If You Only Read One: November 2020
We know that we read — and review — a lot of books. It definitely helps that there are three of us, in that regard. So with this feature, we want to tell you our favorite read of the month - if we only recommend one book to pick up, what would it be?
Moira
Ivy Pochoda’s “These Women” (Bookshop | Kindle) easily stole first place this month. The narrative switches between five women whose lives are intertwined with a serial killer in South Los Angeles who targets sex workers. The women, of different races, cultures, and socioeconomic statuses, are written powerfully and realistically. They range from those with near-misses from the killer, to a police detective, to the mother of a victim. The pacing of the novel is thriller-like, but is definitely of literary quality, and contemplates much more than the violence immediately at hand. While the subject matter is frightening and disturbing, the strength (both good and bad) of the women in the novel is what will stay with me.
Elizabeth
Usually, I hem and haw a little bit about the book that I choose here, but not this month — “Midnight Library” by Matt Haig is my clear choice (Bookshop | Kindle). I’ve already written most of my review that will go up tomorrow (#spoileralert), but I will say that this book wrecked me in the best way. I’m cursed with both a good memory and an active imagination, and so I often spend too much time speculating on “what if” I had done something different at one juncture — how would my life be impacted, if at all, if I had made a different decision. Well, Matt Haig gave me Nora Seed, who, after she makes one big decision, gets to go down all those alternate pathways of her life just as she ends it.
Nora has all kinds of adventures, big and small, as she works on resolving all the regrets she carried around with her, and she is one of the best protagonists I can remember reading. There’s a reason this book is sold out at so many booksellers — it is just that fantastic.
Shannon
While I loved “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” by V.E. Schwab (Bookshop | Kindle), I’ve already reviewed it in full here, so I’m going to dedicate this space to another one of my top reads from November 2020. I finally read “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Bookshop | Kindle) and it’s every bit as grand and sweeping as the many, many reviews make it out to be. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out that, literally as I was in the middle of the novel, this article came out, in which Adichie calls J.K. Rowling’s transphobic essay from last summer “perfectly reasonable.”
We are all committed to championing true diversity and inclusion and condemn transphobia and the violence that stems from it, so certainly we do not agree with either Adichie nor Rowling here. However, if you are able to separate art from artist (something I often struggle to do with certain people) (see my review of “Grown” by Tiffany D. Jackson), or if you already have the book (as I did) “Americanah” is indeed an incredible read. I read it slowly, savoring it, as the multiyear, multi-country journey of Ifemelu and Obinze unfolded.
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