Some unsolicited thoughts and opinions from a mother and daughter who love reading and talking about books!

Yaa Gyasi has been on my radar for a while, but somehow I have never read her award-winning first novel Homegoing. (It won at least four major literary prizes.). But now that I have read her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, I cannot wait to read her first. Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama and draws on those experiences in Transcendent Kingdom. With prose so succinct and beautiful it reads like poetry, Gyasi tells the story of Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford University.

This beautifully written novel somehow manages to feel like a meditation or poetry while simultaneously spinning out the story of two lives over a sixty-year span. Yuki Oyama is a young Japanese girl growing up in New York in the 60s. When her parents decide to return to Japan, she chooses to stay with a friend to finish her high school years in America.

The author Margot Livesay has been on the periphery of my reading consciousness for a while and yet I had never read anything she’d written until The Boy In The Field. This, her tenth novel, is beautifully written and masterfully crafted, with a haunting story that has remained with me since I finished it weeks ago. I am always thrilled to discover an author that I enjoy who has written lots of other books for me to explore!

Was there a more highly recommended book published this year than The Vanishing Half? It appears on everyone’s “Best-of 2020” reading lists and was recommended to me by friends and by my son. Naturally, I had very high expectations for the book, and it mostly came through for me. Bennett follows twin teenage sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes as they run away from their small, southern, Black community to the big city of New Orleans and a life of freedom together.

Just about one year ago, Random House put out its list of best books of the decade to celebrate entering the 2020s. Little did they know that this book about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago in the 80s would resonate so strongly as we all face a widespread and lethal epidemic in the first year of this new decade.

I take great pleasure in getting a book recommendation from a friend and finding that I love the book as much as they did. My friend, Jane and I almost always agree on books. So when she urged both my husband and me to read The River, I figured it had to be good. It is excellent. I love everything about this book.

Last month when I reviewed The Black Flamingo, I described how much I enjoyed its novel-in-verse format. By sheer coincidence shortly after writing that review, I read Clap When You Land, another novel written in verse for the young adult audience that offers plenty to adult readers too. I read this book cover-to-cover one rainy Saturday and found it an engrossing and entertaining escape.

Writers & Lovers is one of the best fiction books I have read this year. If you haven’t discovered Lily King (the author, not my co-editor), then you have a real treat awaiting you. Her previous book Euphoria was stellar and Writers & Lovers follows suit.

In Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld uses historical facts to create a novel about Hillary Rodham and how her life might have turned out had she turned down Bill Clinton’s marriage proposal to pursue her own political ambition. What a fascinating premise! Not only is the idea for the novel great, but so is the execution.