2021 Fiction Recommendations
The Last House on Needless Street
Horror
Catriona Ward single-handedly saved a genre I’d written off. I have a hard time with how gender is usually portrayed in horror, and rarely choose to read books that I know from the start won’t have a happy ending. Especially in a genre that seems to hate women so much.
Ward has created a gothic horror masterpiece that’s downright uncomfortable to read. I can’t wait to get ahold of her next book to see what she comes up with next!
The Kiss Quotient
Romance
Gender-swapped Pretty Woman with a dose of neurodiversity? I wasn't sure what I was getting into with The Kiss Quotient but I ended up really enjoying it. The main man is almost too good to be true, and the woman has Asperger's and hates physical intimacy - partially due to how her brain works, partially due to her incredibly shitty past experiences. I loved the setup of her hiring an escort to learn sex, and as a result this is a very spicy book - if you don't like explicit romance novels this is not the book for you.
The miscommunication leading up to the big fight seemed a little weak, but it wasn't bad enough to actively frustrate me. Overall a fun and spicy read!
Stories of Your Life and Others
Short Stories
A solid collection with stories landing somewhere between sci-fi and speculative fiction.
One asks, "What if we knew God/Heaven/Hell were real, how would that change our behavior?" (With the premise that hell is more like the Greek afterlife than the fire and brimstone most Christians imagine.) A non-religious man's wife dies suddenly and her soul ascends to heaven, so the man must choose between finding a way to love God or spending eternity without the love of his life. The problem is that he only wants to get into heaven to be with his wife, so any good deeds he might do are tainted by the motivations. The entire concept was fascinating to read, and the twist at the end was so good I literally had to get up and walk it off.
Get a Life, Chloe Brown
Romance
This is my favorite of the trilogy. Most authors can write a good meet-cute and lead up, and Hibbert doesn't disappoint. But she also nails the sister dynamics and the cranky attitude of a person with chronic pain who's ended up on the wrong side of their limits (again). The conflict at the end was sudden, but I loved it for the simple fact that even though one of the people in the fight could see exactly what was going wrong, they're still human and said all the wrong things in the moment. Both people after the big blow up realized that it was less about the other person and more about themselves, and DID THE WORK instead of just demanding forgiveness. It was a messy and unnecessary fight but still a completely believable one, the balance of which I think is where many romance authors stumble.
Really excellent book, definitely go buy it when you're looking for your next romance.
Nothing
YA Horror
You know that moment where you watch a kid start spiraling out of control and you know its going to be ok, but they don't because that moment is the worst moment of their much-shorter lives? That's Nothing. 13 year olds are pretty much as smart as adults, but they lack the life experience to help temper emotions or manage stressful moments.
Nothing has an odd set up - a kid climbs up a tree in a fit of nihilism and refuses to come down for months. Where are his parents? Any adults? They seem content to ignore him and let the kid figure it out on his own. Everything past that, however, feels distressingly plausible. The other kids in his class decide something must be done, and wow do they commit to process of figuring out what. It reminded me of the book The Power by Naomi Alderman. You feel in your soul very early on that its not going to end well, but you just can't put the book down because you have to know.
Nothing is a short book, but don't read it at night, and make sure you read it before giving it to a teen. It would be a very good discussion book, but I think it has to be a discussion book if reading it under a certain age. I know I didn't sleep well the night I read it.
Definitely read it though. 10/10.
Nation
Adventure
I did not want to read this book. I checked it out from the library and returned it unopened several times, because while it is Terry Pratchett it is not Discworld, and I had some vague idea that meant it wouldn't be as good. But then I read a collection of essays by Pratchett and he mentioned Nation as the best book he's ever written, and talked about how much he loved it. I immediately tracked it down again, and I'm so glad I did.
This book isn't just angry. This book takes a look at all of the injustices in the world and rages at them. Its a tale of colonialism told from both sides, and a tale of children forced to step into grown up roles. I wish I'd read this as an angry 13 year old hitting adulthood. I wish I'd read this as an angry 19 year old starting to discover the real world. I will be finding a physical copy of this book to add to my shelves, because I will probably add this to my rotation of annual reads.