighted, since it gets her out of the house and away from her father’s constant abuse; so Wanda becomes a fixture in the Mandelstam household, and soon becomes the debt collector in Miryem’s stead, while Miryem pursues other business.
Finally, after an ill-advised boast by Miryem about being able to turn silver into gold attracts the attention of the king of the Staryk, who comes to her with a bargain she is unable to refuse, we meet the third leg of the stool of this story: Irina, daughter of a duke and a quarter-breed Staryk “witch” and, up to this point in life, a plain and silent girl with no expectations. But the advent of Staryk silver alters her worth in the eyes of her ambitious father, and she suddenly finds herself betrothed to the dashing Tsar Mirnatius, who is both less and a lot more than he seems, with dire effect. Although the men in the book play pivotal roles, it is this triad of women whose thoughts and actions control the progression of their layered, interwoven lives, and who end up saving the kingdom of Lithvas from powerful enemies.
The themes in this book—agency, self determination, pride, empathy, duality, the embracing of family wherever you find it—are pervasive, and poignant but also raw. Watching each protagonist rise to her challenges with ingenuity and quiet determination was a joy. And the best praise I can give is that the quality of the character development, the language, the scene-setting, everything you would want from a story like this were maintained from beginning to end. The final sentence was as satisfying as all the rest, and was the perfect ending to a gripping and entertaining tale. It’s been a long time since I read a book that I loved with as much fervor as this one. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read it after I heard about it. I was and am thoroughly beguiled.
ADDENDUM: I must address one issue with this book that was brought up to me by a friend on Goodreads. Although the author otherwise goes out of her way to be inclusive and expansive in her representation of characters of different religious and economic status, she is not similarly sensitive when it comes to the one gay character in the book. There is a courtier who makes it obvious that he is smitten with his cousin the Tsar, and Novik has the protagonist Irina scheme to marry him off to a woman for her own political gain, and is mocking and dismissive of his true preferences, actually threatening him to get him to comply with her plan. Novik needs to recognize that gay people merit the same sensitivity of treatment as her other represented groups. She should know that bad gay representation is worse than no gay representation. Yes, it’s two pages out of 480, but it continues a precedent and a prejudice that should not be present in this jewel of a book. I’m sorry to see it here.
In the world
In The Night Country, sequel to Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, we find Alice, known in the Hinterland as Alice-three-times, back in the “real world” of New York City. (Spoilers for the first book ahead…)
She has been followed fairly precipitately by many of the other inhabitants of the Hinterland, because when Finch broke her out of her story he didn’t do it gently, and the trailing threads and gaping holes began to disintegrate patterns, then stories, until none of the so-called “characters” were safe there. So although Alice is back to living with her mother, going to school, working in a bookstore, and exploring the concept of normality, she is uneasily aware that there are other inhabitants of the city who are also refugees, and who have more in common with her than she does with the oblivious humans surrounding her.
In addition to following the fairy tale people when their stories crumble around them, the book contains a murder mystery: Characters are turning up dead, and not just dead but missing important parts of their bodies. There is a certain method to the killings, as first a left hand, then a right, then a left foot, then a right, go missing from each subsequent victim. The frightening part for Alice is the state of the corpses—as far as she knows, no one but she has the ability to freeze people with a touch, and doesn’t like the idea that she is therefore the prime suspect.
In a parallel tale, when the Hinterland started to disintegrate, Ellery Finch saw his friends to safety as best he could but then made another choice—not to go back to his world of origin, but rather to go on, whatever that meant. We catch glimpses of him here and there throughout the first half of the book through the letters he writes to Alice from strange worlds, and then halfway through the book we turn more fully to his story. How all the stories—and Stories—come together in the end will stay a mystery ready for you to read.
One thing I love about these books is the descriptive nature of the prose. There are three escaped characters who in the Hinterland were known as the Acolytes of the Silver Dagger, the Red, the White, and the Black (after the colors in which they dress). But here on Earth, they are simply known as the Trio. They have found their way to the Christian God, and hang out in a church in Midtown. Alice goes there to confront them, to ask if they have a message for her:
“Looking over the pews I saw that they weren’t quite empty: three heads just peeked over the top of a bench on the left side. The heads were hooded, from left to right, in red, white, and black…. I slid into the pew in front of theirs and turned around, facing them over its back. They had eerie little oatmeal box faces, like an illustrator’s idea of how a wholesome child might look. If the illustrator were terrified of wholesome children.”
Doesn’t your mind immediately flash to a picture of a child sporting the rounded pink cheeks and sly smile of “the Quaker man,” with just a hint of menace somewhere in the expression?
Although the author plans to bring out the actual volume, Tales from the Hinterland, containing Althea Proserpine’s original stories, in January of 2021, that feels more like a whimsical addition to round out the worlds she has created than it does a sequel. Unless Melissa Albert contradicts me sometime in the future, The Hazel Wood and The Night Country form a perfectly complete duology.
Story
Fairy tales are being well represented in the world of literature these days, and I don’t mean yet another pallid re-telling of some archetypal classic, I mean new and original Story.
I just finished reading The Hazel Wood, by Melissa Albert, and I don’t know how its discovery eluded me between its publication date in 2018 and now, particularly with all the encomiums it has received from the likes of The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist, among many others. Eventually, however, hints of its renown sifted down into my consciousness, and I ordered a copy.
Having just suffered through the disappointing first 50 pages of yet another turgid, bulky, awkward fantasy by a supposed queen of YA literature and making the decision not to continue reading it, I picked up Albert’s book with a little trepidation, but from the first sentence—”My mother was raised on fairy tales, but I was raised on highways”—I was completely enthralled.
Alice’s stories of bad luck and trouble that follow her nomadic existence with her mother, Ella, seem unlikely yet inevitable, and when they finally find a reprieve in a letter sharing important news plus a new husband for Ella who is able to provide all the advantages Alice has never known, she seems so surly and ungrateful for what she has received. Her instincts about the ephemeral quality of their new life prove more reliable than Ella’s, however, and when she and her friend Finch encounter ever more bizarre circumstances in their search for a supposedly kidnapped Ella, Alice feels like the trouble around her is more familiar than not.
It all proceeds from the obscure little book of dark fairy tales Alice’s grandmother, Althea Proserpine, brought into the world. Alice has never gotten her hands on a copy, but schoolmate Ellery Finch is a super-fan who can fill Alice in on the contents of this somewhat nasty little collection. Alice resolves that a trip to the Hazel Wood, somewhere in upstate New York, where her grandmother lived near the supposed entryway into the Hinterland from where the stories flow, is necessary to rescue her mother; but relying on Finch to get her there is a doubtful advantage, knowing his loyalty is suspect.
This is a classic portal tale, wherein fairy tales are also to be found, but only behind a door to a place you may not, in the end, wish to visit. It’s written in a literary and intelligent manner, well plotted, and has a satisfying story arc. It contains some surprises that were actually predictable if you were paying close attention, but the fact that they could be expected doesn’t detract from their relevance to and enhancement of the story. The Hazel Wood is a consistent and engaging celebration of the sometimes horrifying origins of Story, and I loved it from beginning to end, including the cover art that so wonderfully foreshadows most of the activity in the book.
The irony in my thorough enjoyment of this book and the next I am about to discuss is that I have not previously been a big fan of fairy tales, having always found them dark, disturbing, and inexplicable; but this book and the next made some sense out of them for me. I appreciated the two “found” tales from Proserpine’s book at the end of this one.
(There is a sequel, The Night Country, which was just published last month and, obeying the behest of a Goodreads friend who said “read the sequel while the events of The Hazel Wood are fresh in your mind,” I have placed it on order.)
The second work that is currently reinforcing the portal story in the world is the latest volume in the Wayward Children tales by Seanan McGuire. I have enthused in the past over this gem of a series—if you are unfamiliar with the previous four books, please read my review, here. The fifth entry, Come Tumbling Down, harks back to Jack and Jill, the twins whose history was explained in book two, Down Among the Sticks and Bones.
The conclusion that Melissa Albert approaches in The Hazel Wood and that Seanan McGuire has fully realized in her books, which is something I never really understood until having read this one, is that fairy tales aren’t supposed to be nice, and the protagonists of the tales aren’t necessarily benign and pleasant people. As Sumi from the Wayward Children books says, none of the children who have traveled to other worlds and returned are in the normal range of character—they are all from the land of misfit toys. They all realize they are heroes of some kind, if only of their own stories; but heroes may have to be ruthless, heroes make hard decisions, heroes may sacrifice themselves or choose to sacrifice others in the cause of the greater good, or Balance, or whatever geas their world has imposed upon them. Even in the world of Disney, heroes can be incredibly single-minded—and therefore self-involved—when pursuing a quest. These children who have traveled to other worlds are not Lyra, or the innocents of Narnia, largely unscathed; they are scarred by their journeys, tragic figures in some instances hollowed out and filled again with something alien that continues to call them. As hard as Disney tries to make fairy tales into benign and positive love stories, the goblins and sea monsters and gnomes keep rearing their heads and saying, Don’t forget about us, we are still here too. McGuire gets that, and it’s what makes her books both terrifying and so genuine that they bowl you over with their awful sincerity.
If you are curious about other portal stories with which you may be unfamiliar (besides the classics of Narnia or Wonderland), try Cornelia Funke’s Mirrorworld books and the wonderful Shades of Magic trilogy by V. E. Schwab. Also of note, in a more time travel kind of way, is Kindred, by Octavia Butler. Book Riot provides a longer list, many of which I can’t vouch for, but you go exploring in these other worlds and see!
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