I was completely hooked on the imagined details of the life of Irish folk heroine and female pirate Grace O'Malley. I ultimately loved the novel's unusual structure, which tracked back and forth in time and revealed more about the strong female protagonist at each turn. I fell hard for this slam dunk of a premise: A novel about a female pirate based on the life of Grace O’Malley, an Irish folk heroine who was legendarily willing to risk everything for her people. Yes, yes, an

I was charmed by John Kenney's darkly funny, thoughtful novel about an obituary writer hitting rock bottom and reflecting on mortality, leaning on his friends, and finding unorthodox ways to embrace the messiness and wonder of life again. Awkard, endearing Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who's going through some things. He's gone downhill since his wife divorced him for her prior boyfriend, and now he's all but given up on love; his last blind date involved a woman who brou

The Secrets We Hide offers what is for me the perfect blend of character development, layered interpersonal issues, and mystery twists and turns that never feel convoluted, plus other favorite Bossy elements: a small-town setting, a family legacy of police work, and a condensed, healthily paced timeline from the story's beginning to end. I was hooked on this novel. I love a story driven by a female investigator main protagonist, and in book one of this small-town mystery seri

In Mandel's newest dystopian novel she presents two worlds, one lawless and one bound by constant surveillance, and she drops characters and their doppelgängers in and out of each. I was fascinated by this melancholy, layered story and its irresistible main protagonist. It's the year 2030 and the United States has collapsed. Ari Waker has just been released from prison after serving a decades-long sentence, and she emerges to a nation in turmoil where many scrape and scramble

Bannister's psychological mystery sets up an imminent death on the tracks, then takes the reader back and forth in time to share characters' back stories, faults and failings, and interconnectedness. An omniscient narrator turns the mirror back on the reader at times. The structure of Five is key to its impact. While the human condition is fragile and while everyone does have a story and while we do not know what goes on behind closed doors while we are judging books by their

Cline crafts a poignant, darkly funny, and uncomfortably, beautifully spot-on-feeling novel about a man with dementia as the clock runs out. He increasingly loses his grasp on the facts but urgently reconnects with pivotal figures from his past and considers his rapidly unraveling, impenetrable reality while revealing to the reader powerful, universal truths. Leave the party right when you think, I'm having such a nice time at this party. David is on a private plane headed fo

Clytemnestra is often depicted as a villain. Here, her layered, sympathetic motivations are revealed. Trained as a warrior and now a queen, she must cope with brutality and frustrating circumstances in this tale of power, love, and vengeance. “You can’t have justice and everyone’s approval.” Clytemnestra was born a Spartan princess (sister of the beautiful Helen--later "of Troy") who married for love, then was married off against her will by her father to cruel Agamemnon, who

In book two of Gillig's great gothic fantasy series, main characters go through satisfying arcs and development, a great love story persists, gargoyle Bartholomew yet again steals the show, and a struggle between political power and faith continues. In The Knight and the Moth, the first title in Gillig's Stonewater Kingdom series, a shadowy, eerie tone gave way to heartwarming, sometimes funny moments as an unlikely pack of allies set out on a journey of discovery, complete w

The first mystery in King's 19-book series builds an irresistibly layered professional partnership and personal, friends-like-family bond between Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. The story's detail, pacing, plot, and character development are all fantastic. I look forward to reading more titles in this series. It's 1915 and Sherlock Holmes is bored out of his mind and languishing in retirement...until he happens to meet 15-year-old Mary Russell on the Sussex Downs. She's cur

I love a sci-fi story about a ragtag space gang trying to salvage a desperate situation. The first in Thorne's series delivers charming, heartwarming adventure and a cast of characters I can't wait to spend more time with in book two. In Rebecca Thorne's cozy sci-fi adventure Moss'd in Space, it's sometime after the year 90,000, and Torian's years of saving have finally allowed her to buy a spaceship. Now she will finally be able to take her sister to a distant planet where t

Walls uses a journal structure to draw the reader into a singular story I can't stop thinking about. In Field Notes from an Extinction, we witness the innermost thoughts of a grumbly hermit ornithologist who is thrust into a parenting role, then must face a pirate queen out for revenge on British colonial rulers amid the Irish Potato Famine. Eoghan Wells's Field Notes from an Extinction is a novel told in journal form from the perspective of a stodgy, single-minded 19th-centu

Cash crafts a delightfully campy, oddball novel around a family of characters who for various reasons abandon social acceptability as they aim to find fulfillment, solve a mystery, discover compatibility, seek purpose, and coexist together. This is a darkly humorous, sometimes quirky tale that's edgy and provocative. In Madeline Cash's darkly funny, oddball novel, the reader can tell what Catherine and Bud Flynn cannot: their open marriage is either directly or indirectly fur

Historian Beverly Gage chose thirteen pivotal places across our nation to illustrate key points in our history, explore our complicated path to the present day, and inspire our growing stronger as we face our past truths as well as our future. This is fascinating nonfiction, perfect to read during our nation's semiquincentennial year. Beverly Gage is a lifelong historian who traveled across the United States in order to write this work highlighting key points in our history,

Amina al-Sirafi is an irresistible character--spicy, determined, nurturing, cutthroat, loyal, inventive, and unpredictable. In this second novel of adventure, the pirate faces seemingly impossible challenges and must do the unthinkable: rely on others and trust them with her life so she can safely return to her daughter and family. For there are indeed a great many capable, cunning women that the world would prefer to remember as witches. I loved every bit of Chakraborty's fi

In this wonderfully bonkers, darkly funny novel, a dying Jewish matron with rigid views and a litany of disappointments to share with those who caused them experiences drug-induced hallucinations and faces vulnerability as the end of her life draws near. Jewish matron Barbara Greenberg is terminally ill, medicated out of her mind with opioids, and writing down key elements of her life, particularly the laundry list of her failures--including, in her view, her raising of her o

This nearly perfect rom-com hit all the right notes for me. Monaghan's tone was spot-on, and her fake-dating story and characters had me abandoning real-life duties to get back to reading this delightful, banter-filled, layered, lovely novel. Single mom Dolly Brick (her mother was a country music fan) returns to her seaside Rhode Island hometown of Whitfield for the summer to help her hardworking dad with his fish shop, support her brother, who has schizophrenia following a t

I loved the octogenarian main protagonist of Elsie and the darkly funny start to the book. Her heartbreaking history surprised me, as did the revelations at the end of the novel. This was my first Sally Hepworth read but won't be my last. Elsie is an 81-year-old living in a Melbourne suburb, grumbling and mainly keeping to herself, aside from her best friend since childhood, a persistent 7-year-old girl who's determined to befriend her, and Peter, a kind young man across the

Sophie Chen Keller's love story to music and the bonds between mothers and sons plunges the reader into traumatic loss, hesitant hope, and, ultimately, a heartwarming and heartbreaking resolution in this Beijing-set novel. That was the hollowness chewing at him, reminding him that people weren't birds. They weren't made to be free of all burdens. They claimed their place in the world with the weight of their bones, which kept them from becoming ever more lost. Song is a poor,

Kline takes what might be a voyeuristic-feeling story of two North Carolina sisters (distant relations of hers) who married the world-famous conjoined twins from Siam, Chang and Eng, and builds a suitably complicated set of dynamics; a layered story of hope, emotion, and tragedy; and enough details of the time to bring it all to life. Here's the truth: even the most extraordinary life feels ordinary when you're living it. In The Foursome, Kline offers the imagined day-to-day

Mason plays with the tone of his newest literary fiction, offering vast rural expanses, claustrophobic woods, childlike wonder, growing paranoia, sudden danger, haunting beasts, and the comfort of everyday familial patterns as a backdrop to characters' struggles to grow, adapt, and, in some cases, reimagine their paths. The world trembled in his nostrils. Some of this was new, and some familiar. Closing his eyes, he took it in, all in, and then he pricked his ears and stared