I think it’s a little early in the year to start talking about reading goals and short books you can read to catch up on your Goodreads challenge, but I’m going for it anyway. Here is an incomplete list of some of my favourite reads that hover in the 250-300 page count region, and some of the reasons why they should be your favourites, too. Let’s begin!
Murder of Crows by K. Ancrum
This book follows Tig Torres, a Cuban American teen detective, who has caught the attention of the town’s local armchair detective group, the Murder of Crows. They’re fixated on a dangerous search for the missing body of the town’s founder and the rumours about what’s buried on the body could be life-changing for whoever finds it. With a mission like that underway, it’s not long before a member of the Murder of Crows turns up dead. Tig, along with her friends Max and Wyn, steps in to help, but the stakes are getting higher and the hunt more deadly. Someone’s willing to kill to keep the town’s secrets buried, and if Tig’s not careful, she’ll be the Murder of Crows’ next victim.
This novel takes place between Seasons 1 and 2 of the Lethal Lit podcast, but I went into the book without having that additional knowledge and still had a good time, although I know there will be many references that I’ve missed. It’s not your typical K. Ancrum book, but it still is a K. Ancrum book, so I was basically forced to read it by an oath of loyalty and was pleasantly surprised by this fun, twisty little mystery. It’s simple and entertaining and impactful for its length.
This is a good fit for readers who enjoy fast-paced, adventurous stories about teenage detectives solving intriguing mysteries while uncovering hidden secrets in their hometowns.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
This is a sapphic love story 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 after surviving a catastrophic traumatic experience 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.
This is a good fit for readers seeking an emotional exploration of the complexities of love, grief, and relationships, as experienced by a queer couple dealing with the aftermath of a life-altering oceanic adventure.
The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks
People are really quite simple, and they have simple needs. Food, water, light, space, privacy. Maybe a small measure of dignity. A bit of freedom. What happens when someone simply takes all that away?
The people locked up in the bunker to live and die there for no purpose suffer as much from each other’s company as from the anonymous evil power who put them there. But of course, being humans, they also feel love and responsibility and curiosity and compassion for each other, and that is what made the story so true to me. I don’t remember how I originally stumbled upon this book, but I am glad that I did, even if I was probably slightly too young at the time. I’ve read many bleak books, but this is by far one of the bleakest books I have ever read. The messages are so intricately woven and muddled in with often completely meaningless diversions that it can at times be difficult to understand what Brooks is actually attempting to communicate – but that’s all part of the wonderful, intriguing mystery of this book. It’s not a ‘happily ever after’, and pretty much none of the questions you ask will receive an answer, which I imagine is a frustrating experience for many readers.
This is a great fit for readers who enjoy suspenseful and dark psychological thrillers about a group of people dealing with the consequences of being kidnapped and held in a confined space.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, and its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. There is one other person in the house – a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
This strange little book is my favourite book of possibly the last three years, and I could write essays about the metaphors for ambition and identity and religion. This is like a dream, slow, strange and intensely atmospheric, unbelievably immersive and engrossing. The point of this story for me was not the mystery of the house or of Piranesi’s identity; the clues are there and it’s not too hard to figure most of it out rather early on. No, the strength is the strange world that Clarke creates so vividly that I felt that I was walking the Halls and avoiding the Tides and listening to the messages the House sends and catching a glimpse of the Moon along with Piranesi. His hypnotic voice – the voice of the timeless scientist – transported me fully into this strange orderly confusion and left me spellbound. And that was the spell I did not want to end.
Piranesi is a good fit for readers who enjoy immersive, imaginative tales set in otherworldly environments, where the exploration of memory and the uncovering of hidden truths lead to a deeper understanding of one’s own reality.
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. However, the discovery of their letters would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all, and someone has to win that war. 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.
This book is a great fit for readers who enjoy slow-burn queer romance with a twist, unfolding through letters exchanged across time and war-torn dimensions.
House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
There were so many things that I loved about this book. Sutherland’s writing is beautiful, something which I had doubts about before I started reading as I had a mixed experience with some of her previous works. It has an incredibly fairytale-esque rhythm that makes the story alluring and atmospheric and exquisite and eerie. There are some beautiful descriptions of character appearances, the clothes that Grey designs, and the environments that they explore. I was drawn in from the first page. I think the thing that I love the most about the writing is that it doesn’t shy away from showing the ugly side and the rotting interior beneath all the beauty.
Grey is a fascinating character. She describes herself as the ‘thing in the dark’ and is the sister who has used her newfound powers for her benefit. She’s beautiful and dangerous and uses the mystery of the sisters’ past to create a mystery for her public persona. In another universe, she would fit in perfectly as a villain.
House of Hollow is a captivating read that had me hanging onto every single word, somehow combining a missing-person story and subversive fairytales and horror elements that kept me up at night. It’s a great fit for young adult readers who enjoy stories about mysterious and supernatural events, sibling bonds, and unravelling family secrets.
Eye of the Moon by Dianne Hofmeyr
When Isikara discovers the beautiful Queen Tiy of Egypt has been killed and her eldest son, Tuthmosis, is facing the same fate, she finds herself on the run with the young prince to get help to return him to his rightful place on the throne of Egypt.
I love how rich the mythology is. I love how bold and reckless Isikara is and how she is the cause of so many problems, in contrast to the prince’s nobleness and kindness. I love the found family themes that emerge in a tale that is largely focused on loss and adventure. I love that this is a book that sparked something in me at age ten that I still remember and have fond feelings for it over a decade later.
This is one of my favourite and most memorable reads from my childhood, although I believe the target audience is aimed to be more young adults than middle grade. The story aims to flesh out the few facts that archaeology gives us about Pharaoh Thutmose IV and turns them into a cohesive and spellbinding adventure. I’m not as much of an ancient Egypt enthusiast as I claim, so I don’t know how credibly she does it, but it definitely works for me.
Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher
As the shy, convent-raised, third-born daughter, Marra escaped the traditional fate of princesses, to be married away for the sake of an uncaring throne. But her sister wasn’t so fortunate—and after years of silence, Marra finally realized that no one was coming to their rescue. No one, except for Marra herself. On her quest, Marra is joined by the grave witch, a reluctant fairy godmother, a strapping former knight, and a chicken possessed by a demon. Together, the five of them intend to be the hand that closes around the prince’s throat and frees Marra’s family and their kingdom from its tyrannous ruler at last.
There are so many elements here that make me feel like the book was written for me specifically, including this being a quest fantasy with a found family element, and also being fairytale-esque. It plays with fairytales in a way where we have the comfort and cosiness of the story with a dark thread running through it. I think that tonal dissonance might be off-putting for some readers, but I think the darkness is well-woven with the cosiness, and I greatly enjoyed reading it. It’s one of my favourite ways to see fairytales explored. It’s also not a retelling in any way that I can tell, just heavy on the fairytale vibes. The imagery and the setting were immaculately described, and the tone in places was almost blunt and very to the point, which was quite refreshing. This is my first T. Kingfisher read, and I am already deeply in love with her fantasy work and how unique the worlds are.
Nettle & Bone is a good fit for those seeking a story that subverts traditional fairytale tropes, featuring a shy and unlikely heroine who embarks on a dark, adventurous, and often funny journey to save her sister and challenge an abusive prince. The author takes the bones of fantasy and fairytale and makes them into something entirely new with what I have learned is a signature mix of the grim and the delightful.
That is all I have to say about books for today. I think I could make this video infinite times over as I am a big fan of short, easily digestible reads, but today I wanted to focus on ones that I own, so you know I love them that little bit more.
TandeWrites 
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