I’ve been reflecting on what I read last year, and I want to spend a little more time talking about my favourite reads of the year and collect those thoughts in one place. I think I did a video version of this in 2022 for what I believed to be the best books of the year (so far), but since then I’ve accepted that some of the books I love to read may not necessarily be the best of books. There will also be a few repeats as I did a post midway through the year with my favourite reads of the year so far. This list will be in no particular order, just vaguely chronological, so let’s begin!
Darling by K. Ancrum
K. Ancrum is truly just a once-in-a-lifetime author to me. Her prose and craft are so unique and endearing and every book by her feels like something that has done irreversible damage to my brain chemistry. This one is a modern-day thriller reimagining of Peter Pan with a very diverse cast in terms of race, sexuality, and disabilities, and is potentially the best and most enthralling Peter Pan reimagining that I’ve read so far.
This is a very unsettling and uncomfortable story about the vulnerability of minority kids who feel like they don’t have a place to belong. Every single book by this author is a love letter to friendships and found families, but this book also explores the importance of safety and how hard it can be to recognize abuse, especially when it can be disguised as kindness when you are longing to find a place to belong. It was an uncomfortable and thrilling read but I was still completely swept away alongside Wendy.
On Wendy Darling’s first night in Chicago, a boy called Peter appears at her window. He’s dizzying, captivating, beautiful―so she agrees to join him for a night on the town.
Wendy thinks they’re heading to a party, but instead they’re soon running in the city’s underground. She makes friends―a punk girl named Tinkerbelle and the lost boys Peter watches over. And she makes enemies―the terrifying Detective Hook, and maybe Peter himself, as his sinister secrets start coming to light. Can Wendy find the courage to survive this night―and make sure everyone else does, too?
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
This is a story of obsession, violence, intellect, passion, and cruelty. And it consumed me entirely. I finished reading it months ago and still don’t have the words for a review. It’s a slow, intoxicating book of violence and mental illness and subtle cruelty and consuming obsessive love. It’s a mess, and it’s so beautifully written, and I am perpetually devastated that this author doesn’t have any other books released at the moment.
The prose is incredible. The absolutely phenomenal level of detail just made each scene alive. It made the book slow and thoughtful but in the best way. You aren’t just viewing the world like the character would – you are so deep in his mind. The way his sensory overload seeps through the pages… I felt every word of it.
Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow’s housing estates. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold.
But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.
Greenglass House by Kate Milford
There was never any question in my mind that this would be one of my favourite middle-grade books of all time. It’s not that the book is atmospheric. It is, and strongly so. And it’s not that the characters are immediately and intensely engaging. They are, and without stretching or warping. And it’s not the flirtation with archetype, pastiche, and homage in the setup with smugglers, customs agents, and a company town. Though it does a fantastic job of both presenting them and reining them into a story you can lose yourself in. The power of this book is Milo.
Behind all the clues and ghost stories and thefts and lies, what Greenglass House really is is the story of a hero’s journey. Milo starts out as a soft-spoken kid with little faith in his own abilities. Donning the mantle of a Dungeons & Dragons type character, he taps into a strength that he might otherwise not even know he had. Milo’s slow awakening to his own strengths and abilities is the heart of the novel. For all that people will discuss the mystery and the clues, it’s Milo that holds everything together.
It’s wintertime at Greenglass House. The creaky smuggler’s inn is always quiet during this season, and twelve-year-old Milo, the innkeepers’ adopted son, plans to spend his holidays relaxing.
But on the first icy night of vacation, out of nowhere, the guest bell rings. Then rings again. And again…
Soon Milo’s home is bursting with odd, secretive guests, each one bearing a strange story that is somehow connected to the rambling old house. As objects go missing and tempers flare, Milo and Meddy, the cook’s daughter, must decipher clues and untangle the web of deepening mysteries to discover the truth about Greenglass House—and themselves.
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White
This is a book about misogyny, transphobia, and ableism from the perspective of an autistic transgender boy. It has a thematic focus on the violent enforcement of gender roles and Victorian-era psychiatry as tools of oppression. The book means more to me than I can articulate, but be aware that it is not a fun or easy read.
To see a trans main character, with a brain like mine, who gets overwhelmed and cries and apologizes over and over, who doesn’t really get people or what they try to say, who moves through the world so similar to the way I do is something I am going to hold close. To read a book so darkly horrific, so brutally brilliant, and to point to the main character and go “Hey, that’s me”, to deeply understand their reactions and actions, is so incredibly special and rare to find.
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.
After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This is the book you need to read if you ever need a reason to believe in love again. I adore every line in this book. It feels like a love letter to language, and there were so many paragraphs that demanded I read them ten times before moving on. If I was someone who annotated books, every page would have pen all over it.
This is a sapphic love story and a tale of self-discovery against a backdrop of multiverse wars and time travel and the limitless of time and space. The story is told largely through letters the characters leave behind for each other on various battlefields as they chase each other across the universe. This book is small – only two hundred or so pages – but it’s full of so much life and love that I don’t really know how to summarise it in a way that does it any amount of justice.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.
Red and Blue, two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions, strike up an unlikely correspondence. But what started as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more: something epic and romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
The discovery of their bond will mean their deaths. There’s still a war going on, and someone has to win that war. That’s how wars work. Right?
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
This is another sapphic love story, this time set against the backdrop of a slow-burn retelling of horrors experienced deep beneath the ocean, woven amongst the events that occurred when she returned. The author depicts a loving queer relationship that shows a realistic perspective of being a woman in a patriarchal world, and the focus of the relationship is the unity of their love and their thriving as a couple rather than battling against society. For once, the horrors are not homophobia.
Loss and grief are key themes in this book, showing the loss of a loved one who is in the process of slipping away from you, juxtaposed with the loss of a parent to a degenerative disease. There’s this motif of degeneration throughout which hit me a little as someone with a chronic illness, largely shown through Leah’s state as she returns from the ocean, but also shown through droplets throughout, such as Miri’s friend with declining eyesight. Loss is inevitable, coping is a necessity, and grief is infectious.
When Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.
As Miri searches for answers to her wife’s altered state, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp…
What the River Knows by Isabel Ibanez
This book is a captivating mosaic of ancient Egyptian history, a vibrant setting, an immersive plot, and an array of characters with questionable motives who are still engaging and likeable. I did not know that this book was the first in a series when I picked it up, and I’m already looking forward to whatever else these stories have to offer.
The writing is beautiful, especially the descriptions of the Cairo markets, the journey up the Nile, and the experience on the archaeological dig site. The blend of cultures was also incredibly engaging – I loved the representation of the various family dynamics, how different religions and languages were dropped in, and how authentic these representations felt. This book is truly a love letter to the history of Egypt and its mythology.
Bolivian-Argentinian Inez Olivera belongs to the glittering upper society of nineteenth century Buenos Aires, and like the rest of the world, the town is steeped in old world magic that’s been largely left behind or forgotten. Inez has everything a girl might want, except for the one thing she yearns the most: her globetrotting parents—who frequently leave her behind.
When she receives word of their tragic deaths, Inez inherits their massive fortune and a mysterious guardian, an archeologist in partnership with his Egyptian brother-in-law. Yearning for answers, Inez sails to Cairo, bringing her sketch pads and an ancient golden ring her father sent to her for safekeeping before he died. But upon her arrival, the old world magic tethered to the ring pulls her down a path where she soon discovers there’s more to her parent’s disappearance than what her guardian led her to believe.
With her guardian’s infuriatingly handsome assistant thwarting her at every turn, Inez must rely on ancient magic to uncover the truth about her parent’s disappearance—or risk becoming a pawn in a larger game that will kill her.
What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
This book was a favourite from later in the year, and I should’ve expected it as I read Rules for Vanishing in 2022 and fell in love from the first page. This book is completely different, but I fell in love from the start just the same. It’s chilling and atmospheric and suspenseful. Naomi is a great protagonist – she is immensely flawed and doesn’t make smart choices, but she is resilient and a survivor of the violence she’s endured, even if she is scarred by it. The story is full of twists and red herrings, and one of the twists is not difficult to predict, but I think that’s a sign of a well-laid-out foundation to the story rather than a flaw.
One of my favourite parts of the book was the descriptions of the Goddess Game – the game they spent the summer playing in the woods. There’s something about weird little girls pretending that they’re deities and worshipping a skeleton with offerings that just sit right with me. Maybe because I was also a weird little girl who thought I was magical. It’s the childlike wonder and the whimsy and the warmth of nostalgia, directly contrasted with the events that end the summer which speaks to me so deeply.
Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.
And they were liars.
For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.
TandeWrites 