Best of 2021
I read a lot in 2021. This list doesn't even make up 1% of my total books read, so you know it's the cream of the crop. Now, not everything here was published IN 2021, but I've certainly never read it before. It's new TO ME, 'cuz it's MY list. Capiche?
Broken Harbor is the fourth book in Tana French's 'Dublin Murder Squad' series, but it doesn't need to be read in order. While not quite standalones, each book stars a different protagonist; a different case. The point being that every detective has at least one case that changes their career and life (usually for the worse, as there are few happy endings to be found). Here, the protagonist is seasoned (pompous) Detective Mick Kennedy, known for being by-the-books and lawful, a stickler for the rules, with the highest solve rate on the squad. The case? Two children smothered in their beds; parents stabbed in the kitchen. I refuse to spoil how personal this case becomes for Mick, or how it messes with his head and forces him to question his morals, but just know that it's good enough to be my favorite in a series that I adore; the best of the best. French is so, so good at mingling Irish history with their more modern problems (this series is profoundly Irish, to the point where the city of Dublin feels like a character on its own) and keeping just a hint of "maybe supernatural" humming in the background, for anyone familiar with Celtic lore. I cannot praise it enough. (That said, here's a list I wrote arranging the 6 DMS books in order of most to least fave, and my elaborated feelings on each: [LINK]).
(Obviously Ireland's situation re: police brutality isn't the same as what's happening here in the states, so I don't expect French to approach from that angle, but it's nice that she does acknowledge the inherently corrupt nature of law enforcement. YES, this is a police procedural, but it seldom paints the cops favorably.)
On a completely different track, Camgirl is Italian-American author Isa Mazzei's memoir detailing her years as a sex worker. This is less a how-to guide and more a confessional as Mazzei shares her hypersexuality coupled with a hatred of sex itself; how she seeks sex for the attention while also using it as a form of self harm, and the trauma these feelings stem from. She guides the reader through her time as a sugar baby before delving into cam work. She talks a little about the stigma of sex work, and how sex workers deserve respect and protection, whether they're full-service or partial; whatever end of the spectrum they fall on... But mostly this story is Isa's and Isa's alone. Some readers have complained that she's an unsympathetic narrator due to how she uses men and lashes out, but personally I found her very engaging and relatable... As a sexual trauma survivor (and an aspiring sex worker), I saw myself in her journey. It's good to get these stories out there. This is a gripping read, and if you can handle a little darkness, a little grit in your lit, some explicit material, I'd highly recommend this.
2021 was the year I fell in love with bawdy comedian Samantha Irby and her hilarious, painfully relatable work. She's a blogger for bitchesgottaeat, but has since started collecting and publishing her essays in book format. I'm selecting Meaty as my favorite of these books, although they're all fantastic and have become comfort food for me — I frequently rotate through them on audio, just because her voice is so soothing. Irby is a fat, Black, chronically ill (physically and mentally) queer woman married to a white woman. She writes about everything from awkward sexual experiences to Crohn's disease-related issues, to child abuse, to homelessness, to how much she enjoys porn and masturbation, to extreme trauma. Her essay "My Mother, My Daughter" makes me cry like a baby every damn time. And then she'll turn right around and have me wheezing with laughter as she shares an anecdote involving shitting on the side of a busy road while hugging a frat boy's leg, or finding herself accidentally stumbling into a Civil War reenactment with only a butch lesbian for company. She's crude and crass and honest and heartfelt, and I'd give her my left kidney if ever she needed it. Samantha Irby, thank you for making my year a little less sucky. I love you madly.
So, Saving Noah is about a teenage pedophile. (Sit back down! Hear me out!) The main character, a mother of two, is devastated to learn that her 16-year-old son has molested several first-graders. He is taken to court and institutionalized at a center for underage sex offenders. Upon release, she tries to give him a happy homecoming, but struggles in the unravelling of her marriage, the rejection, harassment, and violent assault of their neighborhood, and her son's rapidly declining mental health. This story hurts. At times I grew frustrated with the mother's willful ignorance (when your son tells you that he's a pedophile and he will hurt kids again; he can't stop, maybe you should believe him). The ending in particular I have a lot of mixed feelings about — I seem to vacillate between "I HATE IT" and "But maybe I would have done the same? Maybe???" every few days (followed by an immediate "I'm so glad I don't have kids")... But the story kept me engaged from page one, it evoked a whole slew of emotions in me, and I haven't stopped thinking about it (what would I have done in their shoes?!) in the months that followed. In my opinion, that's the mark of a good book.
The Familiar Dark by Amy Engel is as short as it is nasty. I had it read in a single evening... I couldn't put it down! Set in a poverty-stricken corner of the Ozarks, waitress Eve is knocked off her feet by the murder of her teenage daughter. She goes back to her roots (read: her abusive, meth-addicted mother, and her mother's world of violently abusive dealers) to hunt down the killer, feeling she has nothing left to lose. No matter how bad your family is, they WERE still the ones who made you, and sometimes the apple doesn't fall as far from the tree as you might've hoped. If the ending had been any different than what it was, I wouldn't have loved the book nearly as much. It had the balls to go there and go there hard. I let out an audible "hoooooo!" at the very last page, wicking sweat off my forehead. Oh, how I love books with bite...
I don't think I've experienced a ghost story (book or movie) that I LOVED in... Maybe ever. Ghost stories always leave me disappointed, but apparently The Broken Girls is a diamond in the rough. It dragged my emotions in right away with a surprising Holocaust plotline, focusing on a young, orphaned refugee from Ravensbrück sent away to an American boarding school for "troubled" girls. The timeline bounces between 1950 (focusing on the boarding school) and 2014 (focusing on a thirty-something journalist following up on the school for personal and professional reasons). The modern portions didn't grab me immediately, but soon that plot caught up to the school plot in terms of quality, and I was left gripped by both. I like books that make me feel strong emotions, and boy oh boy did this book make me feel rage — at its heart, it's about broken girls. Girls unwanted, dismissed, ignored. Girls that are killed and forgotten. This is seen in both timelines, and both are rage-inducing. I particularly appreciated the mentions of female Nazis/ the way women hurt each other to benefit men, and American antisemitism (I get so annoyed with stories that like to pretend America was the BIG DAMN HERO in WWII. Yeah, right.) The ghost was very real and very freaky, but (like the best horror), also a metaphor for trauma and the damage misogyny wreaks on everyone.
The Reapers are the Angels is, oddly enough, not the FIRST zombie book I've ever cried for. (That honor would go to my beloved Mira Grant's "Newsflesh" series), but this is a gritty western, through and through, with a spunky teenage protagonist spitting the wisdom of the deep south. (Note: Just because Temple is a teen doesn't make this a YA book, despite what some reviews say.) It's told in small vignettes as Temple travels all over the American South, trying to find meaning and beauty in a desiccated world some 30+ years after the apocalypse. Despite the ugliness, the horror that follows her every step, despite the violence and trauma she carries inside herself, there's such a gentle optimism to this world, from caravans that travel the desert looking for people to protect, to groups of hunters who only want to see the natural wonders of the world. (Niagara Falls, here they come!) Not everyone will love the ending (I didn't), but I see what the author was going for. It was a very complete, effective story that wrenched at my emotions.
If one good thing happened in 2021, it's that I stumbled across Caitlin Doughty, aka "Ask a Mortician," on YouTube. She's hilarious, unapologetic, and highly informative, educating her audience on all things death-related (in delightful ooey-gooey detail) while still somehow being classy and respectful towards the deceased (even the ancient deceased!) and their families. If you haven't noticed, my tastes veer towards the dark and the macabre, so a six-foot-tall, very left-leaning Morticia Addams making 30-minute videos detailing the entire embalming process or the history of the bubonic plague is right up my alley. Naturally, I've read all the books she's published thus far, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory was my favorite. (It's significantly more personal than her other stuff. It goes into her childhood experiences with traumatic deaths, her schooling in becoming a mortician, her mental health... I feel like I got to know Caitlin a little more; why she does the work she does.)
Looks like this is the second time Stephen Graham Jones is showing up on one of my annual 'best of' lists. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is a phenomenal example of a character study. Without Jade, the teenage protagonist, the story would not be the same. It's her strange worldview, her obsession with horror movies, her inability to see the world outside of the lens of slashers, that defines this book, and it's extremely fun and rewarding to watch the tale unfold from this viewpoint. To notice things that Jade just can't, and wait for her to catch up. She's convinced her small town, currently undergoing gentrification, is about to be the site of a real-life slasher movie. Unsurprisingly, nobody believes her (would you believe the obsessive edgelord teen?). As she tries to suss out the final girl and the red herring and the dark past, things piece together differently than expected. Altogether this tells a gorgeous tale of the ways broken people cope; how abuse isn't always cyclical; how hope can be found in strange places. And yes: this made me cry like a little baby. Now excuse me while I make a blood sacrifice and perform some black magic to steal SGJ's mad writing skills, because this envy is killing me. (He's so good that I'm angry about it.)
I must've annoyed the crap out of my poor friends while I read Iron Widow; I just couldn't stop screaming about it! If you know me at all, you know I LOVE dark female protagonists. (And by 'dark' I don't mean that they swear a few times or jaywalk. I mean that in any other work, they'd be the uncontested villain.) I love unapologetic female protagonists who are overflowing with passion and obsession and rage; who strive single-mindedly towards a goal. Zetian gave me all that and more. Set in a fantasy version of ancient China, this is a SFF retelling of the legend of Wu Zetian, China's first and only female emperor. With GIANT ROBOTS battling BUG MONSTERS, because heck yeah. Join Zetian and her two boyfriends (canon polyamory and bisexuality? Possible gender non-conformity (as written by a non-binary author)? HECK YEAH!!!) as they dismantle a war effort's misogynistic and classist practices, one torture-murder at a time, and enjoy all the good twists along the way... Including some twists that had me screaming "WHAT?! NO!!!" (I told you: I like books that made me FEEL things. Any emotion is fine, so long as it's a strong one.) (And yes, before you ask, I was a fan of the author's YouTube channel even before the bestselling book came out. *adjusts my hipster glasses*)
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was... Extremely timely for me. Strangely so, even. Not to get too personal, but I was in the midst of fighting to have my records legally removed from the Mormon church (it's not a quick or easy process. I left almost a decade ago) when I read this. For a queer woman like myself, a childhood trapped in a misogynistic and homophobic cult (in a family of at least 5 generations of devout Mormons) is something filled with pain and trauma; I still feel betrayed and heartbroken, the more I learn about the church's sickening practices and lies and history. To the bottom of my heart, I feel like my entire childhood and my self-worth were robbed; maybe destroyed, and it's so hard to find anyone — even my psychiatrist — who can really understand the extent of my damage. But that's exactly what these nine short stories are about: Black women, sometimes queer Black women, and their complicated, often painful relationships with family/friends, sex, romantic partners, their own bodies/agency, predatory church leaders, and religion. It shows perspectives from converts, immigrants, different ages/generations, different levels of religious devotion... Honestly this was just a fascinating and gorgeously written collection that felt like a balm to my broken heart. Thank the stars; SOMEONE understands!!!
Some honorable mentions, before I finish this list off (note— the following links will lead to my reviews, if you want to know more): Katrina Leno’s “Horrid” (ghosts, fairy-tale, spooky, mental health), Naomi Novik’s "A Deadly Education” (where the stakes are high, the actions have consequences, and every victory is hard-won), John Ajvide Lindqvist’s “Let the Right One In” (I’ve never loved a vampire book before, but the Swedes do it right!!! Horror, dark comedy, and some surprising sweetness), Jonathan Parks-Ramange’s “Yes, Daddy” (absolutely HORRIFYING. Gave me nightmares), Krystal Sutherland's House of Hollow (FINALLY a fairy/changeling story that's ACTUALLY dark and creepy; y'know, the way they're SUPPOSED to be), Mariana Enríquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (delightfully macabre and twisted short stories) and Chloe Gong’s “These Violent Delights.” (I know I’m mean to YA lit, but this Romeo and Juliet retelling was so weird and out there that I couldn’t help but enjoy it.)
The Final Girl Support Group might be my #1 fave of 2021. It just had everything I love all packed in together!!! A (nearly) all-female cast... And most of these women are 40+ year-old, hypercompetent badasses! They're (mostly) all queer and/or disabled women of color! They all KICK ASS, mentally and physically. UNRELIABLE NARRATORS, BABY! Self-aware horror tropes and references! A complete lack of ANY romantic subplot! I foresee this book becoming a frequent comfort read for me, right alongside Mira Grant's 'Into the Drowning Deep.' And while the prose wasn't especially flowery (it did the job of telling the story and not much more), the plot/pacing was VERY good, clever, and tight; this serves to make a satisfying re-read, as all the foreshadowing is RIGHT THERE for every twist. I wouldn't say you HAVE to be a big ol' horror movie lover like me to love this book; it's a bit more accessible/less obscure than 'My Heart is a Chainsaw' can get. But it probably helps. Still, even without that context, I feel like everyone can appreciate a story of 'women who've already survived intense trauma band together to solve a mystery before more lives are lost.' The research into how different people cope with CPTSD was respectful and accurate, and I really appreciated the commentary on male/incel entitlement, victim blaming, media capitalizing on tragedy, and how harmful the fans of true crime can be. (There's a big difference between reporting the facts and fangirling over actual serial killers. As someone who mostly lives online, I've seen my fair share of both.)
Well, that's all of 'em! Hope I've convinced you to give one or two of these a shot. Now it's time for me to read some new stuff and leave 2021 behind.
