I finished thirtysomething books this year. Some of them came out this year, but not all of them. I’ve decided not to concern myself with the date of such things. Art endures and is not limited by the calendar. Here’s the things I enjoyed the most.

Best Ending

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It’s not often that an ending makes you smile and think oh yeah, that’s right. This big book about love and racism in America and Nigeria ended so well that I was kind of stunned by it.

Best ‘I didn’t See That Coming’

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
It’s not often that an author can present a mystery in away that doesn’t seem contrived, coy, or obvious. E. Lockhart pulled off a mystery about a rich group of teens on a private island off Martha’s Vineyard so brilliantly that I spent most of a day racing to the finish, breathless and in awe at this clever, clever book. One of my favorites of the year.

The One That Cracked Me in Two

Love Me Back By Merritt Tierce
I don’t know if I’d really call this one a novel. It feels too disjointed. I’d call it fiction, like how they labelled Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. The writing in Tierce’s book of fiction is fierce, unmerciful, and so honest there were paragraphs that literally took my breath away. This was one of those books where I had to put it aside and then just breathe for awhile because it filled me with so much emotion. If you can handle excellent writing around a loose story, this is a good’un.

The One I Recommended to Everyone Who Asked What Book to Get Someone For Christmas

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
I just wrote about this yesterday.

The I Have to Wait HOW Long for the Next Volume?

Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass & Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe
The first trade paperback of Rat Queens was so good. I read it twice in a row. Nothing graphical I read this year can compare to the adventures of Hannah, Violet, Dee, and Betty. May which brings us Volume 2, can’t get here soon enough.

The Best Books Written by My Friends

Guy in Real Life by Steve Brezenoff & The Witch’s Boy by Kelly Barnhill
Steve’s book is a brilliant look at video games, gender, and teens falling in love. Lesh and Svetlana and great characters who I loved spending time with. Kelly’s book is about magic and bravery and family, and if you aren’t captivated by her stories, there’s something wrong with you.

The Best of the Best

Dept. of Speculation By Jenny Offill
FUUUUUuuuccccckkkk. I forgot how much I loved this book until Christa wrote about it (tomorrow, on MN Reads). It’s so fucking good that mere words don’t do it justice.

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Here’s my advice when it comes to Karen Joy Fowler’s fabulous We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, don’t read anything about it at all. Skip the jacket copy, the blurbs, every review, including this one, pick up the book, and start reading. The less you know the better the experience and trust me this is a book worthy of your time. I wouldn’t steer you wrong.

But if you insist on knowing more about it, I will tell you as much as I can without spoiling the delightful reveal that comes roughly 1/3 through the book. First, you should know that this is not some kind of bullshitty coy reveal. When this information comes it feels genuine to both the story and our main character, Rosemary Cooke, who is fumbling her way through college in the mid-90s far away from where she grew up in Indiana.

Rosemary is pretty ashamed of her family. Or maybe not so much ashamed as she is just not wanting to talk about them. See, something shady went on when Rosemary was five. She was sent to live with her grandparents for awhile and when she returned her mother has taken to her bed in a bout of depression, her brother is filled with rage, and her sister Fern is sent away never to return.

When Rosemary is about eleven her brother Lowell disappears. Rosemary goes from having siblings to being an only child. This doesn’t bode well for her and she struggles for most of her life to make friends.

So Rosie starts her story in the middle that semester of bumbling through college, and the strange friend she makes, Harlow, and how hard it is to go back home for the holidays to her psychology professor dad who drinks to much and her mom, who has flaked on her before. She unspools her story slowly, bringing us back to when her family fell apart, and even further when they lived in a giant farmhouse surrounded by land and things were idyllic.

This is a story about loss and the tricks our memories play on us, about family and how we define that. This is a story that I loved. Every page. Every paragraph. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s so good that when I told my friend Kelly I was reading it she swooned a little and said, “It’s so good, I should probably re-read it again.”

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven a post-apocalyptic tale of a theatre troupe is a much-beloved National Book Award Finalist that seems to make people incoherent with swoony love. However, I don’t get the adoration. And it’s probably me. Unless it’s Y: The Last Man, the apocalypse kind of bores the daylights out of me.

I get caught up in the whys and the why nots of the post-apocalyptic world. In Mandel’s most of Earth’s population is wiped out by something called the Georgia Flu it moves quickly and as the population is wiped out so, apparently, is every single person who can possibly keep electricity running and computers going. I’m not sure why our basic infrastructure crumbles, but it does. In the wake of the pandemic people form small communities inside abandoned airports, gas stations, and fast food joints. I’m not sure why they abandoned houses and such, but apparently they did.

What they don’t abandon is, of course, Shakespeare, because art will survive.

The novel focuses on a band of nomadic actors and musicians who travel around Lake Michigan performing for survivors. Why they didn’t head south or west is beyond me. Winter must be brutal as fuck without heat, electricity, consistent shelter. This isn’t really explained.

It also focuses on Arthur Leander who dies of heart attack on stage as King Lear the night the pandemic starts. The chapters kind of flip-flop between post-pandemic theatre troupe featuring Kirsten, who was a child actor in the same production as Arthur when he died, and Arthur’s life.

The tie between these two storylines seemed tenuous to me. The people we follow after the pandemic are connected to Arthur and his wives, but, man, I don’t know. It was kind of fun whenever something about Arthur popped up, but I didn’t feel enough for him to be truly delighted.

Mainly this book seemed to lack dramatic tension. Even after society collapses, the theatre troupe seems to get around without too much problem. Apparently there is some danger and Kirsten, our narrator, has had to kill before, but still, there doesn’t seem to be much peril to anyone. There’s a bit of a mystery that pops up about 3/4 of the way through the book but it is pretty quickly and tidily resolved.

This one did not much for me. It was fine. I guess. I mean it was better than watching “Friends” re-runs, but not as good as watching old episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It was only okay in my estimation, with a little bit of really, really?

For instance, there is much made of getting tattoos once you’ve killed someone. Kirsten is very adamant about this, which I found strange considering the lack of medicine and sanitation and all that. In a world where people die of infected cuts, why risk it? Also, what is tattooing like in a world without electricity. I was kind of curious about that, but that went unanswered.

This one, to me, is a not-very-enthusiastic shrug.

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Epistolary novels are my genre kryptonite. I find them hard to resist and even harder to quit even when the going is not so great. This is the only reason I can give for finishing Ava Dellaira’s young-adult novel Love Letters to the Dead.

The dead in this case range from Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix to Amelia Earhart and Judy Garland. There’s a bunch more too — actors, poets, singers. The letter writer is Laurel, high school freshman, who is starting at a new high school to avoid having to deal with being the dead girl’s sister. May’s been dead six months when the book opens on the first day of school, where Laurel’s English teacher gives them an assignment to write a letter to someone who is dead.

Laurel writes first to Kurt Cobain, because he was May’s favorite. In fact for a teen in twenty-teens(ish) May is awfully obsessed with the 90s- the music, the actors, hell, even the perfume (Sunflowers, of course). Whenever I read stuff like this it reeks of an author putting their own influences in the heads and hearts of their fictional teens of now. Plus, it feels like this is supposed to be a shortcut to character development. May’s a girl who loves Nirvana and that means she’s X kind of girl. Or Y kind of girl. The only problem is that the teens of today who worship Nirvana are nothing at all like the teens of 1992 who did. They wouldn’t even be friends.

And that just one indicator of why these teens don’t feel believable as actual teens who would walk around on planet Earth. One of Laurel’s merry band of new friends is the musician kid, his three favorites of all time: Guns N’ Roses, The Ramones, and The Killers. When I told my friend Steve this, he nearly spit out his beer with laughter. He agreed that those three bands would never collide in a teenager. Ever.

There were so many problems with this book that I’m not even sure where to begin. Should it be with the coy narrator? The teens that don’t seem like actual people who exist but rather an “issue” walking around? Should it be with the cliche emotional climax that might have even happened on a rainy night on the anniversary of the sister’s death? Maybe the overload of “issues” — death, abuse, divorce, closeted homosexuals? Or how about the tied in a bow, everything is resolved ending?

Bleh.

This one is so much bleh. The letters are beside the point, and seem to try to act as a short cut to actual character development. And because the author chose pop culture figures outside a young adult’s age range Laurel spends a lot of time telling these people about their own lives. The letters to River Phoenix were cringe-inducing, and as a reader who recently read a biography of the actor, boring as hell. And the people she writes to seem arbitrary at best. It might start out Dear Judy Garland, but what follows is just a teen girl diary entry about whatever she did at school, at that party, what her friends said, and has nothing really to do with Judy.

Bleh.

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Up until my friend Kurtis read a NY Times review of How to Build a Girl, I had successfully avoided the work of Caitlin Moran. I’d heard a lot of buzz about her book How to be a Woman and an equal amount of buzz about how her feminism isn’t exactly intersectional.

But my friend Kurtis read that review and said they might as well have called this one “book for Jodi.” And he’s right. The synopsis of this book is so far in my wheelhouse that we could spend Sunday nights cuddling on the couch and watching re-runs of Buffy.

Chubby, poor 90s teen Johanna Morrigan reinvents herself as dazzling and dangerous music journalist Dolly Wild. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue. Of course I had to read it.

Johanna is a precocious teenage misfit whose only friends are her two brothers (one older, one much younger) and her dog. Her family is in dire circumstances, on the dole because dad has a mystery ailment most often coped with by booze and pills. Mom’s super depressed because, well, they’re poor and she just had a surprise set of twins. Johanna is lonely and horny and bored and said something stupid to someone nearby and thus convinced the family will be plummeted further into poverty when the government investigates them.

So she invents Dolly Wilde, becomes obsessed with music, and lands herself a recurring gig as a reviewer for Disc & Music Echo. Because she is a socially awkward teen Johanna lubricates herself with alcohol and cigarettes and acts the way she thinks wild(e) rock & roll reviewers act. It is hilarious and awful and awkward, and wonderful for the reader. She brings a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 to the D&ME office and I wanted to die for her.

There isn’t a lot of plot or story to this one, it’s pretty episodic with Johanna madcapping her way through various situations both personal and professional. I guess, this losing of dole money is supposed to be some sort of underlying thread, but Johanna’s family who looms large in the first part of the book, disappear for a good chunk of it only to return in the end.

I had two pretty big problems with this one.

First, it feels like two or three books jammed together and they don’t sit side by side in perfect harmony. We have the family situation and we have Johanna trying to figure out what kind of girl she is in the London music scene situation. Oh, did I mention that her dad is a failed musician keen on getting his big break? He is. The fact that the family disappears for a good chunk of the time is proof the two stories aren’t jiving well together.

Second, while Moran is a wonderful writer, both funny and poignant, I don’t know if she’s such a good novelist. The story is told in the present tense though grown-up Johanna often interjects herself into the present tense narrative. “Years later this all works out,” she’ll say. After emotionally significant moments, we’re treated to what can only be adult Johanna’s thoughts on the topic at hand: sex, music, feminism, fandom, what have you. These are little mini-essays that can only come from someone with much more life experience than our teen protagonist. While they’re nicely-written, smart, etc. it just feels like, well, an essay jammed into the middle of a novel and not part of the story at hand.

It’s a damn shame too, because Johanna is a character who deserves a better book and her own story that doesn’t so closely mimic the author’s actual life. And it’s a double damn shame because Moran is a great writer, I can see why she has legions of fans, but this one, which had the potential to be fantastic, was just sort of okay.

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