SIGN IN AND SAVE—Our Annual Warehouse Sale is here! (50% off our best selling brands!) SHOP THE WAREHOUSE SALE
Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About by Isabel Klee
Last year, my Instagram algorithm saw fit to feed me the story of a severely neglected foster dog named Tiki being nursed back to himself, bit by bit, in Brooklyn by foster mom Isabel Klee. I watched a series of daily triumphs as Tiki went from a terrified pup hiding in the corner of his crate to a triumphant success story headed off to his forever home.
If that kind of story tugs at your heartstrings, Klee’s memoir about her foster experiences and dating mishaps is charming and lovely. Is it a literary masterpiece? Not really. The prose is simple, and the metaphors are overused—but the pup tales are precious.
Kin by Tayari Jones
A stunning work of historical fiction, Kin follows two motherless girls, Vernice (“Niecy”) and Annie, who grow up in rural Louisiana in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South. Their paths diverge as Niecy, an orphan, goes off to college while Annie sets out to Memphis in search of the mother who abandoned her when she was only a newborn. The chapters alternate between their perspectives and disparate experiences, with the common heartstring of their friendship woven throughout.
Female friendship is one of my favorite themes in a novel, and Kin often reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. It’s a beautiful examination of the romance of platonic love and how your closest girlfriends can also be your soul mates. Tayari Jones is a brilliant storyteller—I expect Niecy and Annie’s relationship will live with me for a long while.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe
If you’re a fan of true-crime podcasts, may I recommend putting in your earbuds and diving into this engrossing saga on audiobook. (I’m sure it’s an excellent read, as well, but the audio version is outstanding.) In 2019, a London teenager named Zac Brettler jumped from a posh high-rise building to his death in the River Thames in an apparent suicide. Devastated, Zac’s parents begin a years-long search for answers, venturing into a seedy underworld of crime, affluence, lies, and corruption.
Keefe is a phenomenal reporter and storyteller, uncovering the layers of this tragedy in a bingable narrative you won’t want to turn off.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
The Correspondent is an epistolary novel (a term which I just learned), meaning a work of fiction written as a series of documents. In this case, the book is comprised of the letters and emails of Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old retired lawyer who writes to everyone from her family to her neighbors and famous authors like Joan Didion and Ann Patchett. The correspondence chronicles the humdrum of Sybil’s everyday, but also looks back on the moments that shaped her and those she regrets as she enters the final chapters of her life.
The format makes getting to know Sybil a drawn-out pleasure. You see her as a cranky mother, a dear friend, a courted lover, and an accomplished trailblazer. It’s another good audiobook, with a different voice actor playing each character in the novel, but the experience of reading it as letters sent out into the world is definitely what Sybil would prefer.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
The one everyone’s talking about. Yesteryear is about a tradwife influencer named Natalie Heller Mills who wakes up in the actual trad time of 1855. In the modern world, Natalie has six children, a wanna-be cowboy husband, a picture-perfect homestead, 8 million followers—and also a team of nannies, farm workers, and an undiagnosed mental disorder (I’m sure). So how does she deal living with none of these conveniences and a family that isn’t hers, but also seems eerily familiar? Not well.
It’s worth a read to know what all the fuss is about—and many of the themes are deeper and more complex than the zeitgeist is giving it credit for. Will you come away liking Natalie or really understanding everything that happened? Not at all, but that’s kind of the point.
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
Another much-talked-about book of the year, Strangers is a heartbreaking, observant account of the end of Belle Burden’s seemingly ideal 20-year marriage. In the summer of 2020, while isolating at their home in Martha’s Vineyard (it’s worth noting that they are capital W wealthy), Belle’s husband announces that he’s leaving her. Moreover, he wants zero custody of their two children and seemingly would prefer to wash his hands of the whole thing, provided he also receives a substantial divorce settlement. It is an incredibly intimate and honest look behind the curtains of someone’s private life, sometimes salacious and other times deeply relatable. Sure, Belle is often dealing with First World problems with resources unavailable to most of us, but she’s up front about it. At the end of the day, it’s a story about immense betrayal, vulnerability, and grief. I read it in one sitting, sometimes through tears.
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst
If you’d like a pick-me-up after the tragedy of Strangers, may I recommend A Marriage at Sea, a truly epic love story of Maurice and Maralyn, who set sail across the world in 1972, only to be shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean after a whale cracked a hole in their boat. The couple fights to survive in the open waters, drifting for 118 days on an inflatable lifeboat so small that they can’t lie down fully stretched out. They’re not just trying to stay alive by any means necessary, but also just to get along as their marriage is put to an unfathomable test.
The book is my favorite kind of nonfiction in that it reads like a novel, taking you on a rollercoaster of emotions as you float along with Maurice and Maralyn. It is enthralling, dazzling, and inspiring. A truly remarkable story of survival.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
No one does historical fiction like Maggie O’Farrell, the Irish-British novelist who wrote Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. In Land, she turns her eye to 19th-century Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger, a period of mass starvation and disease in which one million people died, and over three million fled Ireland, cutting the country’s total population nearly in half. With this disaster as a backdrop, O’Farrell introduces us to a talented fictional cartographer named Tomás and his wife, Phina (both of whom lived through the Great Hunger), and their children (all born after). Tomás is employed by the colonizing British soldiers and tasked with creating new maps that reflect the post-famine world, but he is set off course by a mysterious encounter at a spring in the woodland.
Admittedly, I am only halfway through Land, but fully entranced in this mystical, devastating, beautiful world. I love the way O’Farrell brings us into the complexities of family dynamics and grief and memory. Plus, there’s a loyal dog (we’ve come full circle in this reading list).
