Favorite Books — January 2024

There were no fewer than three fantastic books I want to highlight as standouts this month, in three very different genres:

MENEWOOD, by Nicola Griffith

Hild is eighteen, no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking’s court with her seemingly supernatural insight. But now war is brewing. And Hild must find the implacable determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people.

Even if the Hild Sequence stopped at Menewood, its second book, it would be a towering work of historical fiction. But I do hope there will be more books, since after well over a thousand pages of text, Hild (who historically lived to the age of 66) has a lot left to her story, and I’d love to know what she does next. This book starts with some radical changes to Hild’s circumstances, and then for much of its length it is, if it’s any one thing, the process of her learning to become a person, instead of the infallible prophet she was forced to be as a child. And then, unsurprisingly given the time and place, there is more war. As with the previous book, it’s riveting throughout.

MRS. S, by K. Patrick

In an elite English boarding school, a butch Australian outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of “matron.” Within this landscape of immense privilege, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster’s wife. Over the course of a long, restless summer, their unspoken yearning blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity.

For most of its length, I thought this was quite a good book. Then I hit the absolute gut-punch of an ending, and decided it might be a great one. The almost impressionistic prose and dialogue might not suit everyone, but it definitely worked for me.

THE ADVENTURES OF AMINA EL-SIRAFI, by Shannon Chakraborty

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural. But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum.

This was just SO. MUCH. FUN! Pirates! Sea monsters! Evil sorcerers! Moral dilemmas! An ex-criminal getting the gang back together again for one last job! It might not ever reach the thematic depths of Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy, but the rich historical backdrop and the great characters more than make up for that.

Other books I enjoyed this month included AND PUT AWAY CHILDISH THINGS by Adrian Tchaikovsky, HEARTSTOPPER VOLUME ONE by Alice Oseman, CONQUEST by Nina Allan, SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON by Wole Talabi, and THE SEA IN YOU by Jessi Sheron.